Built for a trade that was already changing
The Cutty Sark was launched in 1869 at Dumbarton, on the River Leven, for the shipowner John Willis. She was designed to carry tea from China to London at high speed. The timing was unlucky. The Suez Canal opened in the same year, and steamers using the canal found a much shorter route to the East than sailing ships could take around the Cape. The effect on sail is discussed in the history of Suez Canal shipping, and it meant that the great days of the clipper tea races were nearly over before she had begun.
Her name comes from the poem Tam o’ Shanter by Robert Burns, in which a witch wears a short undergarment known in Scots as a cutty sark. The ship’s figurehead depicts that witch, which is a good example of the ship figureheads that sailors often used to give a vessel personality.
A composite ship
Cutty Sark was built as a composite vessel, with an iron frame covered in wooden planking. This was a transitional method of the 1860s. Iron gave a strong, light frame, while wood planking could be sheathed with metal below the waterline to resist fouling, a problem for iron hulls. The method was soon overtaken by hulls built entirely of iron or steel, as covered in the account of iron shipbuilding. Part of why the surviving ship matters is that so few composite clippers remain.
The tea years and after
Despite the popular image, she carried tea for only a few years. The famous rivalry with another clipper, Thermopylae, is part of the legend, and a race between the two in 1872 is often recalled, with Cutty Sark said to have lost time after damage to her rudder. Even so, tea freight moved to steamers, and by the later 1870s she was working in the wool trade from Australia, where she became known as a fast ship on the run home. Claims about her exact speeds and records are often exaggerated in popular accounts, and it is safer to say that she was among the fast sailing ships of her day.
In 1895 she was sold to a Portuguese company and renamed Ferreira, and she worked under that name for years. In 1922 she was bought by a retired sea captain, Wilfred Dowman, who restored her and kept her in Falmouth. After his death she passed to a training college and spent time as a cadet training ship on the Thames, before being given a new life as a museum.
Greenwich and the dry dock
The ship was moved to a purpose-built dry berth at Greenwich in the 1950s and opened to the public in 1957. Visitors could walk her decks and see the rigging, though over time the damp, London weather and structural wear began to take a toll. By the early 2000s there were serious concerns about the condition of the iron frame and the timber.
A major conservation project began, which included removing large parts of the ship’s planking and fittings for treatment. In May 2007, during this work, a fire broke out on board. Fortunately many original parts had already been removed and were stored elsewhere, which reduced the loss. The fire was a severe setback, but it did not destroy the ship, and the project continued.
A new way of showing a ship
The restoration that followed changed the way the ship is displayed. Her hull was raised several metres above the floor of the dry dock, supported on a steel structure that carries much of the load. That relieves the strain on the old keel. Beneath the ship, a glass skirt around the edge encloses a space that visitors can walk through, allowing them to see the hull from below, and to see the metal sheathing. The project also treated the iron frame, replaced damaged timber where necessary and reconstructed what was lost. The ship reopened in 2012.
Conservation choices here resemble those made for HMS Victory in Portsmouth, where a famous hull is also kept dry. Both ships raise a question about authenticity. In Cutty Sark’s case, a good part of the planking and fittings are replacements, but the iron frame and many of the original parts remain. As with other old ships, the ship is a mixture, and the question is how best to explain that to visitors.
Why she survived
Cutty Sark survived partly through luck, and partly through the action of a series of people who valued her. Of the tea clippers that once raced home, she is the only one still in existence. Other famous clippers were lost at sea, wrecked or broken up. Surviving as a museum, she gives a rare chance to see how a nineteenth-century merchant sailing ship was built, rigged and worked, and to understand a short but fascinating phase of the world’s trade.