Under Full Sail Read online

  Dedication

  To the more than one million Australians whose forebears traversed the oceans aboard the mighty clipper ships and fulfilled their dreams of a better life in an exciting new land.

  Contents

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE ‘Hell or Melbourne’

  CHAPTER 1 The Golden Clippers

  CHAPTER 2 ‘The El Dorado of the World’

  CHAPTER 3 Not a Place for Everyone

  CHAPTER 4 Black Ball and White Star

  CHAPTER 5 ‘Let Her Go to Hell’

  CHAPTER 6 Fire, Ice and Fever

  CHAPTER 7 Miracles and Misadventure

  CHAPTER 8 ‘Screw v. Sail’

  CHAPTER 9 Triumph of the Steam Kettles

  Glossary

  Author’s note

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Rob Mundle

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  ‘Hell or Melbourne’

  July 1852. It had been six weeks since the 932 passengers and sixty-man crew aboard the clipper Marco Polo had left England bound for Melbourne. They had just crossed the northern latitude of the Roaring Forties, some 350 nautical miles south of the Cape of Good Hope.

  Suddenly a fearsome Southern Ocean storm charged in from beyond the western horizon and locked Marco Polo in its jaws. In a matter of hours, the moderate seas turned to mountainous breaking combers, accompanied by a howling and callously cold wind, quite possibly laced with flurries of snow.

  Abject fear filled the minds of the passengers huddled below deck in an alien world. Many had led sheltered lives in small country villages; now they crouched in the claustrophobic ’tween decks of a giant ship, being pitched and tossed so wildly that tables, chairs and any other loose fixtures were being hurled from one side of their accommodation areas to the other.

  But they weren’t alone when it came to their anxiety: even members of the crew were unnerved. The end of this nightmare could not come soon enough for all on board.

  One of them, however, had a very different reason for wanting to traverse these seas as quickly as possible: the ship’s captain, James Nicol Forbes, a thirty-one year old Scotsman more appropriately known as ‘Bully’ Forbes.

  All others aboard Marco Polo just wanted to get through this alive. But for Bully Forbes, reputation won out over the fear of death: Forbes had boasted that he would drive the recently launched 184-foot clipper ship to a record-breaking time between Liverpool and Melbourne.

  As the storm raged around him, Forbes seemed oblivious to its terrifying nature. His only focus was on driving his charge south-east as hard and as fast as he could, away from the tip of Africa towards iceberg territory in the southern seas: a course that few ships had previously taken.

  There was already some justification for Forbes’s record-breaking ambition. On her maiden voyage from the builder’s yard in Canada in late 1851, Marco Polo had crossed the Atlantic to Liverpool in the impressive time of just nineteen days. Now, by harnessing the full force of the storm she was experiencing in the southern seas (today the Southern Ocean), the captain saw the opportunity to prove Marco Polo the fastest ship afloat.

  Much to his satisfaction, she had so far lived up to expectations – thanks to his determination to maintain maximum speed at all times. But the opportunity to show just how fast she could run had not presented itself until the moment this south-westerly gale had thundered in from astern.

  With adrenalin pumping through his veins, and as if goading his ship to sail even faster, a fearless Forbes was said to have been seen standing on the windward side of the deck while holding on to the heavily built, high timber bulwark. It was a location from which he could best absorb the entire scene around him, and really appreciate what it meant to be the master of a ship running hard in what he saw as the ultimate conditions for maximum speed. He could watch his helmsman at the very aft end of the deck battling to hold course, while around him there were the men of the on-watch hanging on for dear life at their respective stations – every one of them hoping they would not be ordered to go aloft to tend the few sails that were still set, all of which appeared ready to burst.

  Forbes’s seemingly careless attitude towards what others saw as complete mayhem confirmed his confidence in the seaworthiness of his heavily laden ship. He seemed enthralled by the sounds of her being pushed to the absolute limit. Added to the roar of the huge breaking seas was the howl of the wind ripping through the standing rigging, sheets and braces, some of which were stretched to near breaking point. There was also the thunder-like rumble of the churning bow wave that rose up each time Marco Polo careered down a wave – a sound that was amplified aft by the curve of the forecourse (the lower square sail on the foremast). For Forbes, it was as if he were listening to Mother Nature’s orchestra tuning up for a booming symphony. For just about everyone else, it was a cacophony of terrifying sounds.

  Forbes was convinced that no one aboard Marco Polo, and possibly no one else in the world, had ever been so fast under sail. This could well be history in the making.

  That meant little for the petrified passengers and concerned crew. Apart from the shuddering and vibrations that racked the 2500 tons burthen ship and the horrid sounds they were experiencing, the wildly gyrating motion of the vessel brought additional terror. Each time the powerful press of wind in her sails combined with the force of a large following wave, Marco Polo would heel alarmingly to leeward – sometimes around 30 degrees – to the point where the outer end of the main yard on the mainmast appeared destined to touch the water. Then, as she surged forward at nearly 20 knots on what resembled a huge avalanche of churning surf charging down a sheer cliff face – and just before she started to come upright – an immense wave would explode like a dam burst over the leeward bulwark and wash across the flush deck in a seething mass of white water.

  Unfortunately, leaks in the deck and companionway hatches meant some of this icy-cold torrent would find its way to the accommodation area below, thus bringing more misery to the ship’s inhabitants – the majority of who now expected to die at any moment. Some no doubt knew that in the twelve years prior to Marco Polo’s passage, ninety-four ships either had been wrecked or had disappeared sailing to Australia and New Zealand. It was a tally they did not want to add to.

  Forbes, it is said, remained on deck unconcerned, but for the passengers, enough was enough. They sent one of their own to confront the captain and plead with him to slow their progress.

  After plucking up the much-needed courage, the poor soul emerged from the companionway and stepped onto the deck amid what he could only perceive as a scene of chaos. Then, with the decks awash, and the ship quaking as if in her death throes, he clawed his way to where Forbes stood. Once there he begged the captain to consider the paying passengers, informing him that it was total turmoil below. The majority were certain that the ship would founder and disappear from the face of the planet, simply because of the captain’s brazen and irresponsible approach to their safety.

  Forbes, cold, soaking wet and with salt water dripping from the peak of his cap, would not have a bar of it. Fixing his steely, dark eyes firmly on the trembling passenger, he waved him away vehemently, and as he did he bellowed: ‘It’s a case of Hell or Melbourne, I’m afraid, sir.’

  Nothing more was said.

  Forbes’s truculent manner, and his stubborn determination to have every possible stitch of sail set in what were the most challenging of conditions, finally brought the result he desired. This day of discord would prove to be a historic milestone in his relatively short, but spectacular, career as a clipper ship captain. Readings from navigation plots and the log line set from the stern later confirmed
that Marco Polo had charged across the southern seas at unprecedented speed. She had covered an astonishing 364 nautical miles in one day – an average of nearly 15 knots – and over four successive days she had set a world record by sailing a total of 1344 nautical miles.

  Forbes and all aboard his ship could now boast that no one before them had ever been so fast under sail. It could also be stated that Marco Polo’s speed was a ground-breaking achievement in British maritime history – one that reflected, for the first time, the true potential of the clipper ship. In today’s parlance, passenger ships had just gone from the era of propellers to the age of jets.

  Regardless, the passengers had little interest in what was being achieved; they continued to exist on the brink of hell below deck. Marco Polo was surging, bucking, tossing, shuddering and shaking so much that countless men, women and children were totally incapacitated through sheer terror, severe cold and seasickness, circumstances made worse by the associated stench. The ship’s motion was so violent that many had to crawl along the passageways to get to their sleeping quarters, while others just gave up and lay where they fell.

  Yet it was not just the appalling conditions on board that made them anxious to reach Melbourne. The sooner they set eyes on the entrance to Port Phillip and anchored off the town’s waterfront, the sooner they could join in the search for the life-changing wealth they expected to find there – with the first major gold find in Victoria made just a year earlier. Ironically, some of the passengers were actually Australian settlers returning home, most empty-handed and disheartened, after joining the rush to California when gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevadas in 1848.

  *

  Just six months later, on Marco Polo’s return voyage, euphoria would have started to replace hope as Forbes navigated her out of the North Atlantic and up St George’s Channel towards the Irish Sea. Holyhead, on the coast of Wales, soon loomed up in the distance.

  At 3pm on Christmas Day, when the headland was aft of abeam, Forbes called for a course change to the east. From there it was only 75 nautical miles to the docks in Liverpool!

  Even James Baines, the owner of Marco Polo, had struggled to accept Forbes’s claim that she could circle the world faster than all that had gone before her. So Baines would have certainly been sceptical when, on Sunday 26 December 1852, a waterman rushed up to him in a Liverpool street and declared excitedly: ‘Sir, the Marco Polo is coming up the river!’

  ‘Nonsense, man,’ Baines is said to have replied. ‘There is no news yet of Marco Polo having arrived in Melbourne.’

  His response would have been based on the fact that no ship had returned to England with a report that Marco Polo had reached Melbourne. But what Baines didn’t know was that several ships had left Melbourne bound for England with that news, but Marco Polo had passed all of them on the way home!

  Baines went towards the century-old Salthouse Dock simply to confirm that the news was not true – but it was! There, before his near-disbelieving eyes, was a magnificent black and white ship, riding easily alongside the pier.

  As he stood there incredulous, he noticed something out of the ordinary amid the complex web of rigging that supported the ship’s masts. At that moment a wry smile probably spread across his face. Stretched between the foremast and mainmast was a long canvas banner with a message scrawled across it in huge black letters: ‘THE FASTEST SHIP IN THE WORLD’.

  Minutes later, amid the large and admiring crowd that had already gathered on the dock, Baines was face to face with Forbes, congratulating him wholeheartedly on a remarkable achievement.

  Marco Polo had completed her return voyage in seventy-six days. The total circumnavigation had taken her just five months and twenty-one days: an astounding three weeks less than the previous record-holder.

  News of this historic passage, and stories relating to the ship’s hard-driving captain, spread quickly around the world. Not surprisingly, thousands upon thousands of people from all corners of Britain, and even Ireland, made the pilgrimage to Liverpool by train, horse-drawn carriage or boat to pay homage to the grand vessel, described by one historian as ‘the wonder of the age’. The crowd were enthralled by yarns from proud crew members about highlights of the passage, and gasped when they heard that at times Marco Polo had averaged almost 20 knots: an unimaginable speed for a sailing ship.

  Baines and his business partner Thomas M. MacKay also enjoyed the adulation; they must have felt as if they were blessed with the Midas touch. For just like that fabled king, their path to prosperity would be paved with gold.

  Marco Polo was one of two ships that had left Melbourne carrying £1 million worth of gold back to the Mother Country. Even more importantly, there was a 340-ounce gold nugget on board – a gift for the reigning monarch, Queen Victoria, from the people of the newly declared Australian colony that bore her name. It was also rumoured that one English passenger had returned home with gold worth an impressive £45,000: the result of his efforts in the Victorian goldfields.

  Before this, the backbone of all shipping lines offering services to the Antipodes had been emigration – ordinary people migrating to the colonies to start a new life. Now Marco Polo had brought tangible evidence of the gold rush in Victoria, and there was no better way to get there than aboard this very ship, the fastest on the seas.

  Most satisfying to Baines and MacKay, though, was the knowledge that some passengers were prepared to pay a premium price – £50 each – to make the voyage one-way. The two men and their associates had found their own goldmine. They could not have hoped for a more satisfying way to launch their newly formed Black Ball Line to the world. Within a decade they would have fifteen ships doing the run to Australia, most of them clippers. The timing of both the Californian and Victorian gold rushes changed the face of commercial shipping, and cemented the clipper even more solidly into maritime history. The speed of these ships was perfect for the gold-rush era, as the treasure hunters were only interested in reaching their destination as quickly as possible. It was Marco Polo’s record-breaking circumnavigation – and, around the same time, the big American clipper Flying Cloud’s stunning eighty-nine day passage from New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn – that did most to confirm that the swift clipper ships were the only answer to long-haul passenger and cargo transportation to the goldfields.

  *

  Burgeoning national pride, and a desire to build the world’s fastest and most spectacular sailing vessels, led to the beginnings of the clipper-ship era in America in the mid-1840s. These designs were an entirely new concept – hence the reference to them as ‘extreme clippers’ – and while their heyday lasted a mere thirty years, many American commentators have recognised this period for its profound influence on that country’s remarkable history.

  The emerging nation of America was ready for such a historic change. As a country of immigrants, it boasted a substantial multinational pool of maritime talent – highly capable ship designers and builders who had gone there from England, Scotland, Wales and many parts of Europe. Neighbouring Canada would also participate in these exciting times.

  The ships were unlike anything that had gone before them. They had sweet and sweeping, long and lean lines. They also featured a bow profile that arched up and forward from the waterline, and some were flush-decked. It has been suggested that the shape of the hull was influenced by the form of fast-swimming fish – but whatever its origin, the clipper was far more streamlined than any other ship of its era.

  Equally imposing was the sail plan. The towering masts, which were heavily raked, carried acres of sail, thirty or more on some of the larger ships, and they had some romantic names – like the highest of all, which were called skysails or moonrakers. The clipper ships also proved to be amazing sail carriers in strong winds: they could set full sail when their predecessors would have been forced to reef, and their speed was unparalleled. Consequently, they soon acquired the name ‘clipper’, derived from the verb ‘clip’, to move swiftly.


  The key to their success was their design.

  Their predecessors had been created around cargo-carrying capacity, and had hulls that were overly buoyant and far from hydrodynamically efficient. They looked like bulbous-bowed barges that could have been modelled on the shape of a bathtub – and often sailed like them. On the other hand, the slim-lined clippers were designed with an emphasis on passenger numbers and speed, their cargo capacity being secondary.

  The design theories that led to the creation of the clipper ship were revolutionary. They were an extension of the design of the considerably smaller but very swift and manoeuvrable ‘Baltimore clippers’, two-masted schooners that, as the name suggests, originated in Baltimore, on Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Their pedigree dates back to the Anglo-American War of 1812, when many were built as swift privateers and blockade runners. The design also proved ideal for pilot boats based on America’s east coast.

  It was the all-round capabilities of these uniquely styled Baltimore clippers that no doubt influenced John Willis Griffiths, a free-thinking naval architect who is credited with creating the first true clipper ship. Named Rainbow, she was built at the respected Smith & Dimon yard in New York in 1845, primarily for transporting tea from China. Speed was of the essence in this highly competitive trade: the first ship back into New York with a cargo of the new season’s crop could demand a premium price from buyers.

  Rainbow’s hull shape was unlike that of any other commercial vessel of similar size. Instead of having apple-cheek shaped forward sections that smashed through head seas, her bow sections resembled a long and tapered wedge that knifed through waves with minimal resistance. But this was just one of many innovations that Griffiths included when developing his radical new design. Whereas the latest designs of other naval architects were simply a progression of the thinking around the most recently launched ship, Griffiths’s mathematical intellect and ‘feel’ for a hull shape put him on a completely different tangent. As American maritime historian William H. Thiesen puts it: ‘Of all the nineteenth-century American shipbuilders, John W. Griffiths did more than any other builder to champion American shipbuilding methods. An experimenter, an advocate for formal ship-design education, and a working intellectual.’