Cutty Sark

The Cutty Sark in London is a preserved 1869 Scottish-built tea clipper famed for being one of the fastest sailing ships ever constructed. Built for the Jock Willis Shipping Line, the ship carried over 600,000 kilograms of tea per voyage and later broke speed records in the Australian wool trade. In 1885, she sailed from Sydney to London in 73 days, outrunning a steamship that departed a week earlier. Today, her hull rests raised three meters on supports.

London Β· from the walk β€œDocks to Dollars” Β· audio ~4 min Β· Generated

Cutty Sark, King William Walk, London SE10 9HT

Where did the Cutty Sark get its name?

Look at the magnificent Cutty Sark, rising above you like a cathedral of commerce and speed. Built in eighteen sixty-nine on the River Leven in Dumbarton, Scotland, for the Jock Willis Shipping Line, she was one of the Last tea clippers ever built... and one of the fastest.......... But here's the thing most people don't realize. Her name comes from a Witch. In Robert Burns's poem "Tam o' Shanter," a fictional witch wore only a short shirt β€” a "cutty sark" in broad Scots dialect. The witch Cutty Sark ran after Tam, who was fleeing on his horse, and the name was a deliberate link between the speed of that supernatural creature... and the speed of this ship. If you look at the figurehead on the prow, that's the witch herself β€” Nannie Dee β€” with her outstretched hand still clutching the horse's tail.......... Now, why was speed so important? A fashion developed among Victorians for consuming the First tea to be unloaded in London. This spurred the great tea races β€” get home first, and you could command Huge prices. The ships' progress was reported by telegraph and followed in the newspapers. Huge bets were laid on the outcome!......... In eighteen seventy-two came the most famous race of all. Cutty Sark and her arch-rival Thermopylae loaded their cargoes side by side and departed Woosung, China together. By the seventh of August, Cutty Sark was roughly four hundred miles ahead. Victory seemed certain... and then an unexpected storm on the fifteenth of August ripped away her rudder. Disaster. The crew improvised β€” a blacksmith Stowaway helped reconstruct a makeshift rudder β€” but she arrived in London roughly seven days behind her rival. Owner John Willis was so impressed that he awarded the carpenter Henderson fifty pounds for saving the ship.......... But here's the twist in the tale that connects this vessel to the Canary Wharf story. The Suez Canal opened in the very same Week that Cutty Sark was launched, and it cut the voyage to China by over three thousand miles. Steamships could use that shortcut. Sailing clippers could Not. After just eight round trips to China, her tea racing days were over by eighteen seventy-seven.......... So Willis reinvented her. On her first wool voyage from Australia, she made it back to London in eighty-four days β€” the fastest trip by any ship that year, arriving Twenty-Five days ahead of the competition. In eighteen eighty-five, she sailed from Sydney to London in just seventy-three days β€” and actually beat a steamship that had left Sydney a Week before her.......... Think about that. A ship of wood and canvas, Outrunning a machine of coal and iron. That same relentless commercial ambition β€” to move goods faster, cheaper, first β€” is the very force that later transformed the derelict docks just across the river into the steel-and-glass towers of Canary Wharf.......... During her years as a British merchant ship, Cutty Sark visited sixteen different countries and traveled the equivalent of two and a half voyages to the moon and back. She carried over six hundred thousand kilograms of tea per voyage β€” enough to make more than two hundred million cups. She is, quite literally, the ship that kept Victorian London caffeinated.......... Take a moment to look beneath her. She's been raised nearly three meters into the air on her supports, and you can walk directly under the hull β€” sheathed in a copper and zinc alloy, designed to prevent barnacles and mollusks from slowing her down. Every design choice on this vessel was about one thing... Speed. The same obsession that still drives the trading floors a mile north of here.

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