The son of a sea captain, Robertson left home as a young man and joined the Merchant Marine, where he eventually rose to the rank of First Mate. In 1877, he left the sea and studied jewelry making in New York, subsequently working as a diamond setter. When his vision began to suffer, he turned to writing short stories about the sea, drawing on his many years' experience. He contributed to leading periodicals such as The Saturday Evening Post. Today he is best remembered for his fantastic story, Futility (1898), which described an unsinkable ship that strikes an iceberg in the Atlantic and sinks with great loss of life. Uncannily he named the ship Titan! When the "real" Titanic went down in 1912, Robertson re-issued the book as The Wreck of the Titan, with a few minor amendments. He produced a number of works during the first decade of the 20th century, but was never really financially successful. He was found dead, presumably of a heart attack, in an Atlantic City hotel. His other works include A Tale of a Halo (1894), Spun Yarn (1898), "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Tales of the Sea (1899), Masters of Men (1901), Shipmates (1901), Sinful Peck (1903), Down to the Sea (1905), The Grain Ship (1914), Over the Border (1914) and Beyond the Spectrum (1914). |
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