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This was a brave call by the government, as their chosen man appeared to have only one qualification that would make him suitable for the momentous task: he was a migrant!
Jordan commenced his professional career as a dentist, in Derby, England. He migrated as a missionary to South Australia in the early 1850s, but his health failed and he reapplied himself to the dentistry profession in Sydney. A few years later he moved to Brisbane and was soon elected a member of Queensland’s first parliament. At that time the colony’s white population stood at 28,000: one person for every 25 square miles.
Jordan’s immediate plan was to find a unique way to break into the very competitive migration market in England. To counter offers to migrants being made by other Australian colonies and by America, he would have to present a more appealing incentive. America alone was attracting 100,000 new settlers annually from around the world.
Jordan’s task was made doubly difficult by the fact that he would be starting from scratch. This meant he must take a completely different approach. So, with the endorsement of the Queensland Parliament, he sailed to London with a plan in place and a strong determination to succeed.
He had realised that Queensland had one major asset: land – and plenty of it. Therefore, migrants who were willing to pay for their own passage to Queensland would receive a land grant. Simultaneously, those too poor to pay their fare would be guaranteed employment as much-needed labourers.
To cover the costs of the fares of this latter group and their families, Jordan very cleverly negotiated a deal with the Black Ball Line, owners of the famous Marco Polo: they would transport them free on their giant clippers, in return for government-guaranteed land parcels in Queensland – land parcels that the shipping company could sell at a later date.
The key to Jordan’s success, however, was his marketing approach: instead of sitting in London or Liverpool and waiting for the people to come to him, he went to them to sell his Queensland message at town meetings. In 1866, he made a highly successful foray into Wales, staging nine meetings, the majority in rural areas. In Cardiff 1300 people attended his event, and in Caernarfon 700. His ‘sell’ obviously worked: in addition to signing up as migrants, many of those who attended the meetings went out and spread the word about Queensland.
Jordan’s success was such that in the years 1865 and 1866 alone, nearly 20,000 immigrants headed to the emerging colony. They became known as ‘Jordan’s Lambs’, simply because the long lines they formed on the docks conjured images of lambs heading to an unknown destiny, be it a shearing shed or a slaughterhouse. Not surprisingly then, Jordan was often referred to as ‘the shepherd’.
Jordan’s efforts also contributed greatly to the reinvigoration of the Black Ball Line’s passenger market. In 1863, sixty-eight ships set sail on the Australia run under the company flag – the highest annual figure in its history – and the impressive numbers continued for some time. In 1864 the figure was sixty-seven, and in 1865 sixty-two.
There was one other history-making event associated with Jordan’s program for getting migrants to Queensland. Until this time the longest non-stop voyage for a sailing ship anywhere in the world had been the 14,000-nautical-mile passage from New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn, or vice versa. However, some of the clippers delivering Jordan’s Lambs to Queensland put an end to that claim.
Not all migrants were bound for Brisbane; some were headed for Rockhampton, 370 nautical miles further north, where their farming land grants were located. This region was first settled in 1854 and gained a short-term benefit from a gold rush at nearby Canoona in 1858 – a gold rush that became a non-event, as there was very little of the precious metal to be found. The non-stop voyage from England that ended at Keppel Bay – where the ships were anchored and the Rockhampton migrants rowed ashore – was 500 nautical miles longer than the coast-to-coast course between New York and San Francisco.
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In 1866 the British answered the on-going demand for passages to Australia with what was considered to be one of the two greatest clipper ships built on that side of the Atlantic. Named Sobraon and with a hull length of 317 feet overall, she, along with the ill-fated Schomberg, were the only two clippers that were comparable in size to the giants coming out of Donald McKay’s yard in Boston. Built by Alexander Hall & Company in Aberdeen, Sabraon was the largest composite clipper ship ever built: she featured iron beams and frames and Malabar teak planking, and was copper fastened. Her sail area was enormous: a spread of canvas that would cover two acres.
The one significant difference between the design of these two British ships and the largest of the Yankee clippers was that the British ships had greater overall length and their rivals greater beam.
From day one, she went onto the run to the Antipodes: from 1866–71 to Sydney, then from 1872–91 to Melbourne. The unique feature of her voyages was that she never returned home via Cape Horn; it was always back around the Cape of Good Hope.
Sobraon quickly became the most popular ship sailing to Australia, mainly because of her size, high standard of accommodation and quality of service. Equally satisfying was the expertise and attention of her captain, Lieutenant J.A. Elmslie, R.N.R., who held that position for 24 years.
Her crew totalled 69 including the captain. There were four officers, eight apprentices, a carpenter, a sailmaker, a bosun, an engineer, two bosun’s mates, 26 able seamen, four ordinary seamen, two boys, sixteen stewards and two stewardesses.
Sobraon made only one trip per year downunder, but because of the premium service and conditions onboard and the timing of the voyage – departing London in September and arriving in Australia in February – there was always great demand from passengers eager to travel. She accommodated 90 in first class and 40 in the second saloon. Guests wanted for nothing, especially when it came to food and beverage selections. On each voyage, she carried three bullocks, 90 sheep, 50 pigs, three cows for milking and more than 300 geese, chickens and ducks. There was also an ice chamber containing several tons of ice.
Not surprisingly, this was the vessel of choice for the most discerning of travellers. In 1867, Lord Belmore and his wife sailed to Sydney aboard Sobraon so he could take up the position of Governor of New South Wales. Then, while at anchor in Sydney Harbour following that passage, Captain Elmslie entertained the Duke of Edinburgh on board while the ship acted as flagship for the Sydney Regatta.
Sobraon was no slouch under sail, especially when running down her easting in the southern seas. On many occasions, she topped 300 nautical miles in a day; her best ever run was 340.
Maritime historian Basil Lubbock described magnificently what it was like to sail a giant ship like this downwind in a howling gale – a ‘real snorter’. Two of Captain Elmslie’s sons sailed with him for many years, and Lubbock quoted the captain’s eldest son, ‘C.T. Elmslie’, who told of a major storm the ship endured in 1889. At the time Sobraon was just north of Iles Crozets, a sub-Antarctic archipelago 1500 nautical miles east-south-east of the Cape of Good Hope:
. . . by 4 p.m. Sobraon had been shortened down to foresail, lower fore topsail, upper fore topsail reefed, main lower topsail and fore topmast staysail . . . the yards were hardly round before the foresail went and in a few moments there was nothing left of it. The sea was running in mountainous ridges, and with the foresail gone threatened every moment to poop her badly. It was too late to heave to and the ship was kept away before it. After four hours’ battling and over 30 men aloft a brand new foresail was bent and set reefed. This was hardly done before the fore upper topsail blew away. However, with the foresail reefed and two lower topsails Sobraon fled before the blast like a startled deer. The squalls every few minutes were terrific and in spite of such short canvas Sobraon was making over 14 knots an hour.
The sea was all the time running higher and higher and breaking aboard in the most alarming fashion. During the night the greater portion of the bulwarks on the port side was carried away; a boat in davits, hanging 22 feet abov
e the water, was filled by a sea and disappeared, the davits breaking short off: the main skylight over the saloon was washed away and tons of water found its way below before the open space could be covered over. The amount of water in the saloon at this time can be imagined when passengers were actually being washed off their feet. On deck there were many narrow escapes of men being washed overboard, the broken bulwarks being a great source of danger. The mate and three of the men were washed from the main[mast] fiferail to the break of the poop, and, after being dashed up against the heavy boarding which had been put up to protect the fore end of the poop, managed to save themselves by the life-lines which had been stretched across. The forward deck house which held the galley and engine room was almost demolished and everything moveable in it was washed over the side.
The storm continued at its height from the Sunday afternoon until Wednesday morning. The passengers, who had been battened down for three days, were in a sorry plight owing to the quantities of water that had got below and the catering for them under such conditions proved very difficult. As is usually the case after such a storm, the wind subsided very much quicker than the sea, and for a few hours on the Wednesday night, the wind having dropped completely and the ship losing way, the rolling was terrific.
Sobraon’s stellar career over a quarter of a century left no doubt that British clipper ship designers and builders were on a par with the best to be found in America and Canada. One can only wonder how great Schomberg would have been had her career not been curtailed by a headstrong Bully Forbes.
By the time of Federation in 1901, the non-indigenous population of Australia stood at 3,773,801, and it was the mighty clipper ships that had contributed significantly to this story of growth. The rate of migration would increase exponentially over the coming century – particularly as the White Australia Policy (which existed from Federation until it began to be dismantled in 1949) came to an end. This then led to a surge of migrants of many nationalities arriving in the country and setting the foundation for its now-multicultural character.
Though the earliest clippers plying the Britain-to-Australia route had been designed and built in America, by the time the famous Black Ball Line was conveying passengers to the new colony of Queensland in the 1860s, Britain had a thriving clipper-building industry of its own. London and the northern port city of Liverpool became the home ports for ships plying the lucrative Australia run, and fierce rivalries developed between the shipping companies. As this competition gathered pace, the British-built clippers would go on to compete on a par with their American-built rivals.
CHAPTER 4
Black Ball and White Star
The British shipping industry fights back
When the first extreme clippers like Rainbow and Sea Witch were being launched in America in the mid–1840s, the majority of British seafarers were still lumbering around the world in the more traditional and considerably slower ‘Blackwall frigates’, which were based on a design concept that had originated in the 1830s.
The reason for this was simple: British maritime laws, some of which had been in place for two centuries, ensured that British vessels were a ‘protected species’. The laws prohibited foreign-flagged vessels from competing with British ships on all trade routes to and from British colonies. They gave Britain and its colonies a monopoly on all trade with each other and between them and foreign countries.
Soon after the clipper boom began, the British Government realised that their archaic maritime laws no longer served the purposes for which they had been designed. Neither the British shipbuilding industry nor British shipping companies were benefiting as originally intended. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the Atlantic, the American shipbuilding industry was booming, as a result of the intense rivalry ship owners were experiencing between themselves and with other nations competing for cargoes. Competitiveness was the name of the game, so the American clippers were becoming bigger, faster and more efficient than any ship that had ever been built in Britain.
In May 1849, when the liberal-thinking Whig Party was elected to government, the reasons for repealing the Navigation Acts were unmistakable. At the time, the largest commercial ship built in Britain had a burthen of less than 1000 tons, while the Americans were already designing ships twice that size, and capable of nearly double the speed of the Blackwallers.
British shipbuilders recognised that clippers were now dominating maritime trade, but because their industry was protected, they did little about challenging the concept. It was as if their industry had run aground on the world scene, and they weren’t overly enthusiastic about salvaging it. Yes, they continued to build ships, but they didn’t seem interested in supplying what most of the market wanted. They seemed content with plodding along in the tried and proved Blackwallers.
The first Blackwall frigate, launched in 1837, had been designed and built in a yard owned by George Green and brothers Money and Henry Wigram, located on the northern bank of the Thames at Blackwall, seven miles from London. When other yards started building similar ships, they were all recognised by the colloquial name of Blackwall frigates.
Compared with the later clippers, many English whips were impressive in size but not in style. In design terms they were impressive in size but not in style. In design terms they resembled bluff-bowed barges, while their rigs were inefficient, their sails ill-fitting and, as maritime historian Basil Lubbock has noted, they had ‘a promenade deck no longer than the traditional two steps and overboard’. He added: ‘These Colonial wagons were navigated by rum-soaked, illiterate, bear-like officers, who could not work out the ordinary meridian observation with any degree of accuracy, and either trusted to dead-reckoning or a blackboard held up by a passing ship for their longitude.’
The voyage to Australia from Liverpool or London on board one of these vessels was often painfully slow, and a horrific experience for many, particularly those who had paid the minimum fare and were travelling in ‘steerage class’. Their quarters were usually overcrowded, with ventilation almost non-existent and privacy unknown.
The horrors that steerage-class passengers had to endure on the passage to Australia were revealed in a first-hand report delivered to a Parliamentary Committee in London in 1844. It certainly confirmed that the experience they endured was little better than that of convicts, who were still being transported to the colonies at this time:
It was scarcely possible to induce the passengers to sweep the decks after their meals or to be decent in respect to the common wants of nature; in many cases, in bad weather, they would not go on deck, their health suffered so much that their strength was gone, and they had not the power to help themselves. Hence the between decks were like a loathsome dungeon.
When hatchways were opened, under which the people were stowed, the steam rose and the stench was like that from a pen of pigs. The few beds they had were in a dreadful state, for the straw, once wet with sea water, soon rotted, besides which they used the between decks for all sorts of filthy purposes. Whenever vessels put back from distress, all these miseries and sufferings were exhibited in the most aggravated form.
In one case it appeared that, the vessel having experienced rough weather, the people were unable to go on deck and cook their provision: the strongest maintained the upper hand over the weakest, and it was even said that there were women who died of starvation. At that time the passengers were expected to cook for themselves and from their being unable to do this the greatest suffering arose.
It was naturally at the commencement of the voyage that this system produced its worst effects, for the first days were those in which the people suffered most from sea-sickness and under the prostration of body thereby induced were wholly incapacitated from cooking. Thus though provisions might be abundant enough, the passengers would be half-starved.
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When the old Navigation Acts were repealed and the government announced that British trade would no longer be the exclusive domain of British ships, protes
ts erupted in shipping centres across the country. The government, however, remained steadfast.
Sure enough, the barriers came down, allowing American clippers access to a huge new passenger and cargo market, by sailing the prosperous tea route from China to England (previously foreign goods could only arrive in England on English vessels or vessels from their country of origin). More importantly, they now had unimpeded entrée to the burgeoning routes to the Australian gold rush, and beyond to New Zealand.
Additionally, British ship owners were no longer forced to support the local shipbuilding industry. They were now free to buy or charter clipper ships from America – and Marco Polo was among the first of the clippers to become part of a British fleet.
However, one British ship designer and builder had already sent out a clear challenge to the supremacy enjoyed by the American clippers on the high seas. His name was Walter Hood, and his shipyard was in Aberdeen. In 1847, his first clipper, the 146-foot Phoenician, slipped down the ways at the Walter Hood & Co Shipyard at Pocra Quay. She was destined to join the White Star fleet of ships sailing the round-the-world route to Australia – and when she did, she certainly impressed.
On her maiden London-to-Sydney passage, Phoenician became the first clipper ever to enter Port Jackson, on 21 July 1849. On her third voyage on that route she put her name into the history books for two additional reasons: she set a record time from Sydney to London of eighty-three days – seven days less than she had taken on her outward voyage – and she carried the first Australian gold to be landed in the British Isles: over 80,000 ounces’ worth. An article in Melbourne’s Argus proclaimed:
An Aberdeen correspondent of the [London] Times . . . expresses a hope that when facts are duly considered, it would no longer be contended that the American clippers have any just claim to be considered the fastest sailers, or as worthy of a preference over British ships like the Phoenician, and others of the same build.