Cutty Sark – one of the most famous and most recognisable ships in the world – is best known for her role in the China tea trade, and indeed the 280ft clipper was built for that purpose.

But her life as a tea clipper was short lived, and for nearly 20 years she was a key player in the Australian wool trade, becoming the fastest ship of her type and regularly beating rivals back to port by as much as a week.

Now permanently berthed in dry dock at Greenwich as a major visitor attraction (see www.rmg.co.uk/cutty-sark), Cutty Sark is the world’s only surviving tea clipper, carefully restored and preserved as a monument to the glory days of sail and to London’s maritime past.

Early years as a tea clipper
Cutty Sark was built in 1869 to carry cargoes of tea from China to Britain. Tea had been popular in England since the mid-17th century, with Samuel Pepys recording in his diary in 1660 that he had drunk his first ‘Cupp of Tee’. Initially this exotic new delicacy was the preserve of the wealthy due to its high taxes, but a highly organised smuggling industry soon ensured that tea could be enjoyed by all.

By the 19th century, importing tea was big business, and a new type of ship, the clipper, was developed in response to an increased need for faster, more efficient cargo vessels to cope with the Victorians’ demand for fresh tea. Competition between the clippers was intense, leading to the establishment of the annual tea clipper races in the 1860s. One of the closest-fought races was the one in May 1866, when the winning clipper, Taeping, beat her nearest rival, Ariel, to the docks by 20 minutes.

When Cutty Sark was commissioned early in 1869, she was intended to outdo them all. The ship was designed and built by Dumbarton firm Scott & Linton for ship owner John Willis, and was one of the first of a new type of composite ship with a hull made from teak and iron and an outer sheath of copper alloy up to the waterline to make it resistant to weeds and barnacles. This new design resulted in a vessel that was faster and more robust than the traditional wooden ships and had more room for cargo.

Cutty Sark was launched on the River Leven at Dumbarton on 22 November 1869. From there she sailed to London, ready for her maiden voyage to China.

On 16 February 1870, Cutty Sark left London for Shanghai with her first cargo of wine, spirits and beer, returning to London on 13 October with 600,000kg of tea – enough to make over 200 million cups! Over the next few years, she made eight voyages to China, with cargoes consisting mainly of tea but often including quantities of coal, tobacco, sugar and many other goods.

In June 1872, Cutty Sark came tantalisingly close to winning the annual tea race. Up against close rival Thermopylae, an Aberdeen clipper, Cutty Sark raced into a convincing lead and by 7 August was some 400 miles ahead. Then, a week later, disaster struck when the ship hit rough seas and she lost her rudder. In an incredible show of ingenuity and craftsmanship, the ship’s carpenter managed to make and fit a temporary rudder, but precious time had been lost, Thermopylae had achieved an unassailable lead and Cutty Sark sailed back into London a week after her rival.

By now, the tea clippers’ days were numbered. In a twist of fate, the Suez Canal had opened on 17 November 1869, just five days before the launch of Cutty Sark, providing a short cut from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea that reduced the London–China run by more than 3,000 miles. The new canal was not viable for sailing ships, which relied on the trade winds around the African coast, so increasingly tea cargoes were carried by the steamships. By 1877, the clippers’ tea runs were over.

The ‘tramping’ years
For the next few years, Cutty Sark ‘tramped’ from one port to another, picking up whatever cargo was available: coal, jute, scrap iron, beer, gunpowder, deer horns and shark bones, castor oil and much more. Her ‘tramping’ years took her all over the world, from Japan, Shanghai and Calcutta to New York, Sydney and Melbourne.

A double tragedy in 1880 earned Cutty Sark a reputation as a cursed ship, or ‘hell ship’. On route from London to Penarth in Wales with a cargo of coal, a quarrel broke out between the first mate, Sydney Smith, and seaman John Francis, which culminated in Smith inflicting a fatal head injury on Francis. Smith was confined to his cabin, but when the ship docked at the Indonesian port of Anjer the captain, James Wallace, helped him to escape. Wallace later faced a mutiny by his crew and shortly afterwards, realising his career was ruined, committed suicide by stepping overboard.

The incident inspired Joseph Conrad’s short story ‘The Secret Sharer’, published in Harper’s Magazine in 1910 and later in the short story collection Twixt Land and Sea (J.M. Dent & Sons, 1912).

Meanwhile, retribution caught up with Smith in 1882 when he was recognised in London, despite having changed his name to John Anderson. He was later found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years’ hard labour.

A new captain, William Bruce, was appointed to Cutty Sark by owner John Willis, but he and the first mate were later dismissed after abandoning most of the crew in Calcutta and sailing on to New York with inadequate provisions so that they had to beg for food. Willis transferred the entire crew from one of his other ships, Blackadder, to Cutty Sark, and she had one final ‘tramp’ to Indonesia and India’s East coast before returning to London in June 1883.

The wool voyages
Cutty Sark’s heyday was the 12-year period she spent as a wool clipper, bringing back vast quantities of Merino wool from Australia to London. This is where Cutty Sark made her name as one of the fastest and most powerful ships of her time, outstripping other clippers and even steamships on the wool runs from Newcastle NSW, Sydney or Brisbane to London. On her maiden wool voyage in December 1883, Cutty Sark reached London in 84 days, beating the record for that year. The following year she beat her own record, reducing her time to 80 days.

From 1885 she was under the command of Captain John Woodget, who not only increased the ship’s run times but also managed to fit more wool into the hold. On her first voyage under Woodget’s command, Cutty Sark sailed from Sydney to the Kent coast in a record-breaking 73 days, beating old tea clipper rival Thermopylae by a full week. She remained the fastest vessel for the next ten years, one of her greatest triumphs coming in 1889 when she beat the P&O steamship Britannia. The astonishment of the Britannia crew is palpable in their log: ‘Sailing ship overhauled and passed us!’

Final years
By 1895, increased competition from larger, stronger ocean-going barques had seen the number of clippers gradually dwindle. John Willis sold Cutty Sark in July that year, and she finished up in the ownership of a Portuguese company, Joaquim Antunes Ferreira & Co, who renamed her Ferreira.

For the next few years she sailed from Lisbon to South America, the United States and Portugal’s African colonies, transporting a variety of cargoes. She survived the Florida Keys hurricane of 1906 and a storm off the coast of South Africa ten years later, the latter causing severe instability as her cargo of coal rolled to one side of the ship. Most of her masts and rigging had to be cut away in a desperate bid to keep her upright before she was rescued and towed to safety by a passing steamer, Indraghiri.

In 1922, Ferreira was spotted at Falmouth harbour by retired sea captain Wilfred Dowman, who recognised her as Cutty Sark. She was a sorry sight, having been re-rigged as a barquentine during the First World War, and was clearly in need of major refurbishment. Dowman managed to buy the ship, re-registered her as Cutty Sark, restored her to her original clipper appearance and opened her as a visitor attraction and training ship.

After Dowman’s death in 1936, she became a training ship for the Incorporated Thames Nautical College at Greenhithe in Kent until just after the Second World War. By then she was in desperate need of renovation. She was saved from the scrap yard by Frank Carr, director of the National Maritime Museum, who had her repainted and put on display at Deptford during the Festival of Britain in 1951.

The Cutty Sark Preservation Society was formed the following year, and the ship was moved to a purpose-built dry dock in Greenwich for restoration before being officially opened by the Queen as a visitor attraction in 1957.

Nearly fifty years later, in November 2006, Cutty Sark had to be closed for a major conservation programme to halt deterioration to the hull. During the closure period, in May 2007, the ship survived a fire that miraculously left most of the original fabric untouched. On 25 April 2012, the Queen once again officially opened Cutty Sark to the public.

During the restoration the ship was raised by 10ft to take the weight off her keel, so visitors can now wander beneath the hull in a space that includes a café, information boards telling the history of Cutty Sark and a collection of more than 80 figureheads.

Further reading

• Cutty Sark Souvenir Guide (Cutty Sark Trust, 2012)
• Hewett, Arron & Macfarlane, Louise, The Cutty Sark Pocket Manual (Osprey Publishing, 2018)
• Kentley, Eric, Cutty Sark: Last of the Tea Clippers 150th Anniversary Edition (Adlard Coles, 2019)
• Wills, Simon, Tracing Your Merchant Navy Ancestors (Pen & Sword, 2012)