biography
| name: |
Dana, Richard Henry
|
pronunciation:
[dayna]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1815–82)
|
| biography:
| Writer and lawyer, born in Cambridge Massachusetts, USA. The son of poet and essayist Richard Henry Dana (1787–1879), he took time off from Harvard College to work as a seaman on a merchant ship (1834–6), and his account of his adventures, Two Years Before the Mast (1840), is regarded as a minor classic of its genre. His The Seaman's Friend (1841) was long the standard manual on maritime law. He practised law and served as a US counsel in the trial of Jefferson Davis (1867–8). He never completed his own planned study of international law, but he edited Henry Wheaton's Elements of International Law. Although not an avid abolitionist, he helped found the Free-Soil Party. He died while in Rome, where he is buried in the Protestant Cemetery with Keats and Shelley. |
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