Encounters with cannibals, convicts and pirates were just some of the highlights of eleven long journeys under sail Captain George Bayly made around the world in the early nineteenth century. The journal Captain Bayly kept of his travels is notable for the historical significance of his voyages, and the writer's eye for a good story. It contains eyewitness accounts of the transportation of male and female convicts to Australia, the voyage of British immigrants to the ill-fated settlement attempted by Thomas Peel near Perth, hostilities between Maoris and Europeans, and trading voyages to and from China. Captain Bayly's stories of typhoons, floods, heroic rescues, shipboard quarrels and deaths give the book appeal to a wide audience. The journal's depiction of the infant Australian settlements as just part of a widely-flung network of British colonial outposts in the nineteenth century also provide an insight into the nation's economic development.