The Forlorn Hope voyage emerged from one of colonial Australia's more dispiriting administrative failures. In 1864, Boyle Travers Finniss was appointed Government Resident of the Northern Territory, tasked with selecting a site for the principal settlement and surveying it. He arrived with forty staff, a small fleet of government vessels, and what proved to be a comprehensive inability to lead. He preferred drilling his guard to managing his stores. He dismissed officers who disagreed with him and promoted those — including his own son — who agreed. He fired the expedition's surgeon for trying to protect Aboriginal people from violent reprisals. By 1865, most of the surveying party's contracts had expired and the men were leaving by any means available. Jefferson P. Stow, a land agent, and surveyors Arthur R. Hamilton and William McMinn decided to buy a boat and sail to Western Australia. They recruited four others — sailors John White and James Davis, and labourers Francis Edwards and Charles Hake — and for £61 15s purchased a Swedish-built open whaleboat from the departing barque Bengal.

She was small: an open boat with two masts and spritsails, to which the crew added a jib, some lockers, and rudimentary weatherproofing. McMinn traced maps from Bengal and stowed two theodolites and pocket compasses. Their provisions included 200 pounds of bread and biscuit, cheese, twenty tins of beef, medical comforts, some cakes, and 70 gallons of water. Hamilton and Hake brought a chest of photographic equipment — most likely among the earliest photographs taken in Australia's Top End. The crew would navigate by latitude, taking a noon sighting each day; they would manage without a chronometer by hugging the coast. They aimed for Camden Harbour in Western Australia, where they hoped to find a ship bound for Fremantle. They set out with the cheers of colleagues still stranded at Escape Cliffs, passed Port Darwin the next day, and began working their way south along one of the most complex and treacherous coastlines in Australia.

The passage was not gentle. Rounding Cape Londonderry on 18 May, they picked through reefs that damaged the hull. A storm the following day broke the rudder; they anchored and repaired it. On 28 May, their provisions completely exhausted, they arrived at Camden Harbour — and found the settlement in worse shape than themselves: the sheep had died, the crops had failed, the settlers were ready to abandon the place. The Government Resident received them hospitably, McMinn traced Admiralty charts as far as Fremantle, and the crew restocked what they could. Leaving on 3 June, they ran into another storm that shattered the rudder's ironwork. Mountainous seas continued for days. One crew member fell sick; the others bailed for their lives in water so cold and rough they eventually cut the mainmast free and let it go. They survived on near-nothing: flour and poor rice, a lucky shoal of schnapper, fresh water obtained from an Aboriginal family at Nickol Bay who took them to a source after being given the customary gifts of knives and tobacco.

On 8 July 1865, Forlorn Hope reached Champion Bay and the settlement of Geraldton. The crew stepped ashore as instant celebrities — no word of their departure or their months at sea had reached any Australian port. They were received at the Geraldton Hotel with considerable hospitality. Most eventually made their way back to Adelaide. The exceptions were Hamilton and Hake, who stayed to take photographs, and the boat herself: Forlorn Hope was eventually capsized at Fremantle by a merchant captain, then found her way to South Australia, where some young men sailed her from Port Adelaide to Victor Harbor. The men who crewed her went separate ways. Stow became an editor and magistrate and in 1894 published a full account of the voyage, dedicated to "my dear comrades Arthur Hamilton and William McMinn." Hamilton died at the Adelaide Hospital, not prosperous. McMinn went on to oversee a section of the Overland Telegraph and design notable buildings in Adelaide. Charles Hake, who had helped take the earliest photographs of the Northern Territory, died in Darwin in the employ of the Telegraph Department.