How the mighty clipper ships transformed Australia from convict outpost to a nation.
The story of the Clipper ships, and the tens of thousands of migrants they bought to the Australian colony of the nineteenth century, is one of the world's great migration stories. For anyone who travelled to Australia before 1850, it was a long and arduous journey that could take as much as four months. With the arrival of the clipper ships, and favourable winds, the journey from England could be done in a little over half this time. It was a revolution in travel that made the clipper ships the jet airlines of their day, bringing keen and willing migrants 'down under' in record time, all hell-bent on making their fortune in Australia.
Rob Mundle is back on the water, with a ripping story that starts on the sea, aboard a clipper ship charging across the Southern Ocean, laden with passengers heading for Melbourne in response to the lure of gold. Brimming with countless stories of the magnificent ships and fearless (and feckless) characters we find on them, like Englishman "Bully" Forbes and American "Bully" Waterman driving their ships to the limit and the tragic legacy of the many shipwrecks that were so much a part of this era.
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'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!
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.
Griffiths even created a design-testing tank so he could prove his theories by towing small models in it, and study wave patterns and drag readings. It was these endeavours that convinced him that the 'cod's head and mackerel tail' theory behind the shape of existing ships was wrong. His designs were long and lean and had a V-shaped bottom instead of flat floors.
Rainbow was very much the centre of attention while being built on the waterfront in New York. She certainly impressed her backers, Howland & Aspinwall, after she was launched. Her top speed was a remarkable 14 knots, a rare achievement for ships of this time . . . and much more was to come. Little wonder that she was classified as an 'extreme' sailing vessel.
Immediately she proved her worth on the China run, but sadly her career was to be short-lived. On 17 March 1848, she sailed out of New York Harbour on her fifth voyage, bound for China via the Chilean port of Valparaiso, and was never sighted again. It was thought that she had foundered off Cape Horn in bad weather with the loss of all hands.
Rainbow would not be the only clipper ship of the era to disappear without trace: over the years an astonishing number of them would depart a port, sail over the horizon and never be seen again. The most common cause of these losses was gung-ho young captains like Bully Forbes, keen to break records and reap rewards, who would drive their ships too hard in extreme conditions. In such circumstances it would take only the combination of high wind strength and a massive rogue wave for the helmsman – or helmsmen, as some ships had twin steering wheels – to lose control.
Almost inevitably, the ship would then broach across the face of a wave, be knocked down to a position where she was beyond her stability point-of-no-return, and be overwhelmed. With her masts in the water and sails flogging wildly, there would be no possibility of her recovery. Instead, within minutes, she would be overwhelmed by the might and brutality of subsequent waves before her hull filled with water and she sank.
Sad as the loss of Rainbow was, she would forever be recognised as the foundation and standard-bearer of the remarkable clipper-ship era.
Griffith's next clipper, Sea Witch, a 170-foot-long three-master, was launched in 1846, again out of the Smith & Dimon shipyard. Months later, she stunned the New York waterfront when she arrived back in her home port with a cargo of tea from Hong Kong after just seventy-seven days at sea. At the time, the same passage would take a conventional cargo vessel around 160 days to complete.
However, it was two years later that her true potential became undeniable.
On 25 March 1849, a tiny white speck was seen on the distant horizon off the entrance to New York Harbour. Its approach aroused interest for those standing high on the hills at Navesink, just inland from the coast, primarily because its proportions were growing at a rapid rate. In a very little time, discussion centred on what this might be – obviously it was a sailing ship, but never before had one been seen to close on New York so quickly.
This ship had every possible sail aloft, including studding sails set to windward. Lookouts who were in position to semaphore news of any approaching ship to downtown New York struggled to recognise the ship's identity; they agreed she looked like a clipper, and if she was, she could only be returning from China with a cargo of tea, but the first of those was not expected so soon.
A little later, when the ship was close enough to the coast to be identified using a telescope, the lookouts were stunned. This was Sea Witch on her return voyage, fully laden with tea.
Her hard-driving master was one of the more colourful characters on the high seas at the time, American Robert 'Bully' Waterman, who had worked closely with Griffiths on the clipper's design. His major contribution had related to the design of the rig and the amount of sail the ship would carry.
Bully Waterman was on his way to achieving what no one thought possible. He was on the verge of completing what was usually a six-month passage from Hong Kong to New York in just seventy-four days, beating by three days the record time he had set two years earlier. To this day, this new mark has never been beaten by a commercial sailing vessel.
The birth of the clipper coincided with an era when navigators were developing techniques and equipment that would bring a new dimension to ocean travel.
Matthew Fontaine Maury was an American naval officer who became known as the father of modern oceanography and naval meteorology. As the first superintendent of the United States Naval Observatory, over many decades, Maury gathered and studied the logs and charts of vessels that had traversed the world's oceans, an effort that led him to develop highly detailed data relating to wind and current patterns, the likes of which had never been known. His subsequent publications showed how ships following his course directions between ports, while often covering a substantially greater distance than the direct route, could reduce their time for the passage by days, sometimes weeks.
He also developed a theory about the existence of a northwest passage, his hypothesis being that an area of ocean in the region of the North Pole was on some occasions not frozen over, which meant it would be possible to sail a ship around the top of North America west to east and enter the Atlantic. This conclusion came to him after he analysed the logs he had gathered from old whaling ships. It had been noted in some of those logs that markings on harpoons embedded in whales captured in the Atlantic showed the harpoons had come from ships based in the North Pacific. Recognising that the timeframe was too short for them to have migrated from one ocean to the other via Cape Horn, Maury deduced that those whales must have been able to surface to breathe over the thousands of miles they would have to travel from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. This meant that a north-west passage must exist – probably not every summer season, but certainly during some. His hypothesis was confirmed as fact in 1854, when Irishman Robert McClure crossed the passage partly by ship and partly by sledge. Then, half a century later, Norwegian Roald Amundsen made the first successful transit solely by boat.
On the opposite side of the Atlantic around the same time, John Thomas Towson was developing a separate theory that would revolutionise the art of navigating the world's oceans. Towson started his commercial life as a successful maker of watches and navigational chronometers, but his talents and intelligence were such that history would see him as a contributor to many facets of life. Among his many noted achievements was the invention of a method for taking a photographic picture on glass, and the application of this method to the development of the reflecting camera.
In the mid–1840s Towson turned his attention to navigation, and in particular the 'great circle' route. He devised a set of tables to allow the easy calculation of a great circle course – where by sailing an arc between two points and not along a latitude, the distance to be sailed would be considerably less.
The benefits of this new navigational method were immediately proved on crossings of the Atlantic, and were soon being applied on many passages to and from Australia and New Zealand, in particular on the long legs across the southern seas.
When the great circle route was coupled with the benefits that came from Maury's research into the world's ocean currents and wind patterns, the sailing time between England and the Antipodes by all ships could be reduced by weeks. It meant that the high-speed clippers could now make this journey at unimaginable speeds.
It usually took a year to build one of these leviathan vessels. The timber to be used for the ship's construction – usually maple or oak in North America – had been felled up to a year before the build commenced, so that the majority of the sap, which could cause rot, had dried out.
The designer, who was also often the builder, would often start with a 6-foot-long timber block and carve out what was called a half-model – one half of the ship cut lengthwise. Made using a mallet, chisels, saws and fairing equipment, the half-model was created to the hull lines drawn by the designer, with a bit of 'feel' often added to the shape by the builder.