An old family photograph sparked my interest in William Kelly, and I set about chasing the ships he commanded and those he owned after he retired from active seafaring. William appeared in books, letters, crew agreements, ships’ logs, historic newspapers, even a passenger diary from a trip to Australia in 1853. In a career just shy of thirty years at sea, he commanded nine ships and travelled more than 400,000 nautical miles on approximately thirty round trips from UK ports. This equates to roughly eighteen circumnavigations of the globe at the equator. Kelly also owned five ships after retiring from the sea.