A Brief History of Circumnavigators

by Derek Wilson

  If Forbes trusted to his reputation to save him, he miscalculated. The gratitude and generosity of his employers had very narrow limits. 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 remarkable 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 circuits 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 colonisation and economic development of Australia and New Zealand which created the demand for ships built to follow the eastward route pioneered by Cook.

  First there were the emigrant ships on which thousands of hopeful or desperate men and women fled from the squalor of industrial 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 traditionally attached itself to this trade. The offer of cheap fares enabled captains to pack their steerage-class accommodation with men, women and children prepared to accept overcrowding, lack of privacy and poor diet. The three months or so that such passengers spent on board were months of sheer misery, compounded of sea-sickness, disease, airless, ill-ventilated accommodation, the constant crying of unhappy infants and the contempt expressed by captain, crew and first- and second-class passengers. Men travelling steerage could be pressed into service as extra deck hands and some captains deliberately kept their crews to a minimum in order to exploit this source of free labour. Many passenger journals have survived describing these dreadful voyages. An emigrant on the Stag in 1850 noted:

  10 o’clock, the sun is now beating out with increased power and we shall have another sweating day. A canvas sheet is now spread over the part of the deck occupied by the females . . . men, however, not so favoured . . . Many will sleep on deck during the remainder of the hot weather . . . No restriction now as regards the bed hour of the single men. They are allowed on deck as late as they think proper. All the scuttles on windows in single men’s departments recommended by surgeon to be kept open during the night.1

  Passengers were given a daily allowance of food and had to cook their own meals:

  Scale Showing the Daily Issue of Provisions2

  There was little to stop the stronger or more unscrupulous passengers taking food away from the less robust. Those laid low by sea-sickness or other infirmity frequently grew weaker through lack of nourishment in the noisome tween-decks conditions described thus in a parliamentary committee report:

  It was scarcely possible to induce the passengers to sweep the decks after their meals or to be decent in respect to the common wants of nature; in many cases, in bad weather, they would not go on deck, their health suffered so much that their strength was gone, and they had not the power to help themselves. Hence the between decks were like a loathsome dungeon. When hatchways were opened, under which the people were stowed, the steam rose and the stench was like that from a pen of pigs. The few beds they had were in a dreadful state, for the straw, once wet with sea water, soon rotted, besides which they used the between decks for all sorts of filthy purposes.3

  It is scarcely surprising that incidents such as this were recorded by emigrants:

  The child I mentioned yesterday evening expired during the night. The body lies upon the poop of the vessel awaiting the last few words to be read over it ere it be cast into the ocean beneath us . . . 10 o’clock all is over. The poor, perishable body is no more but the soul of this infant, we hope, is for ever happy. The grief of the parents is very great as it was their only child . . .4

  With the discovery of gold in 1850 the flow of hopeful settlers dramatically increased. The following years were a bonanza for the shipping lines. The new colonies created an ever-increasing demand for manufactured goods for the clippers to take out. The homeward voyages brought nuggets and gold dust for the bullion-hungry financial markets of Europe and America. They also brought wool. The great sailing ships raced each other to get the fleece back to the auctions held between January and March. For merchants supplying the busy Yorkshire mills it was a highly profitable trade. But of all cargoes wool was the one sailors hated most.

  You can dunnage casks o’ tallow; you can handle hides an’ horn; You can carry frozen mutton; you can lumber sacks o’ corn; But the queerest kind o’ cargo that you’ve got to haul and pull Is Australia’s ‘staple product’ – is her God-abandoned wool. For it’s greasy an’ it’s stinkin’, an’ them awkward, ugly bales Must be jammed as close as herrings in a ship afore she sails.

  For it’s twist the screw and turn it,

  And the bit you get you earn it;

  You can take the tip from me, sir, that it’s anything but play

  When you’re layin’ on the screw,

  When you’re draggin’ on the screw,

  In the summer, under hatches, in the middle o’ the day.

  G. J. Brady

  The wool was ‘screwed’ into the hold; that is the bales, compressed by hydraulic presses, were packed in as tight as possible. It was a hot, smelly cargo – and dangerous. Bales could expand, break their lashings and put enormous pressure on a ship’s timbers. Worse still, they could overheat and catch fire because of water trapped within them. Several ships were lost because of such spontaneous combustion. The most famous was the Lightning.

  In 1869 she was loading at Geelong when fire broke out in the forward hold. The flames spread so rapidly that the crew could not steer her away from the jetty and she swung round her anchor across the harbour. The fire was quite uncontrollable so it was decided to sink the ship. The result was not encouraging. Cannon shot, fired at a range of three hundred yards, either missed or made holes which allowed in fresh currents of air to fan the flames. The stricken Lightning burned all day before slipping beneath the water in a great cloud of steam and smoke.

  By then other fine clippers had joined her in the record books. But the achievement of fast passages to and from the Antipodes is not only attributable to demanding shipowners and reckless captains. Behind every magnificent ship was a yard where a thousand skills were concentrated in the hands of craftsmen. The best vessels, such as Lightning, Red Jacket and Sovereign of the Seas came out of Nova Scotia and New England. They were narrow in the beam yet balanced. Their masts were strong and well braced to carry maximum canvas without springing. So superbly designed were these craft that captains and passengers alike testified that they could run up to eighteen and nineteen knots before a following wind without burying their noses in the waves.

  The New World made another important contribution to the reputation of the great square-riggers. This was Matthew Fontaine Maury. Maury spent fourteen years in the navy (during which time he made a circumnavigation, 1826–1830) before being invalided out, in 1839, and placed in charge of the depot of charts and instruments. He devoted himself, henceforth, to the study of oceanic winds and currents. In order to gather as much information as possible he had special log books distributed to naval captains and he persuaded his counterparts in other countries to pool information. One result was an international conference at Brussels in 1853, the first such gathering to discuss maritime meteorology. It was Maury who advocated the Atlantic and southern ocean routes which were followed by all sailing masters looking for a fast passage. Previously, captains had avoided the potential lee shore of Brazil, coasted the Cape of Good Hope close to and then steered north-east until they were clear of the Roaring Forties. Maury told them
to steer for Cape San Roque, on the northeast coast of Brazil, then swing in an eastward arc through the southern Atlantic in order to pick up the westerlies as soon as possible, passing as much as ten degrees to the south of the Cape and remaining in the forties all the way to Australia.

  When the White Star Line’s Red Jacket followed this course on her maiden voyage in 1854 she went so far to the south that frozen spray made her bow heavy. But that did not prevent her notching up a remarkable record. She went out in 69 days and came back in 75. She did not overhaul Lightning’s record, established a few weeks before but she did achieve the fastest actual circuit of the globe. On 2 September she ‘tied the knot’ – that is she crossed her own outward track – in a sailing time of 62 days 22 hours, a feat which has never been bettered.

  The palm for the best ever round voyage went, the following year, to Red Jacket’s rival, the Black Ball Line’s James Baines. She reached Melbourne in 63 days 18 hours 15 minutes. Her return trip took 69 days 12 hours. She came literally within a stone’s throw of not completing the voyage: her captain, knowing that a record was within his grasp, took some fearful risks tacking off Ireland. James Baines passed the Mizenhead rocks so close that some passengers claimed they could have hit them with a stone. But the ship came safe to harbour to throw down the gauntlet to her rivals. They all found her record of 133 days 6 hrs 15 mins under sail to be unassailable.

  It goes without saying that the men who manned such ships were ‘hard-core seamen’, among the toughest mariners who ever put to sea. Drunken brawls, murders and attempted mutinies were almost commonplace for the polyglot crews who sailed the clippers. Thomas Fraser, who went to sea in 1865, and whose career spanned both the heyday and the decline of the clippers, recorded many of the incidents that made up the rough-and-ready life of these men. He recalled how the mate of the Corea got involved in a fight in Adelaide during a circumnavigation in 1872–3. He found himself against an assailant with a knife and had his face cut from mouth to eyebrow. He lost no time in taking his revenge:

  After the Captain had stitched up his dreadful wound [many captains were, of necessity, practitioners of minor surgery], the Mate was so enraged that he went to the place the man who had defaced him was confined, knocked him down, turned him over, and with the knife that had so cruelly cut him, made a deep cross on each of the man’s buttocks, then took a handful of coaldust from a bunker there and rubbed it in the deep cuts, making an indelible mark.5

  The men, like the ships they sailed, were larger than life. Many of them became legends whose exploits were passed on from generation to generation in dockside bars or became the subject of ribald songs. They were mariners for whom sailing round the world and racing round the world had become a commonplace. Captain John Wyrill who commanded clippers for forty-four years made thirty-six circumnavigations. That may or may not be a record but it is some measure of the accomplishments of a remarkable breed of men.

  But they had now been joined on the world’s oceans by sailors of a quite different kind.

  On the evening of Wednesday, 2 October 1872 four members of the Reform Club sat, in the large drawing room, playing whist and discussing the latest cause célèbre, a robbery at the Bank of England:

  ‘I maintain,’ said Andrew Stuart, ‘that the chances are in favour of the thief, who is sure to be no fool.’ ‘Nonsense!’ replied Ralph, ‘there is not a country left in which he can take refuge. What an idea! Where do you want him to go?’ ‘I can’t say,’ replied Andrew Stuart, ‘but after all, the world is large enough.’ ‘It was so . . .’ said Phileas Fogg in an undertone . . .

  The discussion was interrupted during the rubber. But Andrew Stuart soon took it up again, saying: ‘What do you mean by was? Has the world got smaller, eh?’ ‘Of course it has,’ rejoined Gauthier Ralph; ‘I agree with Mr. Fogg. The world has got smaller, since one can travel over it ten times more rapidly than a hundred years ago.’6

  The scene from Around the World in Eighty Days is fictional but the subject of discussion was one which fascinated many of Jules Verne’s contemporaries. The Frenchman, himself a keen traveller and yachtsman, published his story three years after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 (it was translated into English in 1874). It was an era in which continent after continent was being crossed by steam locomotives, and ocean after ocean was being traversed by the faster, more reliable steamships. The world was, indeed, getting smaller. More people travelled to distant lands to satisfy their curiosity. And if to distant lands, why not right round the world?

  As the sea lanes filled rapidly with the burgeoning commerce of the industrial nations, a new kind of vessel was beginning to appear amidst the clippers and the tramps – the pleasure yacht. Sailing, long the pursuit of princes, was in the second half of the nineteenth century a smart hobby taken up with enthusiasm by the nouveaux riches of Europe and America. Boatyards from Hamburg to Marseilles, Clydeside to Falmouth, Boston to Charleston vied with each other in building trim, luxurious craft for their wealthy clients, craft which would be crewed by professionals and were designed as much for showing off the affluence of their owners as for seaworthiness.

  One of these floating palaces was the Sunbeam, laid down in Bowdler and Chaffer’s yard, Liverpool, about 1870. She was a 157-foot, three-masted, topsail schooner, carrying a mass of sail but also driven, when necessary, by a steam-powered screw propeller. She was designed by St Clare Byrne for Thomas Brassey, Liberal MP for Hastings. This keen amateur yachtsman was the heir of railway pioneer Thomas Brassey senior, who amassed a large fortune from constructing lines in four continents and eventually worked himself to death in 1870.

  The younger Thomas was thirty-six when he came into his inheritance and had already decided to devote himself to matters maritime. The sea was his passion. In parliament he specialised in legislation concerning the royal and merchant navies, currently undergoing such immense changes. He had inherited his father’s passion for hard work; his biographers described him as ‘a rich man of no outstanding ability but with great powers of industry’.7 Reports, pamphlets and articles poured from his pen, culminating in the five volume British Navy, published 1882–3. He became first civil lord of the Admiralty in 1880. He attracted honours and titles and at the time of his death in 1918 he was first Earl Brassey of Bulkeley and Viscount Hythe.

  He exemplified the Victorian ‘work hard, play hard’ ideal, for he followed his hobby of yachting with as much enthusiasm as he devoted to his chosen profession. As soon as he had graduated at Oxford he was elected to the Royal Yacht Squadron, the sailing world’s élite corps. He later became the first private yachtsman to sit the Board of Trade examination and be granted a master’s ticket. And in 1876–7 he notched up another first when he completed a voyage round the world in Sunbeam.

  Just how and when the idea occurred we do not know. Was Sunbeam designed with a round the world voyage in mind? Or did Brassey suddenly decide that she was an ideal craft for the first ever circumnavigation for pleasure? The owner himself insisted that his wife was the prime mover in the venture: ‘The voyage would not have been undertaken, and assuredly it would never have been completed, without the impulse derived from her perseverance and determination’.8

  In 1876 Annie Brassey was in her thirties, a mother of four children and a woman of that English memsahib breed who, whether at home or abroad, was accustomed to having all her whims carried into effect with the aid of a disciplined contingent of servants. From the account of the voyage which she wrote it is clear that her enthusiasm for it was without reserve. If the thought ever occurred to her that running a household at sea and in foreign ports was different from presiding over her establishments in Park Lane and Chapelwood Manor, Sussex, she dismissed it instantly. The project, once resolved upon, would be accomplished. Thus, we see her, in her long skirt and wide-brimmed sun hat, buying food in native markets for dinner parties of up to forty guests aboard the Sunbeam; coping with frequent bouts of seasickness and even one case of smallpox; learn
ing Spanish; giving daily lessons to the children; caring for the shipwrecked crew of a merchant vessel; and never failing to spend an hour a day at her desk writing up her journal.

  That journal is quite unlike any other first-hand circumnavigation account. It is essentially a tourist’s chronicle, very short on nautical detail but bubbling over with enthusiastic observation of strange sights and sounds. Annie and her family visited twenty countries at a time when holiday travel seldom took wealthy Britons beyond the Continent. Annie’s comments on unfamiliar peoples and customs fascinated her countrymen when they were first published but their interest to us is in what they reveal about Victorian attitudes towards other cultures at a time when Britannia ruled the waves.

  When Sunbeam left Cowes on 6 July 1876 she carried a complement of 43 persons, two dogs, three birds and a kitten. As well as the Brassey family and four friends there were a doctor, a nurse, a lady’s maid, four stewards, a stewardess, three cooks and a crew of 22. The schooner’s voyage was west about by way of the Guinea coast, Rio, Magellan’s Strait, Valparaiso, Tahiti, Hawail, Japan, Singapore, Colombo, the Suez Canal (in which Disraeli had just secured a controlling British interest) and Lisbon. She accomplished 15,000 miles under sail and 12,800 miles propelled by her auxiliary engines. Brassey took down the removable funnel and used canvas whenever possible because, ‘it is pleasant to be free from the thud of engines, the smell of oil, and the horrors of the inevitable coaling’, but, as an expert on ships and shipbuilding, he valued the convenience of steam power and he seldom hung about waiting for a breeze. For this reason, and also because he encountered little in the way of really bad weather, he completed the journey in 324 days.