Forbes, Robert Bennet (1804–1889)

US merchant and author. As head of a merchant company and owner of several ships, he supported innovations in marine safety and ship design that included the first iron-hulled tugboat. He wrote pamphlets about the China trade and marine matters.

He was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts and entered the China-trade business of his uncles James and Thomas H Perkins at the age of 13 and stayed with the company when it merged to become Russell & Company. He became head of the Company and ignored the British boycott of Canton during the Opium Wars. During the famine in Ireland in 1847, he personally commanded a ship that took food from Boston to Ireland and in the Civil War, he organized a short-lived ‘Coast Guard’. His memoirs are titled Peronal Reminiscences (1876).