This document is an excerpt from Two Years Before the Mast, a memoir written by Richard Henry Dana Jr. In the 1830s, Mexico was a young republic with a lot of internal problems, such as the struggle between centralists and federalists, a growing debt, and the inability to exercise control over the country’s far north in places such as California, Arizona, and Texas. Dana was an American lawyer and writer. As a young man, he abandoned his studies at Harvard and enrolled as a seaman on a ship bound for California. He published his memoirs of this trip in 1940 as the book Two Years Before the Mast. This excerpt portrays the Hispanic and Native American population in California under Mast’s Anglo lens. Although it is very detailed about society, government, and religion, Dana’s perspective is biased. One demonstration of this bias is Dana’s inability to understand the Mexican legal system of civil law based on legal codes, which differs from the Anglo system of common law, in which case laws are based on precedents. Nevertheless, the memoir is an important document of California just a decade before it became American territory.