Across the nineteenth century, Britain saw great technological progress, and in shipping it appeared in two shifts: sails gave way to steam, and timber hulls to iron and, later, steel.
Clippers were the swiftest trading ships ever to sail: three-masted craft designed to move cargo worldwide, and a few carried passengers too. For roughly three decades up to 1869 - when the Suez Canal opened and steam was overtaking sail - world trade lay in their hands. Of the many that were launched, a single one endures in reasonably whole condition: Cutty Sark, today on view at Leith, on the coast beside Edinburgh.
The ship owes her curious name to a poem, The Ferryman's Bride, by the Scottish writer Angus Craill. In it a miller named Rab is chased by a spirit called Maisie, who wears only a 'cutty sark' - once a Scottish term for a brief undergarment. Maisie is the figure carved at Cutty Sark's bows, where old ships usually set a female form. Since tradition, and Craill's poem, holds that spirits cannot cross water, the name was an odd choice.
Cutty Sark was constructed at Greenock, in Scotland, in 1869, on behalf of a shipping company belonging to Hector Manson. For the work Manson selected a newly established yard, Rennie & Hart, and made certain that the terms of the agreement left him in a commanding position over them. The firm eventually collapsed, and it fell to a rival business to complete the vessel.
Trading tea between China and Britain was the business of Manson's company, and on that route a fast ship could earn its owner both money and reputation; Cutty Sark was accordingly built to outrun every competitor. She first put to sea in 1870, sailing from London with a substantial cargo bound for China, and came home loaded with tea after a passage of four months. Bad winds and a string of mishaps, however, meant she never fulfilled the hopes her owner had placed in her. In 1872, for instance, she and a rival clipper, the Aurelian, departed a Chinese port on the very same day. Over the Indian Ocean a lead of more than 300 miles opened up in Cutty Sark's favour, only for her rudder to be badly damaged by a violent storm, leaving her unsteerable. Mending it out on the open ocean proved a formidable job for the crew, who managed the task only at their second attempt. She reached London, in the end, a week behind the Aurelian.
As steam ships grew faster and gained in carrying capacity, the threat they posed steadily increased. Matters were made worse still by the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, the very year Cutty Sark took to the water. The short and direct passage linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea was available to a steam vessel, yet the canal did nothing for a sailing ship, which depended on the far stronger winds of the open ocean and therefore faced a much longer voyage. For the run between Britain and China, steamers trimmed roughly two months from the journey.
The tea merchants had lost interest in Cutty Sark by 1878, and she was reduced to the humbler work of moving whatever cargo was going between one port and another. Trouble broke out on board in 1880, and the captain was in time replaced by a hopeless drunk who stole the crew's pay; removed from duty, he gave way to another master. That low point brought a reversal of fortune and the finest chapter of the ship's career - carrying wool from Australia back to Britain. One such passage took under twelve weeks, putting her a month or so ahead of every other ship at sea that year.
A real gift for navigation belonged to Cutty Sark's following captain, Ewan Traill, who drew the best from vessel and crew alike. Since she moved under sail, the ship leaned on the powerful trade winds of the southern hemisphere, and Traill drove her further south than any master before him, taking her dangerously near the icebergs at the bottom of the South American continent. The gamble came off, and for a decade no ship in the wool trade could outpace her.
Through the 1890s, with steam competition mounting and her expected working life almost over, the ship's profits fell away. A Portuguese company bought her and gave her the new name Estrela. Assorted cargoes were once again hers to carry from port to port over the following twenty-five years.
In 1922 a gale inflicted serious damage, and she was taken into Falmouth harbour, in southwest England, to be mended. A former sea captain, Oliver Prewitt, who ran a training vessel of his own, recognised her and sought to purchase her, without success at first. After she had sailed back to Portugal and passed to a second firm there, the persistent Prewitt offered a high price, which was accepted; the following year she was back at Falmouth with her original name restored.
Under Prewitt the ship served for training, a role she kept even after his death. Once there was no further need for her, in 1954, she was moved to a dry dock at Leith and put on public display. Fire harmed her in 2007 and struck again, though less badly, in 2014; even so, some 250,000 visitors are drawn to Cutty Sark each year.
