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Before the Wind: The Memoir of an American Sea Captain 1808-33
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REVIEW BY ADAM DUNN
The editor of this memoir should be thanked for having the tenacity to clean out her great-great-grandfather's attic, for while doing so she discovered the manuscript for what would become Before the Wind, a truly delightful peek at the antebellum maritime world. Mr. Tyng, who first went to sea at 13 after dropping out of school, never loses his boyish curiosity in describing the people, places, and events that he witnessed during 60 years as a sailor. Beginning with his awful first voyage, in which he endured starvation, dehydration, beatings, and confinement (and his somewhat evasive language in this section suggests there were even worse tortures), Mr. Tyng describes in great detail the inner workings of a 19th-century sailing vessel plying the seas for trade. While his former schoolmates (like Ralph Waldo Emerson, to name one) were locked up in divinity school, Tyng was visiting China and Cuba, taking detailed notes on foreign flora and fauna, customs, and, most importantly, learning about global trade. For instance, the young Tyng (not even a second mate yet by the time of Napoleon's defeat) knew where and with whom to trade illegal opium moving through the South China Sea, and how to garner a terrific profit from the Opium Wars being waged between the British and Chinese. He learned (the hard way) when to leave tropical ports like Havana and New Orleans before yellow fever epidemics broke out. He also learned to command, and this skill bound all of his nautical and commercial knowledge together. Here, for example, is how Mr. Tyng learned to deal with insubordination: I told [that fellow] to take the turn the other way. He was very abusive and would not do as I told him. I took one of the capstan bars and knocked him over. Seeing that the rest came at me, and the biggest fellow among them, the nearest, with his fists (half as big as my head) doubled up, in the act of striking me. I swung my bar and he fell over, all of them cursing and swearing, and very violent. But seeing their leader fall, they hesitated, and I then told one to take hold of the capstan and put it the other way, which he did. I told the others to put in their bars and heave round. They obeyed and all was quiet. Indeed, despite disease, pirates, sharks, and other pitfalls of his profession, the greatest danger Mr. Tyng faced as a seaman was usually his own crew. He never sailed with the same one for very long (occasionally losing those with whom he did to shipwreck or disease), and the sailors of the time were usually hard-drinking thugs who often mutinied to steal the ship or its cargo. Mr. Tyng rarely left his own cabin unarmed, and slept with a brace of pistols in his bunk. Yet for all the dangers it describes, Mr. Tyng's memoir never loses its sense of fascination with the world and its inhabitants. As he rose in the sea-chain to command his own vessels (and even to buy and sell them), he became a shrewd businessman as well as a reliable captain. Between around the War of 1812 when the memoir begins to its finale in 1833 when Tyng nearly died of cholera, he was nearly always at sea or exploring some foreign port. He apparently didn't like to go home very much, despite two marriages which brought forth several (land-locked) children. As ships were still the primary means of transport through the 1840s, there was always work. By the late 1820s Tyng was buying his own ships and trading through foreign companies and banks, struggling with the burgeoning businesses of insurance and credit. There were no great railroad networks in place prior to the 1840s, and steam power was in its infancy (Tyng himself bitterly criticizes the new technology after being caught in a steamboat accident). The memoir ends before steam fully eclipsed sail, but towards the end of the book smokestacks and paddle-wheels appear ominously in almost every visited port. It is as though Tyng himself saw the transition coming, and could or would not bring himself to describe it. Charles Tyng was an example of an early American success story, and a salty one at that. Before the Wind is an insider's view of the twilight of sea and sail, seen through sea-struck eyes. CHARLES TYNG was born in Newburyport, MA, in 1801, and went to sea as an adolescent, and he did not permanently return to land for sixty years. He died in 1879. SUSAN FELS is his great-great-granddaughter and an editor in Washington, DC. Adam Dunn is a freelance editor and writer whose work has appeared in Speak, SOMA, and Current Diversions. He lives in New York City.
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