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 see'. Perhaps to his own surprise, Captain Robinson not only completed the memoir but revised it with a view to publication. Although noting came of this at the time, his manuscript survives and Robinson's 'tough account of a rough life' is now presented to the public for the first time, with comprehensive notes based largely on the surviving ships' logs and journals from his voyages. 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). Captain Robinson is a vivid account of an extraordinarily varied working life.