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The Cutty Sark
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The Cutty Sark was built to be the finest and fastest of the clipper ships. On Monday, 22nd November 1869, this beautiful clipper ship of 963 tons gross was launched at Dumbarton on the Scottish Clyde. Her purpose was to transport tea from China to Europe but, her working life as a tea clipper was short, For in the same year that she was launched the Suez Canal, which the sailing ships could not navigate, was opened. The tea trade became less profitable to sailing ships and her last cargo of tea was carried in 1877. The name Cutty Sark comes from an ancient Scottish legend made famous by the poet, Robert Burns. A farmer named Tam O'Shanter was riding his horse home one night when he came across a group of witches dancing in a churchyard. One of these witches, 'Nannie', was young, lovely and extraordinarily graceful. What she wore was a 'cutty sark'(Scottish dialect for short chemise). Tam watched Nannie dance for a while and, overcome with admiration, cried out, "Weel done Cutty Sark!" The witches were startled and started out in pursuit of Tam, who raced away on his horse. For a moment it seemed he would be caught. Just as Nannie grabbed hold of the horse's tail it strode across a bridge over a river. Nannie was unable to follow for witches cannot cross running water. The horse however, lost it's tail to Nannie! It was not until 1885 that a new profitable use was found for the Cutty Sark. She triumphed in the Australian wool trade. Under Captain Richard Woodget, a virtuoso mariner, who sailed the Cutty Sark like the responsive 'instrument' she was, the Cutty Sark repeatedly made the fastest passage home from Australia. By 1895, the Cutty Sark was once again made less profitable by advances in steam ship design. She was sold to the Portuguese and laboured steadfastly for her new masters for almost three more decades as the Ferreira (although her crews referred to her as Pequina Camisola or 'little shirt'). She regularly traded between Oporto, Rio, New Orleans and Lisbon, in the service of Portugal's colonial possessions. In 1916, after being dismasted in a storm in the Indian Ocean, she was re-rigged as a barquentine to carry less sail due to a wartime shortage of spar timber. In 1920 she was sold again, this time becoming the Maria do Amparo and in 1922, underwent a refit at London's Surrey Docks. On her journey home from that refit, she was driven into Falmouth Harbour by a Channel gale. It was there that she was spotted by Captain Wilfred Dowman, a Cornish mariner who, as an apprentice seaman back in 1894, had seen her 'slicing by' at full sail and had never forgotten that breathtaking sight. She was now very much dilapidated and likely to become a hulk. Captain Dowman approached her Portuguese owners and bought her for the sum of £3,750. He had her restored, re-rigged and flying the 'Red Duster" once again. Upon Capt. Dowman's death in 1938, his widow presented the newly restored clipper to the Incorporated Thames Nautical Training College at Greenhithe on the Thames, where the vessel remained until after the Second World War, when the college acquired a larger, steel-built ship for its cadets. Once more, Cutty Sark became 'surplus to requirements'. Lengthy discussions ensued over her future which ultimately led to her being towed to a mooring off Greenwich in 1951. Eventually, the Cutty Sark Society was formed by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh and the ship was gifted to the society. In December 1954 she was moved into a specially constructed dry dock at Greenwich where, since her official opening in 1957 by HM The Queen, the Cutty Sark has been visited by over 13 million people from all over the world. The towering mainmast of the Cutty Sark stands at 152 feet (47m). With all three masts fully set, there would have been 34 sails equivalent to the area of ten tennis courts, all controlled by over 11 miles of rigging or ropes. There is no doubt that no clipper was finer, faster or more famous than the Cutty Sark. Of all those beautiful ships which braved the 'roaring forties' and traded around the China Seas, it is fitting that it was she who survived to tell the tale.
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