She sits in a purpose-built dry dock on the bank of the River Thames. The drydock is enclosed now and we will have a look inside the drydock as well her inner decks
BHPian Jeroen recently shared this with other enthusiasts:
Last weekend, we headed to London to attend the wedding of a nephew of Mrs. D. The wedding was in Greenwich, so we had booked a hotel in the same area. It also meant we were less than a 10-minute walk from the famous Cutty Sark.
Cut Sark was built, originally, as a clipper. The clipper comes from an old American expression, “to go at a clip”, meaning to go quickly. The first clippers were the small schooners and brigs of the Chesapeake Bay, USA, at the beginning of the 19th century. In the 1830s, some of their features were used in larger ships. The design developed in both the USA and Britain, and the word came to mean any large vessel with a long, narrow hull, a yacht-like appearance, raking masts and a vast sail area.
We will dig into some of her history, but this is how she looks today. She sits in a purpose-built dry dock on the bank of the River Thames. The drydock is enclosed now and we will have a look inside the drydock as well her inner decks.
This is where you enter these days:
From Wikipedia:
Quote:
Cutty Sark is a British clipper ship. Built on the River Leven, Dumbarton, Scotland in 1869 for the Jock Willis Shipping Line, she was one of the last tea clippers to be built and one of the fastest, at the end of a long period of design development for this type of vessel, which ended as steamships took over their routes. She was named after the short shirt of the fictional witch in Robert Burns’ poem Tam o’ Shanter, first published in 1791.
After the big improvement in the fuel efficiency of steamships in 1866, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 gave them a shorter route to China, so Cutty Sark spent only a few years on the tea trade before turning to the trade in wool from Australia, where she held the record time to Britain for ten years.[5] Continuing improvements in steam technology early in the 1880s meant that steamships also came to dominate the longer sailing route to Australia, and the ship was sold to the Portuguese company Ferreira and Co. in 1895 and renamed Ferreira. She continued as a cargo ship until purchased in 1922 by retired sea captain Wilfred Dowman, who used her as a training ship operating from Falmouth, Cornwall. After his death, Cutty Sark was transferred to the Thames Nautical Training College, Greenhithe, in 1938 where she became an auxiliary cadet training ship alongside HMS Worcester. By 1954, she had ceased to be useful as a cadet ship and was transferred to permanent dry dock at Greenwich, London, for public display.
Your tour will start on one of her lower decks. You can clearly see the construction of her hull. This would have been full of stacks of tea-boxes
Next is the upper deck, on which a lot of historical information about her is also on display.
There are some more images of her rigging further on. I was amazed to read about her crew. In her heydays as one of the fastest clippers in the world, her regular crew would be less than 30!
In 1895 she was sold and renamed as Ferreira. One year later she ended up in a storm with cargo shifting. In order to save the ships and crew her captain gave the order to cut away the masts. Because of WW1 wood was very scarce and they re-rigged here as a Barquentine.
You can see the difference in rigging clearly in these two models.
Cutty Sark as a clipper:
Ferreira (Ex Cutty Sark) as a Barquentine
This new rig meant she lost a lot of her speed, but she also needed a much smaller crew of about 30.
The rigging of a clipper is hugely impressive.
Bow
When you work on a sailing boat, you need to know how to work and coil rope!!
The crew all slept on the various accommodations on the main deck. Everything below was for cargo.
The main steering wheel.
Look at this guy up in the rigging! You can actually climb into the rigging yourself. These days, with a lot of safety gear, of course.
But this is how they used to do it. No safety harness. No nothing. Just one hand for the ship and one hand for yourself!
There are various newspaper clipping on display describing various important moments of Cutty Sark’s life.
Continue reading BHPian Jeroen’s post for more insights and information.
