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Captain Robinson
the reminiscences of a Tasmanian Master Mariner.
James William Robinson 1824-1906.
edited by Michael Nash
"Relatively few books have been written about the whaling industry in Australia and personal accounts
by men engaged in the trade are fewer still. This volume is therefore to be welcomed, not only for its
rarity, but because it is the best memoir yet published about Australian whaling in the nineteenth century"
(International Journal of Maritime History, December 2010, p391).
In March 1904, at the age of 80, Captain James William Robinson – at the ‘earnest request’ of his family – began to write down
‘some particulars of my early life and occupation and voyages to sea’. Perhaps to his own surprise, Captain Robinson
not only completed the memoir but revised it with a view to publication. Although nothing came of this at the time, his manuscript
survived and Robinson’s ‘tough account of a rough life’ is now presented to the public, with comprehensive notes based largely
on the surviving ships’ logs and journals from his voyages. The result is a vivid account of an extraordinarily varied working life.
Robinson first went to sea as a ship’s boy at the age of eleven. He saw his first whale killed shortly before
his thirteenth birthday, and he rounded Cape Horn soon after. At the age of fifteen, when he was working for a season
at a Tasmanian bay-whaling station, his father died unexpectedly and due to the family’s financial circumstances
Robinson felt that he had ‘no alternative but to follow a seafaring life’.
While he worked mainly in the pelagic whaling industry out of Hobart, Robinson 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).
500 numbered copies. 240x165mm. x, 178pp, frontis portrait, colour
and b&w illustrations. Case-bound with dustwrapper. ISBN 9780908528349
AUD55.00 plus postage
To order direct from our website click here - type 'Captain Robinson' in the title field and press 'search'
... also, a SPECIAL LIMITED ISSUE of 25 numbered and signed copies.
Finely bound by Wolfgang Schaefer of Bookart (Gembrook, Victoria)
in quarter leather and linen.
$285.00 (AUD)
BLUBBER HEAD PRESS
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Email: books@astrolabebooks.com.au
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