Sweating profusely both with exertion and pure fear, Douglass played a dangerous game of hide and seek with his pursuers. In the dark gloom between narrowly packed ships, all would be silent. Momentarily he would burst back out into the burning bright sunlight to hear the roars of the chasing pack. Sometimes he would glance back and fear would spur him to new exertions and he leant heavily into his oars, hurling the skiff forward with each powerful stroke. He finally succeeded in losing the mob and made for the city, ramming the boat up a beach and abandoning it there. He leapt ashore and was lost within the anonymity of San Francisco’s ramshackle streets. He didn’t stop moving either, literally running for the Californian hills.
In the meantime, the dissatisfied mob turned its attention back to Waterman. He was in NL&G Griswold’s San Francisco office when the mob descended, baying for blood. In the ensuing melee, he was compelled to escape via the roof and a drainpipe, leaving the incensed crowd on the verge of a full-blown riot. As the shadows lengthened on a very long day for Waterman, he slipped out of town. Douglass, meanwhile, was caught hiding in a hay cart several miles away. On being arrested he said: ‘Well, gentlemen, if you want to hang me, here’s a pretty tree, do it like men.’
Waterman and Douglass, along with the second mate Coghill, were brought to trial, but their assertion of mutiny put them on strong ground and Waterman was ultimately praised for his handling of a tricky ship with a weak crew. Douglass escaped with a light censure and was free to carry on tormenting crews like the bully he would always be.
Abandoned ships left to rot along the wharves of San Francisco. Some were still in use, others were eventually turned into wharves in their own right. The maze of ships formed ideal cover for the fleeing Douglass.
The aftermath
As for Waterman, the Challenge cured him of the sea once and for all and he retired to his ranch in California. He took to religion and is reputed to have worked as a missionary in San Francisco, boarding ships and spreading the word of God. The story goes that on one of these soul-saving missions he was recognised by one of his previous crew and unceremoniously slung over the side. He recovered from this dunking and in later years was regarded as a pillar of the community, establishing the settlements of Cordelia and Fairfield in California.
William Webb, who had designed the Challenge and held such high hopes for her, was disappointed with her performance, but learnt from her design. He proceeded to turn out some of the finest vessels in the Californian trade, including the Comet, the Swordfish and the Young America, which all succeeded in cementing his reputation as one of the foremost designers of the clipper ship era.
McKay’s Flying Cloud, meanwhile, actually managed to repeat her 89-day run to San Francisco a couple of years later. It was a passage that was only once equalled again and never beaten.
And what of the Challenge? After this unfortunate start in life, she enjoyed very little luck and was forever labelled a ‘hell ship’. She did, however, outlast many of her peers, eventually running aground and sinking off the French coast in 1877. Her disastrous maiden voyage left behind a legacy of brutality and violence that gradually became a myth told in hushed tones in wharfside bars and fo’c’sles around the world.
CHAPTER THREE
MARCO POLO
THE FASTEST SHIP IN THE WORLD
In every life there are highs and lows. For some this rise and fall of fortune is little more than a gentle undulation, the moderate groundswell of our life that keeps things moving along. Yet there are others for whom a groundswell is not enough and who push on recklessly, often racing headlong into catastrophe in search of that thrill of risk that confirms they are truly alive. James Nichol Forbes, the master of the Marco Polo, Lightning and Schomberg, was one such character. He reached the peak of his profession and then threw himself, almost wilfully, into a tidal wave of catastrophe.
James Forbes had left Liverpool in 1855 at his peak: newly married, wealthy and in command of the Schomberg, the largest and finest sailing ship ever built in Britain to date. He was commodore of the famous Black Ball Line of passenger ships and one of the most respected captains in the world. A little more than six months later, on the morning of 4 January 1856, all of his fame and achievements had turned to dust. The Schomberg had just been wrecked off the Melbourne coast and even as Forbes sat in one of the town’s better appointed hotels awaiting orders from the owner, his former passengers were holding a meeting with the express intention of destroying the reputation of their famous captain.
The meeting was held in the Melbourne Mechanics Institution and the first resolution was to prove that ‘the conduct of the Captain of the Schomberg was ungentlemanly, discourteous, tyrannical and grossly immoral’. It was a well-attended and boisterous affair. As the beleaguered Forbes paced his hotel room pondering his change of fortune, the meeting was agog with titillating tales of his lack of moral fibre.
Melbourne in 1854.
‘The captain entertained two “lady” passengers in the second cabin,’ piped up one good Victorian. ‘These females were kept out of their cabins by the captain and his officers until very unseasonable hours. One was kept up until one in the morning, while the other preferred daylight for she returned to her cabin at four in the morning and then only in her nightdress!’
This final statement was greeted with cheers of agreement and delight. The knives were out, and the meeting ended in uproarious fashion, with Forbes being denounced again and again. Later that day, when Forbes left his hotel, he was greeted by titters and guffaws at every turn.
How different things had been the previous year when he had arrived in this town aboard the Lightning, respected as the greatest captain to have ever set foot on Australian soil. One stranding later and his life had utterly capsized.
A stranding with a twist
As a matter of fact, James Forbes’ meteoric career was bookended by two strandings. The second, discussed with so much relish in Melbourne, was seared onto the captain’s memory forever, but for the first he was several thousand miles away. Yet that first stranding was also to have a profound effect on his career. Back in 1850, Canadian shipbuilder James Smith had decided to build a new vessel with the intention of sailing her to Liverpool and selling her. All through the autumn and winter, workmen had been frenziedly shaping and sawing at Smith’s yard at Courtenay Bay on the outskirts of St John, New Brunswick. By spring 1851 the 185 ft clipper Marco Polo lay poised to make the brief transition from land to sea.
An artist’s impression of Captain James Forbes.
The Lightning, probably the fastest vessel Forbes ever commanded.
As the winter progressed the residents of Courtenay Bay had watched and listened as the ship grew a shadow. The whining of the saw, swish of the axe and thud of the adze had been a symphony that had accompanied her construction. The streets around the yard were full of the sweet smell of sawdust as her ribs slowly swayed, one by one, up into place, casting thin shadows in the
A wooden schooner on the stocks at a US shipyard.
The Marco Polo at sea.
The port of Liverpool in the 1850s was a thriving hub of emigrant ships.
low winter sunlight. Then had come the hiss of the steambox and the pounding of treenails as her great frame was planked. She was evidently a very large ship, her great hull now blotting out the light of the sun, and as the caulker’s mallet rang out through town, locals gathered to assess the new vessel.
She didn’t look much like a clipper at all and many proclaimed they thought her damn ugly. At the time she was described as ‘a great brick of a boat, with a bow like a savage bulldog’. With her painted ports and angular stern she looked more like a warship than the sylph-like vessels being launched in the US and UK, yet she was as sharp as a wedge below the waterline and very deep for her length. Many in the know said she would travel fast if she was pushed hard enough.
Now she was poised to leave, carrying the hopes of the town with her to places they had never seen. All eyes
focused on the foreman and his men as their mallets swung away to remove the chocks and she started to slide down the ways. Things were going smoothly. The first challenge of getting the boat moving was achieved. The next was stopping her, and it was at this point that things started to go wrong. The check wires that the yard used to slow the boat down were meant to come into play and, as the weight of the ship started to load them up, there was an almighty explosion. As overloaded hemp and chain parted, the Marco Polo careered across the bay out of control, colliding stern first on a mud bank, and then sheering around horribly in the tide, injuring several people aboard when chains, barrels and other debris went by the board.
Disaster! The town looked on, dumbstruck with horror, then seemed to move bodily towards the water. Men swarmed into boats in an endeavour to free her. Yet for all the prompt action, it took five days to free the stranded vessel. Worse was to come: as she lay those five days at the mercy of the tide, it became evident that her shapely hull was twisting and sagging under the pressure of her unnatural position and the power of the tide dragging her to and fro. Her owner and builder wrung his hands watching her lie there stricken and breathed a sigh of relief when she was finally freed. It was an evil omen, and many old salts in the town shook their heads when they looked across at her fitting out. ‘She’ll never sail,’ they said, eyeing her slightly wonky lines with relish.
They were wrong. Leaving St John loaded with lumber for Liverpool, she made the trip in the remarkably swift time of 15 days. Her powerful lines and weighty build ensured that she could be driven very hard in heavy weather, but her captain proclaimed that there was something else about the boat, some miracle of her design and construction that kept her flying when others slowed. Many argued that the twist in her hull was the making of the vessel.
Under new ownership
The Marco Polo’s 15-day passage went largely unnoticed and her owner had to wait for her second trip to Liverpool, this time from the port of Mobile, Alabama, before he found a buyer for his creation. Smith travelled with the ship and, arriving in Liverpool, he hoisted a broom to the top of her mainmast. This was the sign that a ship was for sale and this time there was no trouble finding a buyer. Shipping was booming, and whispers of the discovery of gold in Australia were already filtering into the taverns of Liverpool and London. By 1852 these rumours had grown to hysteria and men and women from all walks of life were clamouring to head for the gold fields of New South Wales. Poised to exploit this was James Baines, a Liverpool merchant whose Black Ball Line of packets had flourished on the Atlantic run. Baines saw that the time was right to expand and sought out cheap ships to put on the Australia run. The Marco Polo fitted the bill perfectly.
Baines had gambled on an unusual new ship and rolled the dice again with the appointment of her new skipper, James Forbes. A lean, energetic Scotsman of 32, Forbes was unusually young to be captain of a large passenger vessel. He had risen to the attention of Baines after managing to drive one of his most truculent ships out to Argentina and back in excellent time. Now he faced a fresh challenge, for the Australian trip was a long, hard slog. The beat out of the English Channel and across Biscay was tough enough, but from the Cape of Good Hope to Australia one could expect a fairly hair-raising trip across the Roaring Forties.
In those days, emigrant ships were crammed with passengers, with death and disease a constant menace. The shorter the passage the better, and Baines knew it was vital to establish a reputation for a fast service. In Forbes he saw a young man with grit and determination, a man young enough and with enough fire in the belly to take the strain of driving a ship on for 80 days and more at a time.
Up through the hawse-pipe
James Forbes was certainly a driven man. It took an exceptional sailor to gain command at such a young age and he had done it the hard way. ‘Coming up through the hawse-pipe’ was the expression for a skipper who had started out as cabin boy and worked his way up. Forbes had left his native town of Aberdeen at the age of 18 and headed to Liverpool, the epicentre of the shipping world. By his mid-twenties he had already gained a command. Unlike many of the somewhat stoical skippers of the clipper ship era, Forbes was a brash character, larger than life and a natural showman. He craved fame and recognition and had already witnessed how Captain ‘Bully’ Waterman in the US had gained celebrity through his feats of sailing; Forbes wanted some of that for himself.
The gold fields of Ballarat, Australia, were a magnet for adventurers and dreamers throughout the world.
Emigrants embarking aboard a departing ship. On her first voyage, the Marco Polo was badly overloaded, and many passengers perished.
The discomfort aboard the Marco Polo in foul weather is clearly conveyed in this depiction of life aboard an emigrant ship.
Like Waterman, he rapidly gained the nickname ‘Bully’ and, just like his namesake, he pushed his crew as hard as he pushed his boat. To make a passage was everything and everyone else could go to hell as far as he was concerned. One thing that Forbes lacked was any kind of finesse when it came to dealing with people. He was working class, foul-mouthed and unashamed of it. In many ways, these attributes were to be his undoing.
First came success and Forbes had plenty of it. The Marco Polo left Liverpool for Melbourne on 4 July 1852, loaded with 932 emigrants from all walks of life. Some were gentlemen prospectors, to whom the thrill of gold was simply too great to resist, but the larger proportion were much poorer and far more desperate. In the cramped conditions in steerage class the best hope was to get there as quickly as possible. Prior to this voyage, Bully Forbes had certainly given many of them reason to be hopeful by proclaiming that the ship would be back in Liverpool within six months. Given that many ships took that length of time to get out to Melbourne, many saw this as little more than an idle boast and paid scant attention. There is little doubt that James Baines, the owner, smiled somewhat indulgently at his fiery skipper’s bold proclamation and simply hoped he’d get there in under 100 days – anything under this mark was a good passage by the standard of the day.
The months passed by and Baines awaited news of the arrival of his new vessel. By Christmas he was getting twitchy. Surely she should have arrived out by now? Still, no news of his vessel had been brought home and the wait continued. All this time Baines wryly pondered on the preposterousness of Forbes’ six-month round trip claim. On Boxing Day he received a nasty jolt. He was accosted in the street by a messenger boy informing him that the Marco Polo had returned.
‘Nonsense, boy, she hasn’t even arrived in Melbourne yet,’ was his startled answer and he hurried down to the docks, fearing the worst. Surely some mistake? Had she met with some misfortune forcing her to turn back? Turning a corner, Baines espied her hauling into Salthouse Dock. Between her fore and mainmast she flew a banner roughly daubed by a seaman’s hand bearing the legend: ‘The fastest ship in the world.’ The Marco Polo had made it around the world in five months and 21 days – far quicker than any before her.
Troubles on the record passage
The trip had been a tough one, and lurid rumours abounded about Forbes’ desperate cracking on to make the passage. Seamen leaving the boat told tales of wild nights when the Marco Polo had shivered to her very seams and how the captain had threatened them with a pistol to prevent them from shortening sail. There were stories of confrontation with the passengers and of how an outbreak of smallpox had left 35 dead on the outward passage.
It was probably on this passage that the ‘Hell or Melbourne’ incident occurred. The story goes that one dark night the Marco Polo was staggering along under far too much sail. Down below the passengers were in acute discomfort as the boat lurched and groaned. In the dark ’tween decks there would be the occasional almighty thump as the vessel pounded into a heavy sea. All would cower for fear that either the masts had finally come loose or that she had given up and was about to sink. Many of the passengers were seasick in these miserable conditions and gathered in little knots to discuss their misera
ble lot. The general conclusion was that it was all the captain’s fault.
The Marco Polo on her maiden voyage under the Black Ball Line. The Black Ball flag flies from her mainmast. This painting gives a good impression of how heavy and ungainly the Marco Polo looked compared to other clippers.
Even the handiest tall ship was still relatively cumbersome to handle in restricted waters and this meant that making a landfall required extra care. Here, a clipper beats away from a rocky coastline.
Eventually one gentleman decided it was high time to do something about it. Struggling up on to the freezing, spray-lashed deck, he battled his way to the weather rail, where Forbes stood impassively observing the carnage, one arm hooked under the rail to steady himself. Above the roar of the wind in the rigging and between dunkings in the walls of spray that were battering the pair, this gentleman asked Forbes what the devil he thought he was playing at. Forbes replied without hesitation: ‘It’s a case of Hell or Melbourne, I’m afraid, sir.’ And that was that.
The Marco Polo made it out to Melbourne in 68 days, beating the steamer Australia by a week in the process. The return passage around Cape Horn occupied 76 days and Forbes found that the Marco Polo’s deep draught and full lines above the waterline gave her a capacity to fly in the Roaring Forties and Screaming Fifties. She could take all the driving he could muster, yet she was also surprisingly quick in light airs. This combination was her real strength. Then there was also that secret ingredient, the miracle of the ship, wrapped up in that twist in the hull inadvertently added by a friendly sandbank.
Clipper Ships and the Golden Age of Sail Page 4