Born in Sag Harbor, Long Island, Prentice Mulford (1834-1891) sailed to San Francisco on a clipper in 1856 and remained for sixteen years. He left for a long tour of Europe in 1872 and then settled in New York City where he became known as a comic lecturer and author of poems and essays and a columnist for the New York Daily Graphic (a serial), 1875-1881. He founded the popular philosophy known as "New Thought." Life by land and sea (1889) contains Mulford's adventures at sea and in the West, 1856-1872: life on a clipper and a California coastal schooner hunting whales and seals, gold prospecting in Tuolumne County, accounts of camp life and experiences as a school teacher and minor local politican, copper mining in Stanislaus County, and career as journalist for the San Francisco Golden Era.