Robert Charles Halpin DL JP RNR FRGS (16 February 1836 – 20 January 1894) was an Irish sea captain.

Halpin appears to have shown little interest in formal education and with his imagination fueled by tales of faraway lands recounted by mariners in his father's tavern, he left home at age ten to become a seafarer.

He joined the brig Briton that was engaged in the Cumberland coal trade and was shipwrecked off Bude, Cornwall in 1851 with many lives lost, but Halpin managed to reach the shore.

Boomerang worked on the Liverpool to Melbourne to Kio (Ecuador) route, returning with a cargo of guano, bird droppings used as fertiliser.

In 1858 Halpin became involved in a new sea route that had started from Galway, Ireland to St. John's, Newfoundland, giving a quicker, shorter Atlantic crossing.

Emigration from Europe to North America was the new large shipping trade and operated from major ports such as Liverpool, Hamburg and Galway.

At the break out of the American Civil War, Halpin ran the Union blockade bringing supplies to the Confederate States and returning with cotton to Europe.

"[2] Launched at the Isle of Dogs, Kent, on 31 January 1858, she was 693 feet in length (over 200 metres), 22,500 tons dead weight, and had accommodations for over 3,000 passengers.

She attracted only 191 passengers including Jules Verne who later wrote a book about her called A Floating City (Une ville flottante, 1871).

Their task was to lay a submarine transatlantic telegraph cable from Valentia Island, County Kerry to Heart's Content, Newfoundland.

[3] His circle included Lord Kelvin, who had been aboard Great Eastern overseeing the cable laying,[1] Admiral Sherard Osborn, who proposed him for Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society, the American oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and Edmund Dickens, nephew of Charles Dickens amongst other notables of the day.

He ran for Member of Parliament for East Wicklow as a Unionist in July 1892, losing to John Sweetman, the Anti-Parnell Home Rule candidate.

In 1876 Halpin purchased a site on elevated ground two miles north of Wicklow Town, overlooking the Irish Sea.

At Tinakilly on 20 January 1894 Robert Halpin, aged 57, died of gangrene resulting from a minor cut while trimming his toenails.

[4] The award was a silver medal, 50 millimetres (2.0 in) in diameter, bearing on the obverse the image of Halpin in Royal Naval Reserve uniform with the inscription 'IN MEMORIAM.