The Schomberg

Upon his return to Liverpool in 1855, Captain Forbes left the Lightning after her first round voyage to take command of the Schomberg, the first emigrant clipper to come from the Aberdeen shipyard of Alexander Hall. James Baines and Thomas Miller Mackay had been impressed with the little Aberdeen tea clippers that Hall had built in the past, particularly the Vision that had recently been built utilizing a new patent planking method that was said to be more watertight, buoyant, lighter, and stronger.

National pride was certainly another consideration as was the fact that Donald McKay was very busy at that time building other clippers for the Black Ball Line. The publicity of building a large clipper ship in the British Isles was received with great favor among the British people and the chief beneficiary of all this free publicity was the Black Ball Line.

Baines and Mackay wanted a new ship as soon as possible and after being assured that it wasn't going to cost any more than a McKay clipper of comparable size, had given Hall an order for a huge 2,600 ton emigrant clipper. Hall, who had never built an emigrant ship before, did his best to comply, copying many of the lines from Donald McKay's clippers, adding a raking Aberdeen bow rather than enlarging his own tea clipper designs. Her fitting out, however, was lavish to the extreme and greatly added to her expense. All the work was done in Aberdeen.

The result was a colossus 262.5 foot long heavily-sparred and rigged clipper that was said to carry 16,000 square yards of canvas and was larger than any other ship that had ever come out of British shipyards before. The British entertained high hopes that the Schomberg would set a new record on her maiden run to Australia, and was launched at Aberdeen on April 5, 1855, to great patriotic fervor. The Schomberg was named in honor of Captain Charles F. Schomberg, R.N., who was the head of the Liverpool emigration service.

On Saturday July 25, 1855, a large crowd gathered at the Aberdeen shipyard of Alexander Hall, and cheered heartily to the firing of cannon as the Schomberg departed, after taking on 1500 tons of ballast, in the company of two tugs to begin her passage out to sea.

The harbor had been recently dredged and the tugs still had a difficult time handling the giant clipper and she grounded right outside the harbor entrance as the tide ran out. 150 tons of ballast was removed and with the next tide she was re floated with no damage.

Captain Forbes then sailed the Schomberg "north-about" around Scotland and arrived ten days later at Liverpool, where she joined the Black Ball fleet and was then scheduled to make the October sailing to Melbourne.

The Schomberg

Flying from her signal halyards along the Mersey was a banner proclaiming "Sixty days to Melbourne." And there were rumors that Forbes had over £1,000 riding on this boast. After taking on 430 emigrant passengers and 3,000 tons of cargo, that mostly consisted of Geelong railway equipment and rails, the deeply laden Schomberg departed the Mersey on October 6, 1855 on her run down the Atlantic.

On October 16th, her main topmast came down and a replacement mast was not sent up again until four days later and this slowed her down by at least 10 knots as noted in a passenger's diary, and the Schomberg did not cross the line until her 30th day at sea. The wind gave out for nine days at the equator and left the Schomberg passengers at the mercy of the hot sun.

Around this time, by strange coincidence, the Hall tea clipper Vision was sighted on October 27th on her homeward passage to Liverpool from China with a cargo of tea.

Forbes and some of the first-class passengers took a ship's boat and rowed over to the Vision where Captain Douglas warmly welcomed them for he and Forbes were old friends. After a visit aboard the Vision, Captain Douglas accompanied Forbes' party back to the Schomberg where he made an inspection of the ship.

Following dinner, there was a band concert on the poop and by all accounts it was a grand time. When Captain Douglas departed that evening to the glare of rocket fire to help them find their way, he brought back to the Vision the Schomberg passenger's letters to deliver to England, along with a gift of some chickens, a pig, and a bag of potatoes.

The trade winds proved to be elusive until the Schomberg arrived off the coast of South Africa and upon crossing latitude 30° S. she made her easting down and crossed the Greenwich meridian 55 days out.

From there at last she found the strong winds that she was looking for and the Schomberg proved that she was capable of fast speeds with a strong wind behind her, reaching a speed of 18 knots on December 7th. The Schomberg passed close to Desolation Island on December 11th as the passengers and crew looked on in dread and in awe of the rocky cliffs less than a mile and a half away as Forbes drove her hard to the east.

On December 15th, the winds of the Roaring forties blew away her royal yard and the winds at that time showed no rhyme or reason and blew erratically, dying down, or frequently shifting east and west which greatly slowed the Schomberg down for days at a time. On Christmas Day, the Schomberg made land off Cape Bridgewater, Australia, several hundred miles to the west of Melbourne, with a best day's run of 368 miles.

There, she encountered headwinds and was forced to tack along the shore, but the winds continued to blow contrary from the wrong direction and the Schomberg headed out to sea again.

Moonlight Head appeared on the horizon around noon the following day as a strong south-easterly wind blew and the crew close-hauled the ship. Soon, they took in the topgallant sails as well as the royals after reefing in the mizzen topsail.

On the evening of December 27th, the Schomberg was tacking in toward shore and Moonlight Head when the wind suddenly began to fall off. Forbes was in the salon playing cards that night when the mate told him that the Schomberg was getting too close in under the land and suggested tacking out again. But Forbes was in a foul mood for he was losing at whist and continued on with the game for another half an hour before going on deck to give the order to 'bout ship.

Strong currents were running three to four knots to the westward and when Forbes arrived on deck to begin tacking ship, the wind had fallen off again and the giant clipper refused to come around. Forbes then tried to wear to, and bring the wind around the stern to no avail and this resulted with westward currents carrying the Schomberg towards the breakers on the moonlit horizon. The ship at last slid up on an uncharted sandspit 35 miles to the west of Cape Otway and 20 miles to the west of Moonlight Head off the mouth of the Curdies River. They were 30 miles to the west of the nearest settlement, Warrambool.

There was panic among some of the lady passengers but it soon became apparent that there was no immediate danger of the ship breaking up. The captain and crew hoped to get her off the sandspit somehow and hoisted all sail. Then they tried lowering a boat to try and take soundings around the ship, but could not float the boat in the shallow water over the sandsprit. It was determined that the Schomberg was stuck fast in four fathoms of water. There was hope that her sails might pull her off to deeper water if the tide came up and the winds returned, but this was not to be.

Upon learning that the Schomberg was hard aground, Forbes reacted angrily, "Let her go to hell, and tell me when she is on the beach." Forbes then went below leaving the mate, Henry Cooper Keen, in charge. Meanwhile, the currents and swells pushed the ship further up on the sandspit and the crew then clewed up her sails and let go her starboard anchor.

A decision was made to send out a ship's boat if the tide came up enough to launch, and with the incoming tide they did so. Mr. Dixon and Mr. Millar, two of the passengers, decided to volunteer and go along with the boat crew.

As the oars were being handed down over the side to the waiting crew in the boat, one of the oars slipped and the end got stuck under a ship timber and soon a wave lifted the boat and impaled it on the end of the oar.

The crew pulled the end of the oar out and water came rushing through the hole until passenger Millar stuffed a handkerchief into the hole and plugged it up. They then rowed off to search out a safe landing place along the coast and if they found one they were to build a fire and send up a rocket as a signal for other boats to follow.

In the meantime, they lowered seven life boats over the side and the women and children along with some of the male passengers joining the crew at the oars to await the rocket signal. It was soon feared by all that the advance boat had been lost along with her crew when suddenly the boat returned with Millar's words of warning to Captain Forbes that although they had found a good half mile stretch of suitable beach between some rocks, not to try and land the boats in the dark because there was heavy surf.

The advance boat rowed away again to seek out a favorable landing spot but soon returned to the Schomberg because some of the boat crew thought they saw a lighthouse in the distance. Rockets were sent up from the ship and signal guns fired off to no response. After a time it was concluded that it was not the Cape Otway lighthouse and was only a star.

At dawn the next day, smoke appeared on the horizon and was spotted by Chief Officer Henry Cooper Keen which indicated that a steamer was approaching. The rockets and guns were fired off again and the distress flag hoisted up the halyards in the attempt to catch their attention.

Some time later, the steamer approached and a boat was dispatched from the Schomberg with a second mate and picked crew and they rowed off to meet the approaching steamer.

At the same time, Millar's boat was returning to the ship for they too had also seen the steamer which meant that it was no longer necessary to try and land the women and children on the beach. Captain Forbes boarded Millar's boat and the crew rowed off toward the steamer. Soon, they met the other returning boat and since Millar and his crew were exhausted, Forbes gingerly jumped over to the other boat and the crew rowed back to the steamer.

When Forbes returned to the Schomberg it had been decided that the Queen, a steamer en route from Melbourne to Portland Bay, would take the men, women, and children passengers aboard. Immediately there was a stampede towards the life boats and again Millar, with Forbes' approval, took charge of the situation.

An orderly boarding operation began and in time the passengers were all safely ferried out to the Queen. The steamer then sailed for Melbourne. Captain Forbes stayed aboard the Schomberg with a volunteer crew and later in the day forty members of the crew rowed through the surf and landed on the beach.

News of the wreck of the Schomberg swiftly spread through the Melbourne shipping community and the Black Ball Line agents, Mackay, Baines & Co., were quick to charter the steamer Keera and sent her off to the wreck site to salvage what they could of the passengers' luggage and jewelry as well as £250,000 in specie being sent out to the colony.

On December 30th, the Keera arrived at the wreck site, where heavy seas caused the Schomberg to roll badly and the crew on the beach thought the task of retrieving luggage and other cargo too dangerous. They refused to go aboard until the crew aboard cut away her main and fore masts and this move greatly relieved the strain. Most of the luggage was then retrieved by nightfall and transferred aboard the Keera which steamed out to sea to spend the night.

Ten of the Schomberg's crew spent the night aboard the wrecked ship along with Captain Forbes and Captain Matthews, while a fierce gale blew that night. This kept the Ada and the Lioness, two other ships steaming to the rescue from Melbourne, from showing up until Sunday morning after the two were forced to take shelter from the storm in Apollo Bay over the night.

The Keera returned after awaiting out the storm at sea and the Queen returned from landing the passengers at Melbourne. Upon arrival of the Queen back at the wreck they sent twenty men and a stevedore aboard the wreck to speed up the salvaging along with the crew of the Keera with the captains of both vessels intent upon swiftly completing the salvage operation before the Schomberg broke up in the heavy seas. Which kept the Lioness at bay unable to offer assistance even after the wrecked ship's crew cut away her mizzen mast.

High seas forced the desperate salvage operation to be abandoned by 9 a.m. and Forbes sailed for Melbourne with the Lloyd's agent aboard the Keera. The officers and crew rowed the ship's boats through the dangerous surf for a safe landing on the beach.

The Queen returned two days later and tried another attempt at salvage, but the heavy seas prevented any boarding parties from reaching the wreck as two boats that were launched from the Queen capsized in the attempt.

By then, the wreck was breaking up and much of the wreckage was blowing up on the beach, where police were by then posted to keep the looters at bay. But as more wreckage blew up on the beach, things soon got out of hand and the police could not stop all of the looters from getting away with some of the cargo. The crew from that point on had nothing to keep them on the beach and proceeded to trek on to Warrnambool, thirty miles and three days away. The ship's band led them into town.

There was an auction in Warrnambool on January 13th where the salvaged cargo fetched good prices as did some of the ship's gear. The wreck was sold to a firm of local merchants, Manifold & Bostock, and two of the partners drowned in the attempt to salvage anything from the wreck and all further efforts were then abandoned.

Further salvage efforts failed and the ship soon went to pieces. Eventually, the ship broke up and large pieces of the wreck were carried by the currents for 1500 miles all the way to the coast of New Zealand.

While the salvage efforts went on, angry passengers who had lost everything gathered in Melbourne to denounce Captain Forbes. At a formal inquiry, Forbes was acquitted of all blame for the stranding of the Schomberg on the sandspit because it was uncharted.

The passengers judgment, however, was more harsh. At a mass meeting at the Mechanics' Institute in Melbourne, Forbes was severely censored. Passengers voiced their complaints about Forbes' tyranny over the voyage and his disgust over the pace of the passage. Many passengers thought that he let the Schomberg go up on the sand bank on purpose.

There were also allegations made against his morality in the most severe terms as "ungentlemanly, discourteous, tyrannical and grossly immoral," and similar allegations of a morality breach were made against a ship's doctor as well.

The ensuing scandal ruined "Bully" Forbes' career in the service of the Black Ball. The Schomberg's loss was a heavy blow to James Baines & Co. even though she was fully insured and from that point on no more large new expensive ships were ordered, and instead the firm went back to purchasing cheaper Canadian ships. After the Civil War began, they purchased American clippers that could be had at a cheap price.

It is thought by some maritime historians that the Schomberg, if she not been wrecked, would have arrived at Melbourne with a passage from Liverpool of 82 or 83 days which was right around the times that Donald McKay's Black Ball clippers made over their 1855 passages with the fastest passage being made by the James Baines that year of 79 days.

Forbes was fortunate to have made a lot of money over the early years of the gold rush and still owned eight shares of the Marco Polo which he later sold to Baines in 1863.

Forbes bought a 997-ton Canadian ship Hastings in 1857 and made one successful Australian chartered voyage for the Black Ball Line. Two years later, the Hastings was wrecked off the Cape of Good Hope but there is no mention if Forbes was aboard at the time. It seems that Forbes then made a try at the ship-chandler's business taking on a Liverpool sail maker as a partner. Forbes then went on to take command of the Ajax and General Windham followed by the Rattlesnake and the Earl of Derby that Forbes salvaged.

Forbes did go on in 1867 to take command of the Marco Polo for one last voyage to Australia before his retirement upon his return to Liverpool. His final days were spent at a house on Westbourne Street overlooking the Mersey River. James Nicol "Bully" Forbes died in his 52nd year on June 4, 1874.

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