The English, of all nations, honour and even revere their ships. They are the
constituents of folklore as much as of history - the Dreadnought, the Ark
Royal, the Golden Hind and the Victory are part of a long list of maritime
fables. They may be fighting ships or merchant ships, cutters or clippers,
but they represent the spirit of a people surrounded by the wild sea. The
ships of the English have circumnavigated the globe, and opened up the
Northwest Passage. They took the first pilgrims to America, and the first
settlers to Australia.
Among the most eminent is the Cutty Sark, now lying damaged by a ruinous fire
in Greenwich. The name is not as mysterious as it seems. It is coined after
the “cutty sark” or shirt of Nannie, a female witch in Robert Burns's poem,
Tam O'Shanter; Nannie is swift and fearless, and so became the presiding
spirit of the ship itself. The Cutty Sark was a tea clipper born in an age
of speed, when other cutters were given names such as Flying Spur and
Forward-Ho. The Cutty Sark became, for a while, the fastest ship in the
world, managing speeds of 17 or 18 miles per hour. No vessel, powered by
steam or sail, could easily pass her. It was said that she sailed like the
witch after which she was named. In the last decades of the 19th century,
she constantly passed mail steamers on their way to India or Australia.
Every sailor believes, or used to believe, that each ship had its own
particular character and temperament - and that certain captains were so
attuned to it that they could manage the vessel with the utmost ease and
freedom. They were said to have the intuitive quality of “sea sense”. So the
Cutty Sark was said to be tremulous and affectionate. She was not impetuous
or turbulent. She had an almost miraculous ability to get out of the most
dangerous conditions or unexpected accidents. It was said that one captain
always wore carpet slippers on deck, and rarely got his feet wet.
She was built in 1869 by a team of Scottish shipwrights, who based their
design in part on the fishing boats in the Firth of Forth. The Cutty Sark
looked like a huge yacht. Her white figurehead was of Nannie herself, the
beautiful witch, with her long hair flying in the wind and her hand drawn
out in pursuit of Tam O'Shanter. When the ship was in port it was customary
to obtain a horse's tail, and place it in her outstretched hand as a token
of her success in the chase. That figurehead was washed away in the waves
many years ago, but a new one has taken its place.
The loads the vessel carried were immense. She took on board oil and coal and
“general cargo” from pianos to Portland cement, carrying back tea and wool
from India or Australia. She could accommodate 1,150 tons of coal, 26,876
cases of oil, or 1,303,000lb of tea. Yet she still managed to look light on
the high seas.
The details from the captain's log book on her maiden voyage - printed in
Basil Lubbock's now reissued 1924 book The Log of the Cutty Sark - show the
world of which she would be an integral part: “Winds variable, faint airs,
and hot sultry weather. At daylight found ship inside of Six Islands. Must
have been strong easterly current. Numerous coral shoals.”
Those of us who have only seen the Cutty Sark in Greenwich may find it
difficult to imagine her at the end of her first voyage in Singapore
surrounded by sampans and opium schooners. Once the vessel was loaded with
tea she left harbour to the sound of a salute from the guns. The captain
wore a black cloth coat and a chimney-pot hat. There were days of calm on
the journey back - in his log the captain wrote of “the old music again,
sails clashing against the masts for want of wind. There was about as much
wind as will blow the smoke of a cigar away” - but there were days of swift
voyaging across the oceans.
Those were occasions for races between the tea clippers; the crews sailed
against each other almost instinctively, for the sheer joy of it. They
looked down on the new tea steamers as inferior things, and considered their
sailors less hardy than colleagues on the clippers; the steam-sailors led a
much softer life, less exposed to the volatile moods of the sea. The ships
were also less proficient. In 1889 the Cutty Sark beat the fastest mail
steamer of the P&O line on the journey to Sydney. In any case, merchants
said that tea was best stowed in a wooden hold.
The Cutty Sark sailed through typhoons and hurricanes, gales and tempests. she
survived hurricanes. She sailed past volcanoes in eruption, and made her way
through great icebergs. Her crew sometimes came down with cholera or
dysentery. She visited ports with names such as Bimlipatam and Coconada,
Iquique and Coquimbo. She passed landmarks with nicknames such as Cape Stiff
and the Black Pyramid. She carried molasses and train oil, nuts and cobalt
ore.
There were fatalities. On October 31, 1888, the captain wrote: “Cooke, an
apprentice, was washed overboard, he held on to a rope but before anyone
could reach him, he lost his hold and was no more seen. The ship being under
topsails only and heavy cross sea and dark, nothing could be done to save
him.”
There was even a murder, when the chief mate bludgeoned an able seaman to
death. The log book also documents moments of fear: “An immense sea rolled
up right aft. When I looked at it, towering up so steep, in fact, like a
cliff, it looked as if it was about to drop down over our stern and
completely bury the ship.” This was the world of the sea in the 19th
century.
By the 1880s she left tea and took on wool as her principal commodity. The
races began again. When she sailed against other wool clippers, in the
journey from Sydney to Deal, she often beat the others by a margin of 24 to
30 days. The Cutty Sark sailed under the British flag for 25 years. In the
summer of 1895 she was sold to the Portuguese, and sailed under the name of
Ferreira into what must have seemed like oblivion. The ship was now
considered an “old-timer”, relegated to obscure ports in South Africa and
South America, no more than a relic of the past.
Yet when on the few occasions the Cutty Sark turned up in Cardiff or the
Mersey, she created something of a sensation. Everyone wanted to tread the
decks of the most famous ship in the world. There were a few more
adventures. She sailed the oceans during the First World War, and survived
the best efforts of enemy vessels to sink her. In 1922 she was purchased by
a retired English sea captain, in love with her history, and 16 years later
was presented to the Thames Nautical Training College.
She stood at Greenwich, as majestic as ever, until a disastrous fire on May 21
last year severely damaged the hull. It is believed that the vessel can be
restored to its former glory as the last surviving tea clipper in the world.
In the legends of the sea there are known to be “lucky” and “unlucky” ships.
It is to be hoped that the Cutty Sark remains a lucky one.
The Log of the Cutty Sark by Basil Lubbock
Brown, Son & Ferguson, £24; 332pp
Ship's manifest
16 million people have visited the Cutty Sark in Greenwich.
She cost £16,150 to build.
She weighs 963 tons and her main mast is 47m high. She has 11 miles of rigging
and carries 34 sails, with an area of 32,000 sq ft, giving top speed over 17
knots.
Her best time from Sydney to London was 72 days in 1885.
She went on display in 1954 after three years of restoration.
Conservation work was being carried out when the fire broke out. Less than 2
per cent of the original ship was damaged. She will reopen in 2010. A photo
diary of the work is on cuttysark.org.uk.
£20 million has been raised, and another £14 million is needed. To help go to
the website above or write to The Cutty Sark Trust, 2 Greenwich Church
Street, London SE10 9BG.
