Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
shore. Forbes was in no hurry to come on deck and when he did ap-
pear it was too late to avert the danger.
Schomberg
grounded on a
sandbank. At this point the captain washed his hands of her. 'Let her
go to hell!' he bellowed and returned below. It was left to the mate to
give the order to abandon ship. Passengers and crew were all saved
but the
Schomberg
was pounded to pieces.
If Forbes trusted to his reputation to save him, he miscalculated.
The gratitude and generosity of his employers had very narrow lim-
its. At the age of thirty-four this remarkable captain's career came
to an end. Sacked by the Black Ball Line, he drifted round the world,
picking up whatever commands he could. But he was a broken man
with little of the old braggadocio left. He died in Liverpool in 1874,
at the age of fifty-two. It was a sad end for one of the most remark-
able circumnavigators of all time, a man who had made, not one, but
three spectacular voyages round the world.
Not all the majestic clipper ships, of course, made regular cir-
cuits of the globe. They plied a variety of long-distance routes. Those
engaged in commerce with the Orient, for example, travelled out and
back across the Indian Ocean, making use of the trades. Yet, they
were all designed to withstand the world's heaviest seas and to seek
out the wild winds earlier vessels had shunned. It was the colonisa-
tion and economic development of Australia and New Zealand which
created the demand for ships built to follow the eastward route pi-
oneered by Cook.
First there were the emigrant ships on which thousands of
hopeful or desperate men and women fled from the squalor of in-
dustrial slums and the threat of the debtors' prison to seek a better
life as pioneers in a new land. Not all shipowners exploited human
misery by cramming poor passengers on board like cattle but many
certainly deserved the reputation for callousness which has tradi-
tionally attached itself to this trade. The offer of cheap fares enabled
captains to pack their steerage-class accommodation with men, wo-
