He was born in 1821, a native of Aberdeen. In 1839 he left Glasgow for Liverpool without a shilling in his pocket; but he was a man who could not be kept down and he soon gained command of a ship; and at once began to astonish everybody by the way in which he forced indifferent ships to make unusually good passages. One of his first commands appears to have been an old brig, in which he made two splendid passages to the Argentine. His success with the Black Ball ships _Maria_ and _Cleopatra_, which were neither of them clippers, gave him the command of _Marco Polo_ and his chance to break all records.
In character Captain Forbes was a most resolute man, absolutely fearless, of quick decisions, but of a mercurial temperament. It goes without saying that he was a prime seaman—his wonderful passages in _Marco Polo_ and _Lightning_ are proof enough of this. And with regard to the _Schomberg_, I have little doubt in my own mind that Forbes was disgusted with her sluggishness and by no means sorry when she tailed on to the sandspit. But he evidently failed to foresee the bad effect her loss would have on his own reputation. In Liverpool, at the many banquets in his honour, he had been rather too ready to give wine-tinted promises as to what he would do with the _Schomberg_, and the chagrin of this, his first failure, was the real cause of his downfall.
After the wrecking of the _Schomberg_, he sank into obscurity, for though he was acquitted of all blame by the Court of Inquiry, he could not weather the disgrace. For some time he remained in Australia, a “very sad and silent man,” the very opposite of his usual self. However, in 1857 he obtained command of the _Hastings_, but lost her in December, 1859. All this time his star was setting, and for a while he was regularly “on the beach” in Calcutta. Then in 1862 we find him home again and acting as agent for the owners of a Glasgow ship called the _Earl of Derby_, which was in distress on the Donegal Coast. Soon after this in 1864, in the time of the cotton famine, he bobbed up in Hongkong in command of a ship called the _General Wyndham_, one of Gibbs, Bright & Co.’s, and there loaded cotton for Liverpool. He is described then as being a seedy, broken-down looking skipper, with the forced joviality of a broken-hearted man. He discussed the passage down the China Seas (it was S.W. monsoon time) with some of the tea clipper captains, and displayed all his old bravado, declaring that he would “force a passage.” However in spite of his big talk, he took 50 days to Anjer.