Story of the westward movement of the Melody-Harford family from Massachusetts to California. Family members go by clipper ship, "Dream of the West," around the Horn. For twenty days the ship encounters a great calm in the South Atlantic and sits motionless. Esther Jackson noted in 1988: "O'Neill uses the calm as a device to motivate the passengers to reveal an intricate pattern of personal crises, crises which he treats as having parallels in the larger context of American history. The phenomenon of becalming can be seen as a symbol of the crisis of values endangering American society in the years preceding the Civil War. Indeed, the tension between the idea of freedom and the idea of slavery is the subject of a soliloquy by Cato, a black freedman, in the opening scene of the play. For the passengers, the ship itself becomes the societal context in which variations on this theme are played out. Scenes aboard ship treat of changes in the structure of American society; in the character and function of religion; in the roles of women in the evolving culture; and in attitudes about personal freedom. But by far the most powerful theme in this drama is one which relates to changes in the sensibility of one representative family. The journey of the Harford family from New England to California symbolizes an historical transition with many levels of meaning, perhaps the most significant of which is imaginative."