Captain Robinson : the reminiscences of a Tasmanian Master Mariner, James William Robinson 1824-1906. by Robinson, James William (edited by Michael Nash) - 2009

Hobart: Blubber Head Press. 2009. A limited edition of 500 numbered copies. 240x165mm. 8vo. x, 178pp, frontis portrait, colour and b&w illustrations. Case-bound with dustwrapper. A fine clean copy. ISBN 0908528345 ***Written in retirement in 1904, Robinson's ‘tough account of a rough life’ has never before been published. The Captain worked mainly in the pelagic whaling industry out of Hobart, but also carried a variety of cargoes to all the Australasian colonies, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, and to gold-rush California. He undertook the only Australian sealing voyage to subantarctic Heard Island, and collected guano off the Queensland coast. Ashore, he established and operated mines in both Victoria (gold) and Tasmania (tin). Captain Robinson is a vivid account of an extraordinarily varied working life. One reviewer has called it 'the best memoir yet published about Australian whaling in the nineteenth century' (International Journal of Maritime History, December 2010, p391). .