Seaworthy Timbers: The Life & Times of New England Sea Captain Aaron H. Wood, by Michael C. Dooling

This was my second-choice request from the Naval Historical Institute for my next book review for them. My first request had been initially granted, and then I was told that the book had simultaneously been requested by a Danish researcher making a first-time request for book reviews, and given that I have more than a dozen published reviews for them already, I was asked to make another request, and so I did. Fortunately, this book was still available. When I first selected it by title, I thought that I was selecting a biographical history of someone from the colonial period, where enterprising Yankees served in very early efforts at building a nascent American merchant marine. Yet once this book arrived, it became evident that this book was not about someone from the seventeenth or eighteenth century, but about a Yankee shipmaster from the period during and after the American Civil War, when the wooden ship was losing its place of dominance to the newer steamboats.

This change gives the book several types of poignant meaning. For one, the book is about someone who devoted himself to a rapidly obsolescent, rising in offices of responsibility in a field that is nearing the end of its existence as a profession. There is a sense of melancholy about such a matter, about someone defiantly seeking to preserve their status in a dying world rather than learning the skills to rise in a newer world, a sort of loss familiar to more contemporary skilled workers in an age of similarly dramatic change. From what I have looked at so far, this man took his wife and kids with him as they traveled as a family around the world, something that one could do only in positions of responsibility, as those in lower ranks of the crew traveled alone, almost always as bachelors. Being a family man in Mr. Wood’s profession was not easy either. Of interest as well, in the little I have read while flipping through the pages, is that the subject of this book has not been written about before, to the knowledge of the present author, but his writings were scattered and sold, making it impossible to use the full base of his diaries and letters to write a complete narrative. As a result, there are some gaps in the narrative based on writing that is missing. The pages I have seen are beautiful, and the fact that someone would devote so much time and effort to write a biographical history of the life and context of an obscure but literate seaman is a touching sign of hope that the obscure lives of our time will similarly not be entirely forgotten either when we are dead and gone, but might at least be remembered by someone.