Under Full Sail Page 14
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Wanting a head start on Lightning, and fearing that some of his men would decamp and join the gold rush, Captain Reid had planned the fastest possible turnaround for Red Jacket. While there were not as many passengers on board now as there had been during the outbound voyage, Reid was given the responsibility of delivering back to England some 45,000 ounces of gold, worth at that time about £1 million.
However, upon arriving in Melbourne, the captain had had an unexpected and far more pressing matter to deal with: he found himself embroiled in a legal stoush – one that had the potential to delay his departure from Melbourne for an unknown period. This matter related to the incident on board Red Jacket alluded to by Frederick Hoare, when five male passengers had become aggressive over a card game and pistols had been drawn.
Soon after arriving in Melbourne, Captain Reid had the five men charged with ‘riotous and insubordinate conduct amounting to assault and mutiny’. The case dragged on, with some of the men apparently laying counter-charges against Reid, who had put them into detention aboard Red Jacket for the final forty-seven days of the voyage.
It appears that Reid received legal advice suggesting he go into hiding in Melbourne until it was time for Red Jacket to sail, and it is highly likely that he accepted this advice. It does appear that there was some sort of resolution to the matter, though, as Reid was indeed back on board when his ship departed for England on 2 August 1854.
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The return passage to Liverpool was to become another clash between Red Jacket and Lightning, and first blood went to Red Jacket when she set a new record of twenty-one days for the stage from Melbourne to Cape Horn – approximately 5500 nautical miles. Within days, though, any chance of logging a dock-to-dock record was dashed when Red Jacket was confronted by an ice field while sailing east of the cape.
There was a real danger that the ship would become icebound – trapped and unable to make any headway. An additional concern was that her hull might be damaged when it struck ice floes, something that was impossible to avoid. Reid made the logical call and had the majority of sails lowered or furled so that Red Jacket’s progress was slowed to the point where the helmsman barely had steerage. The captain then spent much of his time perched on the second-highest yard on the foremast so he could call a safe course through the ice field and have the helmsman respond accordingly.
An unidentified passenger aboard Red Jacket later provided a London newspaper with a graphic account of this incident:
On 24th August I was roused out of sleep by the noise of shortening sail. Ice had been seen before, but the solid masses had been supposed in the dark to be land. I found we were in smooth water and large masses of ice were floating about us . . . The ice appeared to extend on every side in solid fields as far as the eye could reach, without any prospect of getting out, so that we had to follow the channel. All sail was clewed up except the topsails, and as there was a good breeze we proceeded along at about four or five knots. Our situation at this time seemed most appalling, as we appeared to be getting further into the ice, so that at 11 o’clock we were almost making up our minds to remain for weeks in this fearful situation. About noon the captain and second mate, who had been on the foretopsail yard all the morning, discovered a clear sea again, to reach which we had to force a passage through dense masses of ice. It was here she sustained the principal damage to her stem and copper.
Yet the relief passengers and crew enjoyed once Red Jacket was freed of the ice turned to dismay a few hours later, at 8pm, when they were once again trapped in a huge field of ice. This time, Captain Reid called for a retreat: he had the ship tacked and set on a course that would take her back to where she would be in ice-free waters.
Unfortunately, though, when that point was reached, the broken-up ice presented an equally serious problem. The floes were again so large that they would damage the hull should Red Jacket hit one hard enough. Besides this danger, there were icebergs to be avoided, the largest seen being about 2 miles in circumference and 100 feet high. It was a threat so immense that Reid called for the ship to heave to for the night. Fortunately, within forty-eight hours, Red Jacket had woven her way through the dangers and was once again on course to the north.
After being trapped by the ice then confronted by fickle winds for the next three weeks, when her average speed was less than 5 knots, Red Jacket began to benefit from strong south-westerlies and a very favourable, fast-flowing Gulf Stream, so she was able to reach Liverpool on 15 October, in seventy-three days and twelve hours.
Lightning’s passage was far less eventful, so Forbes was able to guide her into the Mersey on 23 October, sixty-four days and three hours after clearing the heads at Port Phillip – a record. In what was a remarkable indication of the similarity between the two ships, Lightning’s time for the circumnavigation was just two days and one hour better than Red Jacket’s.
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These two great ships would go on to play significant roles in the transportation of passengers from Britain to Australia. Between them, over the next fifteen years, Lightning and Red Jacket are believed to have carried upwards of 20,000 migrants and general travellers to the Australian colonies, along with tens of thousands of tons of cargo – vital supplies for the rapidly growing British outpost. This great rivalry came to an end in October 1869 when Lightning caught fire and was scuttled while docked in Geelong, 34 nautical miles southwest of Melbourne.
By that stage, while British ship designers and builders were leaving little doubt that they were on a par with their American counterparts; many orders from British shipping companies for new clippers were still going to Donald McKay in Boston. In 1855, what was hoped to be the equal of the American ships was launched in Aberdeen, but the fame that preceded her would be short-lived.
CHAPTER 5
‘Let Her Go to Hell’
The demise of Bully Forbes and other maritime disasters
When he sailed Lightning into Liverpool and set the fastest time ever for the passage from Melbourne, the legend of Bully Forbes was at its zenith: his public acclaim as the greatest British captain of the clipper-ship era continued unabated. His three spectacular voyages out to Melbourne and back – two aboard Marco Polo, followed by the Lightning passage – had brought him international recognition, and the profile and success of the Black Ball Line had grown proportionately.
However, as maritime history reveals, from that point Forbes’s star was on the wane.
While Lightning was sailing around Cape Horn then heading home to Liverpool, the Black Ball Line’s owners, Baines and MacKay, were preparing to welcome the 248-foot-long Schomberg into their fleet. This was the vessel that was expected to become the greatest British-built clipper of all: considered by British shipbuilders and seafarers to be the only local clipper ship that could match, and hopefully beat, the best of the Yankee clippers.
Such a grand ship demanded the grandest of captains, so, without hesitation, the Black Ball Line announced that its highest ranking commander would be assigned to the task: none other than Bully Forbes. His last ship had gone like lightning, Forbes claimed, but he would make Schomberg go like greased lightning.
It was 6 October 1855 when Forbes took up a position on Schomberg’s deck, close to the helmsman, so he could best coordinate the ship’s departure for Melbourne. There were 430 passengers plus crew aboard for this maiden voyage, and they, along with all on the dock, enjoyed an air of excitement inspired by a belief that, weather permitting, the outward voyage would take a mere sixty days: a new record. As well as having a full complement of passengers, Schomberg was heavily laden with cargo, the largest consignment being iron railway lines and associated equipment to be used in the construction of the Melbourne-to-Geelong railway.
However, the weather did not favour a fast passage, and when land was first sighted – Cape Bridgewater, 30 miles south-east of the Victoria–South Australia border – Schomberg was already sixty-eight days out of Liverpool . . . and Forbes was c
ompletely frustrated by the ship’s sluggish performance and poor handling.
That afternoon – Christmas Eve – a strong but unfavourable easterly headwind developed, a circumstance that called for a 90-degree change of course, close-hauled offshore to the south. As Schomberg headed away from the coast, the wind continued to increase, as did the ship’s angle of heel. The immediate need then was for a dramatic reduction in sail area, so with crew either aloft or working hard on deck, the mizzen topsail, plus all topgallants and royals, were taken in. Soon after that, the mainsail split from luff to leech and had to be replaced.
After heading offshore for nearly six hours, Forbes called for the ship to be put about and set on a course back towards the coast. But, much to his frustration, the easterly wind prevailed for another two days, so progress towards the entrance to Port Phillip Bay, about 100 nautical miles to the east, was stalled.
Now more than a week behind in the much-vaunted sixty-day run to Melbourne, the captain, it appears, lost all interest in running his ship. His disappointment in her performance meant that he began to spend more time below than he did on deck. This attitude might also have been influenced by a £1000 wager relating to making a record passage which he was rumoured to have made prior to leaving England – a wager he was destined to lose. At around 10.30pm on 26 December, Forbes was playing cards with passengers in the main saloon when the ship’s first mate advised him that the wind had died away and Schomberg was being carried towards the shore by a fast-flowing current. The mate suggested the ship should be tacked as soon as possible, but Forbes, who was losing the game, told the mate he would be on deck to assess the situation after he had played another hand.
By then, it was far too late.
When Forbes finally arrived on deck, Schomberg was almost aground on a sandbar about 35 miles to the west of Cape Otway. Forbes tried desperately to tack her and head back offshore, but with barely a breath of wind blowing, Schomberg did not respond to the helm.
As luck would have it, the sea-state was nearly calm. So when the inevitable news came from the crewman sounding the depths that the ship was aground, an irate Forbes is said to have bellowed: ‘Let her go to Hell, and tell me when she is on the beach.’
With that he left the deck and retired below.
Fortunately, conditions remained benign overnight, so next morning all passengers and crew were safely transferred to the steamer Queen, which had come to the rescue. However, Schomberg herself could not be saved. Before long rising seas claimed her; she was washed onto the beach and became a total loss.
The subsequent official inquiry into her sinking cleared Forbes of all blame, on the premise that the sandbank on which the ship grounded was uncharted. But a meeting of the majority of Schomberg’s passengers was held soon afterwards at Melbourne’s Mechanics’ Institute. It was suggested by some of those present that Forbes had been so annoyed by the ship’s lack of performance that he had deliberately let her run aground, while others questioned his morality during the voyage and complained of his tyrannical approach to running the ship.
Finally a criminal trial was held and Forbes was exonerated – but the damage to his reputation was terminal, and his fall from international acclaim rapid. He never captained another Black Ball Line ship.
He remained in Melbourne for some time after the loss of Schomberg then returned to Liverpool, sad and silent – according to Basil Lubbock in his 1921 book The Colonial Clippers, ‘the very opposite of his usual self’. He did secure some work out of Hong Kong in 1864, but even then the once legendary and flamboyant Forbes was, Lubbock wrote, ‘a seedy, broken-down looking skipper, with the forced joviality of a broken-hearted man’.
Forbes died in Liverpool in 1874 aged fifty-two. The epitaph on his simple headstone salutes him as ‘Master of the famous Marco Polo’.
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By the time of Schomberg’s loss, the demand in Britain to get to the Australian goldfields was insatiable. It could only be met by putting every available ship on the route, no matter the size or design. Clippers were the preferred mode of transport, but innumerable smaller and slower vessels, which usually offered cheaper fares, also headed for the Antipodes. The average adult cabin fare was then about £25.
Ships heading for Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane needed only to ride the Roaring Forties across the southern seas, then sweep up to the western end of Bass Strait. Melbourne-bound ships would then enter Port Phillip Bay, while ships heading to Sydney and Brisbane would ‘thread the needle’ – safely traverse Bass Strait – then turn north and sail up the east coast. More often than not, this latter stage was tough going, as the winds frequently changed in strength and direction, and an adverse south-flowing coastal current also affected their progress.
Sadly, though, not all ships either made it to Australia or completed the return voyage to their home port. Regardless of the style or size of a ship, the perils faced during a circumnavigation to Australia and back were the same: icebergs, fires, remote and unlit islands, or heinous storms in which one mountainous and breaking wave could suddenly overwhelm a vessel. Added to this dangerous mix were the difficulties of navigation: plotting a ship’s position was still an inexact science, so errors were not uncommon. Over the ensuing decades all of these and other factors contributed to the loss of many thousands of lives, English, Scottish, Irish and European, on the well-travelled route to Australia.
But still the migrants came!
Ambition, and dreams of a fresh and exciting new life in a burgeoning, gold-laden land of vast proportions, obviously dimmed the fear of perishing on those voyages.
The insatiable demand for travel to the Antipodes continued unabated despite the regular run of drama-laced newspaper headlines proclaiming heart-wrenching and frightening stories of shipwreck, tragedy, abominably rough passages or inconceivably fetid conditions aboard, and tales of ships that had literally disappeared, taking all with them and leaving no clue as to what might have happened.
And no one was safe until the very end. Since white settlement of Australia began, King Island, at the western end of Bass Strait and only 90 nautical miles from the entrance to Port Phillip, is known to have been the scene of more than 140 shipwrecks that claimed over 700 lives. Little wonder that seafarers of the era have referred to this island as ‘the Graveyard of Bass Strait’.
In 1845 – some years before the clipper era began – it became the scene of Australia’s worst maritime disaster: the sinking of the 800-ton migrant ship Cataraqui, and the loss of 406 lives including seventy-eight children.
Cataraqui was transporting migrants from England to Melbourne when, on 3 August, she was hammered by a severe westerly gale and mountainous seas. During preceding days, because of heavy cloud, the captain, Christopher Finlay, had been unable to get sun sights that would have allowed him to accurately plot the ship’s position, so he had been navigating using dead reckoning. On the night of 3 August, the captain elected to slow the ship’s progress by heaving to until daylight, as his dead reckoning indicated that Cataraqui was then between 60 and 70 nautical miles from Port Phillip and in safe water.
With the storm still raging and the ship drifting sideways, at 4.30am there came a thunderous explosion. Cataraqui had been picked up by a giant wave and hurled onto the rocky shore of Fitzmaurice Bay, near the southern tip of King Island.
The force of the impact was so powerful that the vessel’s interior was flooded within minutes, making it impossible for the majority of passengers and crew below deck to escape. Cataraqui began breaking up from the moment she hit the rocks, and as each wave pounded over her, an ever-increasing number of survivors, who were clinging to whatever they could on deck, were washed into the boiling sea and drowned.
When dawn broke, there was virtually nothing of the ship to be seen by the nine fortunate souls who survived and made it to shore.
But as the following decades would prove, not even a tragedy such as this could temper the urge by so many to reach Australia.
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The shocking Dunbar tragedy of 1857 once again showed that no emigrant was safe until they were standing on the dock of their chosen destination.
Measuring 202 feet over all, Dunbar was the largest clipper-style Blackwall frigate ever built in Sunderland, on England’s east coast. She was named in honour of her wealthy owner, Duncan Dunbar, the prominent English proprietor of the Dunbar Line, which supplied nearly one-third of the vessels that transported convicts to Australia between 1840 and 1868. Dunbar was launched on 30 November 1853, having taken sixteen months to build at a cost of £30,000. The traditional shipbuilding timber, English oak, was used for her hull frames, deck frames and hull planks, while her deck planking was made from teak imported from India. The final touch, which was in keeping with the Dunbar company tradition, was a carved figurehead in the shape of a determined-looking lion.
Soon after being launched, Dunbar was chartered by the government in London to transport troops to the Crimean War. So it wasn’t until three years later that she ventured to Australia on a passenger and cargo run, with Captain James Green in command. Dunbar spent three months in Sydney, being first unloaded, then reloaded with cargo for her return voyage. During that time the Sydney Morning Herald informed its readers, ‘The Dunbar is a splendid vessel.’
Dunbar’s 15,000 nautical mile non-stop homeward voyage around Cape Horn and back to England was uneventful. Then, in May 1857, after a relatively quick turnaround, she set sail for Sydney once more, this time with sixty-three passengers and fifty-nine crew aboard. Many of the passengers were migrant families leaving England filled with fervour for their new life, while others were residents returning to Sydney after visiting family and friends or doing business in England. All were comforted by the knowledge that this would be Captain Green’s ninth voyage to Sydney.