In the closing years of the Napoleonic War, Edward Primrose Tregurtha saw active service in the navy for three years, and at the end of the war was honourably discharged – at the age of twelve years, after which he went back to school! He resumed his adventurous career as an officer in the East India Company, and saw further action in the Opium War in China, and in the troubles at Rangoon. Then followed five years of sea-faring and whaling until he finally settled at Launceston in 1836. His journal, which is reproduced in this book, covers first these early adventures and then a further sixteen years in Van Diemen’s Land and on the mainland.

Tregurtha never made the main pages of history, though he was often close to the places where history was being made. If he had arrived in Launceston a few years earlier, he might have shared in the exploits and in the fame of Batman and the others who pioneered the settlements across the strait . A few months too late, he had to be content with the less glamorous (though important) work of ferrying sheep, goods and passengers from Launceston to the infant townships of Melbourne and Geelong.