Cutty Sark
Designed by Hercules Linton, built by Scott and Linton, Dumbarton · 1869
The ship in front of you was built to be fast. Cutty Sark was launched on the Clyde in eighteen sixty nine as a tea clipper, designed to race the new season's tea from China to London before her rivals and before the price fell. Her hull is long and narrow, her bow sharp, and her three masts once carried a huge spread of canvas. She arrived just as the Suez Canal opened and steamships began to take the tea trade, so her greatest years came later on the wool run from Australia, when she set records that no sailing ship could match.
Walk beneath her first. The ship has been lifted three metres above the floor of her dry dock so that you can stand under the keel and see the sweep of the hull. The gleaming plates are Muntz metal, a copper and zinc alloy that kept weed and shipworm off the timbers. Above, the planking is fixed to a wrought iron skeleton, the composite construction that gave clippers their strength and lightness. On the weather deck look at the wheel, the tiny cabins, and the rigging, then go below to the hold where the tea chests were once packed to the beams. Under the hull is also the largest collection of merchant ship figureheads in the world.
Cutty Sark took her name from the witch in Robert Burns's poem Tam o' Shanter, who wore a short shirt, a cutty sark, and the figurehead shows her grasping the tail of Tam's horse. After decades under Portuguese owners she came home in nineteen twenty two, opened at Greenwich in nineteen fifty seven, and survived a serious fire in two thousand and seven during her restoration. The ship reopened in twenty twelve, and the copper glow of her raised hull has become one of the signature sights of Greenwich.
Did You Know? In eighteen eighty nine Cutty Sark overtook the crack steamship Britannia in the Indian Ocean, sailing at seventeen knots while the steamer managed sixteen.
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