7-8 Feb: The Schomberg and Other Tales.

- February 14, 2023

Once again I was back in the broom cupboard head down, bum up and brain floating around in SW Qld attending to work. Roger, meanwhile, entertained himself in Peterborough by doing chores and counting seagulls. Peterborough is a quiet little hamlet at the mouth of the Curdies River. It has two pubs (one shut), two cafes (one shut) and two general stores (one closing down). I guess it's half the town it once was.

Nice sunrise, though.

I rode my bicycle along the Clifftop Walk after work. The walk wandered from Peterborough along the cliff top to the Bay of Martyrs. Before I even get to the start of the walk I found a monument to three ship wrecks, one of them being the clipper Schomberg.

The Schomberg was a state of the art clipper whose Captain, a certain Mr 'Bully' Forbes, boasted that he would break his own 68-day record for passage between Liverpool and Melbourne. Unfortunately the weather and the ship itself, loaded down with railway iron and carriages, conspired to defeat him and the Schomberg never made it to Melbourne. Instead she ran aground at the mouth of the Curdies River and sank with (thankfully) no loss of life.

Mr Forbes' reputation did not survive the sinking. Indeed, it became clear that as the ship drifted toward its doom he was otherwise engaged below deck, playing cards with two young lady passengers. Even more reprehensible, he resisted the crews' entreaties to turn the boat about until he had finished his rubber of whist, by which time they were all in the drink so to speak. A court cleared him of any wrong doing but the passengers and public were outraged and made their outrage known to the effect that Mr Forbes' career sank like the Schomberg, albeit a little more slowly, until he died at the ripe old age of 52.

The moral of the story is that ships' Captains really must prioritise sailing the ship of which they are captain at the time.

The Schomberg lies somewhere out there.

The story of the Schomberg was but one of a plethora of stories about ships who ran aground up and down the coast with such frequency that it appears amazing that anyone ever made it to port in one piece on Victoria's southern coast.

Peterborough from the cliffs.

I finished the ride along the Cliff top walk and then, because I was a wee bit too keen for punishment, I kept on riding along the Great Ocean Road to the Bay of Martyrs, stopping in at all the lookouts along the way.