From mermaids to mutinies, shipwrecks to cholera, the life of Charles Tyng was a non-stop voyage of adventure. A young boy, at the beginning of the 19th century, Charles Tyng had an itch for adventure. Yielding to Charles's love of the sea, his father signed up the thirteen-year-old as a "ship's boy" on the brig Cordelia. His first voyage took him all the way to China, where he befriended Cantonese street merchants and wandered into dark opium dens.
He was treated so abominably during the eighteen-month voyage that upon his return to Boston he said he'd never go to sea again. But his father shipped him out again at the earliest opportunity. By the time he returned from his fourth voyage, the young Charles Tyng had become a mate, and by his early twenties, the captain of his own ship. Both Tyng's life and the way he recounts his years at sea are full of wonder.
Whether you're a sailor yourself, an armchair traveller, a history buff, or simply a lover of pulse-quickening maritime adventures, you'll be as drawn to this book as Charles Tyng was to the sea.
