Under Full Sail Page 11

  As more and more ships arrived in England from Australia, carrying an ever-increasing amount of gold, the urgency of eager throngs of gold-seekers to get to the Antipodes grew proportionately. Shipping companies in Liverpool and London commenced negotiations to buy or charter Yankee clippers, while diverting their Blackwallers, which had been sailing to and from India, onto the routes to Sydney, and Melbourne in particular. Still, there were insufficient ships to meet the demand.

  With all migrants reaching Australia the only way possible – by sea – the England-based shipping lines were running virtual shuttle services, and turnarounds were being completed as quickly as possible. Port Phillip Bay pilots reported that, at their busiest times, it was not unusual to have twelve or more ships waiting at the entrance to the bay for guidance to their anchorage in Hobson’s Bay.

  The timing of the gold rush could not have been better for the Black Ball Line, newly launched by local shipping identity James Baines, Scotsman Thomas M. MacKay and two junior partners, Joseph Greaves and John Taylor. The company poached its name and flag from a rival American line sailing packets between New York and Liverpool – much to the latter’s displeasure.

  Baines and MacKay immediately saw golden opportunities sailing the route between Liverpool and Australia. By putting the recently purchased Marco Polo under the command of their most talented captain, James (Bully) Forbes, they would have a head start on their business rivals. She would be recognised as the largest clipper on the run, becoming the pioneering ship for the company and the country.

  Marco Polo was built by James Smith at his yard in St John, in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, and launched in 1851. Locals obviously didn’t see her hull shape as being like that of a fish, as many others had: instead, she was described as being ‘as square as a brick fore and aft, with a bow like a savage bulldog . . . a big thick lump of a black ship with tremendous beam, a vessel you could carry on to glory in, even to sporting lower and topmast stunsails in a strong gale’.

  The ship’s origin was somewhat unusual in that she was not built to order. Aware the old navigation laws had been lifted, Smith was smart enough to realise there would be a market for her in England, so not long after the launch, he sailed Marco Polo across the Atlantic with a cargo of cotton, and offered her for sale there. A journalist from the Illustrated London News had a different view of the ship’s design from the people of St John, writing in early 1852:

  The distinguishing feature of the Marco Polo is the peculiarity of her hull. Her lines fore and aft are beautifully fine, her bearings are brought well down to the bilge . . . she has an entrance as sharp as a steamboat and a run as clean as can be conceived . . . in fact, with a bottom like a yacht, she has above water all the appearance of a frigate.

  Baines was similarly impressed, because soon after Marco Polo arrived in England he negotiated to buy her as the initial flagship for the newly formed Black Ball Line fleet. As a three-decker with the most modern appointments and 8 feet of head room throughout, she was ideal for the emigration trade. Even so, he commissioned her to be refitted so she could carry the maximum number of passengers. It was a competitive market, and if the Black Ball Line wanted to command high prices from its passengers, comfort for all – whether travelling first-class or steerage – was paramount.

  A newspaper report in Liverpool provided an insight into the standard of accommodation that passengers might expect:

  On deck forward of the poop, which is used as a ladies’ cabin, is a ‘home on deck’ to be used as a dining saloon. It is ceiled with maple and the pilasters are panelled with richly ornamented and silvered glass.

  The new layout was standard for the day: married couples were berthed amidships, single women aft, and single men forward.

  When the refit was completed, Marco Polo was recognised as being considerably more comfortable than any other emigrant ship. She pioneered the standard for which Black Ball Line ships became renowned: well ventilated below deck, offering state rooms, smoking rooms and tastefully decorated saloons for ‘cabin’ passengers. Even the accommodation for steerage class travellers was superior to what had previously been experienced. The ship also acquired a reputation for being well rigged and maintained.

  Baines even insisted that large lead-lined tubs be positioned on deck so the women passengers could do their laundry.

  *

  The passengers on the ship’s manifest would be seen as one of the first ripples in what would later become a tidal wave of mass migration to Australia. News that gold had been discovered in significant quantities near Melbourne reached England only five months before Marco Polo set sail, and from that moment the big gold rush to Australia had begun.

  An advertisement that appeared in a Liverpool newspaper at the time read:

  Under agreement to sail on 21 June 1852 for Melbourne and Port Phillip the splendid new frigate built-ship Marco Polo, James Nicol Forbes, Commander (who has much experience in the trade). A1 at Lloyd’s, 2,500 tons burthen; coppered and copper-fastened; now only on her second voyage; is the largest vessel ever despatched from Liverpool to Australia; and expected to sail as fast as any ship afloat: has splendid accommodation and carries two surgeons – Apply to James Baines & Co.

  This was just the first of the boasts about the new ship’s speed. A later newspaper report detailing what was referred to as a customary ‘dejeuner’ held on the main deck prior to the start of the voyage stated that during the celebrations Bully Forbes had made a remarkable statement. The captain ‘judged from the appearance of her sticks and timbers that his ship would be obliged to [be fast]; and that they must not be surprised if they found the Marco Polo in [Liverpool’s] River Mersey [within] six months’.

  The majority of local seafarers treated the statement as mere folly – a wine-laced brag. While Marco Polo was then the largest ship to undertake the return run to Australia, none before her had ever come close to achieving that time.

  But Forbes was as confident as they were not. He was certain that the North American clipper was very much capable of completing the circumnavigation within that time. Besides, what most didn’t realise was that Forbes had an added incentive. Baines and MacKay had lured him into the role of captain by offering him a small shareholding in their company, should he return in under six months. Simply put, a record run to Melbourne and back would secure his position within the company, and as a ship’s master, for many, many years to come.

  Forbes was born in 1821 more than 250 miles north of Liverpool, in the shipping port of Aberdeen, on Scotland’s east coast. From his teenage years in the mid-1830s, his passion was the sea, even if the financial reward he gained as a deckhand from around age fourteen would best be described as a pittance.

  By eighteen he had not a shilling in his pocket, but he did have one valuable asset: he showed great skill and courage as a seafarer, so much so that he ascended rapidly through the ranks to become captain, aged just twenty-five, of the ship Prince of Waterloo on her return voyage from New Orleans to Liverpool. Sadly, on her next voyage, to Quebec, Prince of Waterloo ran aground on Anticosti Island in the Gulf of St Lawrence, but Forbes was able to return to Liverpool as master of the Canadian vessel Wilson Kennedy. This was followed by a short stint captaining the White Star Line ship Wakefield.

  Inevitably, word on the waterfront regarding Forbes’s talents filtered through to Baines, another young prodigy – two years younger than Forbes – who had chosen to make his fortune on the other side of the shipping business, perhaps aided by funds from a confectionery business owned by his mother. In 1849, he and his partners had established James Baines & Co, and were on the lookout for reliable, tough, talented, up-and-coming captains.

  Before long Forbes had accepted an offer to join the company, and he and Baines would develop a close working relationship. His first position with the company was as the master of Maria, then Cleopatra, both on the Australian run. He obviously impressed his employer while commanding these ships, as Baines had
no hesitation in appointing him captain of the magnificent Marco Polo when he set up the Black Ball fleet.

  Marco Polo’s departure on 4 July was celebrated in grand style. While flags around the port and on the ship fluttered lazily in the gentle breeze, the air was filled with rousing music coming from the ship’s band, which was stationed amidships and surrounded by excited passengers.

  It was the top of the tide: the right time to be towed out of the River Mersey by small paddle-wheeler tugboats onto the Irish Sea. The call by the captain for the tugs to take the strain on their tow lines and for the dock lines to be cast off was the signal for high emotion among those on board, and the families and friends farewelling them from the dock.

  By the time the tugs had the 2500-ton ship heading downriver, slowly but surely, towards the open sea, Forbes’s mind would have been locked onto the passage ahead and the opportunities it might present him and his ship. He was most definitely out to stamp his name and that of Marco Polo into maritime history books, and prove that his pre-departure prophecy was actually a promise.

  Once clear of the land, the crew members who had been sent aloft and those on deck began unfurling and setting the sails. Soon afterwards, the tow lines from the tugboats were let go and Marco Polo was literally ‘off the leash’, heading away on a circuitous course to a destination some 13,000 nautical miles away.

  It was a passage on which only Mother Nature could decide whether there would be fame or failure.

  Baines and Forbes were both satisfied with the crew they had assembled. They had signed on many of the best officers they knew to be sailing out of Liverpool, the most important being Charles McDonald, Forbes’s second-in-command. There were thirty regular crew aboard, as well as thirty seamen who were working their passage to Australia. Additionally, many of the passengers were keen to help with the sailing of the ship. Their endeavours were often referred to as ‘pully-hauly’, as they found that hauling on a halyard or a brace alongside the regular crew was a satisfying form of exercise.

  The first few days passed without incident, but Marco Polo wasn’t far into the Atlantic before it became apparent to most that the conditions on board promised by Baines and his company were a far cry from reality. Forbes’s impatience to put to sea caused the first problem: much of the cargo and equipment, including the many trunks the passengers had brought with them, had not been stowed correctly.

  But the main issue was that the ship was grossly overcrowded, which created difficulties from the outset that could not be overcome. Marco Polo was licensed to carry 701 adults, but through an artful manipulation of the law – structured on the number of children accompanying their parents – the manifest documented nearly 150 additional passengers. A significant proportion of them were heading to the goldfields, but an emigration society had also placed on board an overwhelming number of everyday citizens who were being sent to Australia to live, some willingly, others not.

  The captain cared little about this overcrowding, or the fact that food supplies would be stretched to unacceptable levels. Forbes’s greatest concern was the speed of his ship – and he was certainly satisfied by the swift passage that was achieved down the Atlantic. In little time Marco Polo had crossed the Equator, relatively close to the coast of South America, and was on a course towards the southern seas and the Roaring Forties, heading for iceberg territory.

  Forbes was determined to maintain this track because it was as close as he dared to go to John Thomas Towson’s recently proposed great circle route: the shortest possible distance to his destination, and a saving of around 1000 nautical miles. This course was, in fact, what many referred to as a composite great circle route, a far safer course where, instead of sailing the complete arc that would take them to the edge of the Antarctic Circle – 66 degrees 33 minutes south – they would level off at about 50 degrees south (around 150 nautical miles south of the remote Kerguelen Islands). From there they would sail west along that latitude until they intersected the great circle route’s arc where it swept up from the southern seas towards Bass Strait. At that point they would turn north-east and follow the great circle route to Bass Strait. This composite route would save them around 800 nautical miles.

  For the passengers, it meant that in a matter of two weeks they would have travelled from the sauna-like climate of the tropics to the depths of a frigid and storm-lashed southern-hemisphere winter.

  Even so, they didn’t realise it would be far worse than they could have imagined – on two fronts.

  Forced to endure appalling weather extremes, many passengers would suffer greatly because they did not have clothing warm enough to cope with the blizzard-like conditions they would encounter in the southern seas – conditions that they had not been warned to expect, nor could ever have contemplated.

  Worse still, children were soon beginning to die after being struck down by the plague of the day, measles. The cause was simple: one couple had boarded the ship in Liverpool not knowing that their young child had already contracted the disease. From the moment it began spreading, there was nothing the ship’s two doctors could do to slow its progress. Adding to the doctors’ woes was the fact that many of the medicines they ordered had not been put aboard prior to departure – possibly because the ship had left before they could be delivered.

  Hard as it was to believe, there was even worse to come. As Marco Polo headed into the Roaring Forties and continued on her dangerous course, passengers and crew alike were utterly unprepared for the savage storm that hit with sudden force, threatening to engulf the ship and send her to the bottom.

  Yet all that Bully Forbes saw was the perfect opportunity to sail his way into the record books. He remained entirely unconcerned about the fears held by his passengers and some crew. He was interested only in harnessing every ounce of energy coming from what he saw right then as the perfect maelstrom. Here was his first chance to show the world what one of the very latest clipper ships could achieve under sail, and become famous while doing so.

  *

  Convinced for weeks that they might never see land again, the passengers and crew aboard Marco Polo felt blessed when they sighted Cape Otway, at the western entrance to Bass Strait. From that point it was only 60 nautical miles to the eagerly anticipated narrow entrance to Port Phillip Bay.

  A few hours later, as Marco Polo hove into the view of the men of the Port Phillip Pilot Service, stationed on land at the bay’s entrance, they were amazed by her great size, and the sleek lines of her black hull. They had never seen a larger or more impressive ship enter the port. She was a thing of beauty, from her stem – where a full-length figurehead of the famous explorer whose name she bore was mounted proudly under the bowsprit – to her stern.

  With the pilots aboard and most of the sails hauled up and furled, Marco Polo made her way slowly up the bay towards Melbourne, and as she did so, Captain Forbes had every reason to feel proud of the way his ship had performed in all conditions.

  However, there had also been a dark side to the voyage. In the ten weeks it had taken to reach Melbourne there had been at least fifty-two burials at sea: two adult women and around fifty children aged under ten. In this era it was not unusual for between 50 and 100 deaths to be recorded on the older and slower vessels that sailed this route, and they carried only half the number of passengers that were aboard Marco Polo. Still, there could be no denying that – in addition to overcrowding – Bully Forbes’s stubborn determination to sail his ship without mercy through the frigid southern latitudes had contributed to this tragically high toll.

  It was Sunday, 19 September 1852 when Marco Polo reached her designated anchorage in Hobson’s Bay, west of the entrance to the Yarra Yarra River. Within a few hours of her arrival she was the talk of the waterfront. Word spread rapidly that this amazingly large vessel of revolutionary design had completed the passage from Liverpool to the entrance of the bay in an almost incomprehensible sixty-eight days!

  For Forbes, however, the job was only half done
. Yes, he had proved that his original claim had been no idle boast. But more importantly, he still had to deliver on the second part of his pronouncement: he had to complete the circumnavigation and be back in Liverpool in less than six months.

  All thoughts of the storms they had faced and the suffering they had endured faded fast for Marco Polo’s passengers from the moment the anchor was set firmly in the sandy bottom of the bay. Instead, there was a mild air of hysteria prevailing: all the majority could think about was getting ashore as quickly as possible and rushing to the goldfields. Some even tried to bribe the pilots to take them ashore in their boat, but the only way to reach shore quickly was to hire one of the watermen who brought small rowboats out from nearby Williamstown.

  The town of Melbourne was about six miles upstream along the Yarra Yarra River, and there were only two ways of getting there: travelling by steamboat up the river, which in some places was just 25 feet wide, or walking along rough bush trails. Little did the weary passengers know that their arrival in Melbourne would be just the start of a long, and costly, trek to one of Victoria’s many goldfields.

  *

  Back aboard Marco Polo, Forbes had already turned his attention to the return voyage to Liverpool. Being home inside six months was an exciting prospect for him – but before long he realised that his self-imposed challenge could well be destroyed within a matter of days.

  As Marco Polo was approaching the Hobson’s Bay anchorage he was surprised to see as many as fifty large ships lying idle. He would have expected their crews to be busy loading or unloading cargo, but there was no activity to be seen on the decks.

  Forbes quickly sought answers from some of their captains, and each response was nearly the same: the majority of the crews, and in some cases even the captains, had deserted their ships and rushed to the goldfields, with no intention of returning. Not even the threat of being shot or bludgeoned with a baton for abandoning ship could stop them, nor could the enticement of huge financial rewards – between £40 and £50 – get them back. Some captains took the extreme measure of visiting the local prisons to try to secure crew, but couldn’t find anyone willing to leave town, even if their fines were paid.