Robert Bennet Forbes

Robert Bennet Forbes (September 18, 1804 – November 23, 1889), was an American sea captain, China merchant and ship owner.

In 1834, he married Rose Greene Smith and they had three children: Robert Bennet Forbes (1837-1891), Edith Forbes who married Charles Eliot Perkins, and James Murray Forbes (1845-1885).

He died on November 23, 1889, aged 85, in Milton, Massachusetts.

Ships Forbes owned or was involved in the construction of approximately seventy vessels.

His first ship was Lintin, a 390-ton bark built by Sprague and James in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1830. Forbes owned Lintin from 1830–1832, after which time she sailed in Chinese waters. Forbes also owned , which took the first cargo of ice to China. "During the Civil War he was employed as a volunteer by the government to inspect the building of nine gunboats and at the same time built for himself and others the Meteor, of 1500 tons."

Forbes rig The Forbes rig was also well received on Mermaid, as this 1852 excerpt from the "Boston Atlas" transcribed by Bruzelius shows: The Forbes rig was publicly rejected, however, by the captain of in 1855, in favor of the Howe rig.

Legacy

He built a Greek Revival mansion for his mother in Milton, Massachusetts, designed by Isaiah Rogers (1833), that is now the Captain Robert Bennet Forbes House Museum.

"Captain Forbes was a member and an officer of the Massachusetts Humane Society, one of the Boston pilot commissioners, member of the government of the Board of Trade, one of the vestry of King's Chapel, member of the Boston Port Society, and at one time and another a director of various railroad and insurance companies."

In private writings, while noting that the flooding of China with opium was "demoralizing" millions of workers and "draining the country of money," he noted that he made his "fortune" by selling the drug. He wrote that he had "no moral feeling of indignation connected with the business" despite his awareness of the human costs and the Chinese government's aims to make opium illegal, turning Forbes and his fellows into smugglers. The opium trade led by western powers sparked several wars, led to the downfall of one Chinese dynasty and directly killed untold thousands of addicts.

Writings Forbes' writings, most of them pamphlets, include:

On the Establishment of a Line of Mail Steamers ... to China (1855) Remarks on Ocean Steam Navigation (1855) The Forbes Rig (1862) Means for Making the Highways of the Ocean more Safe (1867) Remarks on Magnetism and Local Attraction (1875)

The Lifeboat and other Life-saving Inventions (1880) New Rig for Steamers (1883) Notes on Navigation (1884) Loss of Life and Property in the Fisheries (1884)