Many will have visited this famous tea clipper at Greenwich in London and marvelled at its design and the remarkable restoration, despite a fire in 2007. After a £50m restoration lasting six years, she is back on display to the public in London.

What seems less known is that this famous tea clipper served under the Portuguese flag for 27 years. Perhaps not surprising considering Portugal’s maritime history. Portugal had a famous ‘fleet’ of sailships, and this high-speed ship was a great addition to the fleet. In 1895 Jock Willis sold Cutty Sark to the Portuguese firm Ferreira for £2,100 that’s over 2 million pounds in today’s values. Her crews referred to her as Pequena Camisola ("little shirt") though that wasn’t her official name. Her official name came from a poem by Robert Burns called Tam O’Shanter. It refers to a short nightie worn by one of the main characters in the poem. Hence her nickname in Portugal was Pequena Camisola.

Bad timing

Sadly, the Cutty Sark was built too late to achieve a long life as a tea clipper. She was built in Dumbarton, Scotland in 1869. At the time a fashion developed among Victorians for consuming the first tea to be unloaded in London. This spurred the ‘great tea races’ and a spirit of intense competition: get home first and you could command huge prices. That's why, as a clipper ship, Cutty Sark was designed to be fast.

The problem was that the Suez Canal had opened to shipping in 1869 just as the Cutty Sark was being launched. Steamships quickly took over delivering tea as they could use the canal, which a clipper couldn’t. Steamships were much more reliable, so the very market the high-speed ship was designed to serve and dominate due to its ability to get the first tea to the UK quickly lost its ‘edge’.

The owners had to quickly find an alternative cargo. Coal and wool from Australia. She continued to record remarkably fast passage times, under her Master Richard Woodget, and became the leading ship in bringing wool from Australia to England. Eventually, steamships began to dominate the wool trade as well and it ceased to be profitable for a sailing ship. In 1895 Jock Willis sold Cutty Sark to the Portuguese firm Ferreira.

Name change

Under her Portuguese flag, Cutty Sark traded various cargoes between Portugal, Rio, New Orleans, Mozambique, Angola, and Britain. Her crew claimed she was still capable of doing 16 knots, about 18.5 mph.

In October 1915 Portugal declared war on Germany, which meant that the ship was in constant danger of being sunk by German naval activity. She survived unscathed until May 1916.

According to the Greenwich Royal Museum site “Due to the war, the cost and rarity of adequate masts and yards meant that she was converted into a barquentine (fore and aft rig) over an 18-month period at Cape Town.

By January 1922 Ferreira ran into a Channel gale, and the captain put into Falmouth harbour to repair the damage. Wilfred Dowman, a retired windjammer skipper and owner of the training ship Lady of Avenel, saw the ship and set out to buy her. However, she returned to Lisbon without further mishap and was sold to a new Portuguese owner who changed her name to Maria do Amparo.

Dowman was determined to rescue her. He offered a price of £3750 – more than what she was worth even in 1895 – and finally, Ferreira was brought back to Falmouth. In 1923 her old name and nationality was restored – Cutty Sark had returned to British ownership”.


Image courtesy of: https://www.diaryofalondoness.com/cuttysark150/

Author

Resident in Portugal for 50 years, publishing and writing about Portugal since 1977. Privileged to have seen, firsthand, Portugal progress from a dictatorship (1974) into a stable democracy. 

Paul Luckman