In the Australian trade, the Cutty Sark raced and beat much larger iron clippers such as the Argonaut.
The Sardomene was built in 1882, about the time that ship owners stopped building ships with speed as a priority. Although the Sardomene was almost double the tonnage of the Cutty Sark, she would have carried a similar sail area, thus greatly reducing her speed in light winds.
Fort Macquarie, Sydney. The Cutty Sark was a regular in Sydney for over a decade.
The Cutty Sark in Sydney Harbour drying her sails.
This was the last refuge of the clipper, as the long ocean passage in these wild waters remained uneconomical for steamships. The race was still on here, as it was vital that ships arrived back in London in time for the March wool sales. Thus, after loading in Sydney or Melbourne, a fleet of 20 or so wool clippers would sail across the desolate waters of the Southern Ocean as they raced home with the season’s wool clip.
Here, the Cutty Sark found her old rival the Thermopylae and, although the two vessels were smaller than their iron rivals, they soon proved to be the dominant ships in the trade. Yet it was the Cutty Sark that proved the faster in the run home. No vessel seemed able to touch her in the very strong winds of this desolate stretch of water. Under the shrewd command of Captain Woodget, she dominated all. The tables had been turned on the Thermopylae, which had always got the better of her in the China race.
In 1885, the Thermopylae and Cutty Sark were both loading wool at Circular Quay, Sydney. The pair were due to leave within a few days of each other and Woodget, observing the Thermopylae’s gilt cockerel, commented: ‘I’ll pull that damned bauble off her.’
She made the run to London in 73 days and was easily the first wool clipper home. The Thermopylae was second, but a full week behind. Finally Jock Willis’ dream of beating the Thermopylae had been fulfilled. The Cutty Sark continued to dominate the wool fleet until the 1890s, when the hated steamships started to undercut the clippers once again.
The sailing ship was reduced to being nothing more than a functional carrier of bulk goods. Sharp lines and graceful curves were replaced by slab sides and bluff lines which screamed out functionality over beauty. Yet it is poetic that the two great clipper rivals, the Cutty Sark and Thermopylae, were both there racing side by side in the final days of the clipper age defying the drab march of progress with their desperate flying passages. Illuminating a dull port with their beauty and grace, which one simply cannot conceive in a modern cargo vessel.
Of course, you can still enjoy the Cutty Sark’s graceful lines, for she survives to this day, lying in stately retirement in London. Although you can still admire her in her glass cage, the place she truly belongs is unquestionably deep down in the Roaring Forties, driving before towering grey seas while the storm roars overhead and thrums through her rigging. Here, the flying clipper had only the lonely albatross for company and it was on this desolate, desperate stretch of water that the full potential of her beauty was truly unfurled: graceful, purposeful and utterly unassailable.
EPILOGUE
Twilight
In 1908 the tea clipper Titania was towed to a ship breakers yard in Genoa. Older sister to the beautiful Ariel, in her prime this vessel had overhauled the Thermopylae in 1871 and beaten the Cutty Sark in a close race in 1878. With these triumphs behind her, the beautiful little vessel had abandoned the tea trade in the late 1870s and taken up a more humble existence as a tramp of the ocean.
In the 1880s Titania was purchased by the Hudson Bay Company and spent over a decade tussling with Cape Horn as she travelled between Europe and Vancouver. Her low bulwarks and open deck must have made her a real caution in the storms down south, but she fought on gamely and made some excellent passages. Yet her battling was all in vain. Her sleek little hull was too sharp to carry a full cargo and dwindling dividends persuaded her owners to sell to an Italian company. Another decade of tramping and her owners gave up and sent her to the breakers. The Italians are known as a passionate nation and they know a work of art when they see one. When the ship breakers at Genoa looked over the beautiful vessel towed into their yard, they wrung their hands in dismay. They could not bring themselves to destroy such a model of perfection and beauty. It would be like putting your foot through a Monet, taking a wrecking ball to the Sistine Chapel. Non e proprio possibile! So the Titania sailed again and two years later it was the turn of the ship breakers of Marseille to wring their hands once more when she returned to their yard. This time her perfect hull was destroyed, and with it one of the last symbols of an era where beauty and function worked as equals was gone.
Scores of tall ships were laid up for months on end toward the end of the tall ship era. Sometimes they were simply awaiting the next freight, but others were just left to rust away.
Other clippers suffered more violent fates at the hands of wind and wave. Of the early American clippers, most were water-strained wrecks by the 1860s, but the great rivals Flying Cloud and Challenge were two which survived longer than most. Flying Cloud was sold to James Baines’ Black Ball Line in 1862 and completed several voyages out to the colonies before sliding down the ranks into the lumber trade. The badly strained ship held out until 1874 when she grounded off St John, New Brunswick. For a whole year she wallowed in the surf there a total wreck, and the following summer she was burnt for her metal fittings. Her rival Challenge was similarly long-lived and was still tramping the seas in 1877, owned in Sunderland and renamed Golden City. Despite her long life, Bully Waterman’s final command was never a lucky ship and her career was blighted with accident and misfortune. Her last owner later recalled that when he bought her he was warned off this ‘confounded pickpocket’ of a ship. He later admitted she never made any money for him. Her end came in 1877 when she grounded off Ushant after her steering had been damaged. Rescue attempts were futile and she became a total loss. Her first captain was far more fortunate, and for the wealthy residents of Solano County in California, Robert Waterman is not remembered as a bullying passage maker and alleged murderer, but as the wise and benevolent man who helped to found the communities of Fairfield and Cordelia, the latter settlement named after his wife. He died in 1884, many miles from the sea in his comfortable ranch.
A windjammer leaving Hamburg. By 1900, British ship owners had turned their back on sail, but Germany continued to run efficiently a large fleet of tall ships right up until the outbreak of World War I. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 was another heavy blow, however.
The Glory of the Seas was the last ever clipper built by Donald McKay. Launched in 1869, she was not as sharp as his earlier clippers, but still made some extremely fast passages. The building of this great ship on spec bankrupted McKay, but she remained afloat until the 1920s, a fine epitaph to a brave era.
Little is known of the final fate of Neptune’s Car. After the Pattens’ dramatic departure, she made a number of fine passages around Cape Horn and was sold to a shipping firm in Liverpool in the 1860s, subsequently disappearing from the registers. It is likely she was renamed and her ultimate fate remains a mystery. The demise of the Marco Polo, Lightning, Schomberg and their unfortunate commander has been discussed in depth, which brings us to the British tea clippers. As for the veterans of the 1866 race, both ships and commanders suffered mixed fortunes. MacKinnon of the Taeping died on his following voyage as already noted, and his former command was wrecked off Ladd’s Reef in the China Sea in 1871. We have previously discussed the fate of the Ariel, overwhelmed in the Roaring Forties and posted as ‘missing’ for many years. Captain Keay left her in 1869 and, after dabbling with command of a few steamships he retired and lived to a ripe old age. George Innes and Serica were less fortunate; Captain Innes returned to his old ship after the loss of the larger, faster Spindrift in 1869. In 1872 he was engaged in some typically daredevil work down the China Sea when his luck finally ran out. Getting in among the Paracel reefs in poor weather, the Serica piled up on a reef and was soon destroyed. Only one of her 23 crew survived, and
Innes went down with the ship that had brought him so much fame. The Fiery Cross and Taitsing enjoyed long lives, being wrecked in 1893 and 1883 respectively. Captain Robinson of the Fiery Cross and Sir Lancelot retired to his home town of Workington in Cumbria and became a Justice of the Peace. One can imagine this well-respected pillar of the community still trod the streets with an impatient, restless step until his death in the 1890s. The Sir Lancelot lasted as long as her famous master and was still doing good service plying between India and Mauritius until 1895 when she finally foundered in a severe cyclone.
The Aristides was built for the Aberdeen White Star Line seven years after they purchased the Thermopylae and became the flagship of the Line, with Captain Kemball moving from the tea clipper to the new vessel. Although a beautiful ship, she was nowhere near as fast as Thermopylae.
Barring Titania, the Cutty Sark and Thermopylae were the last two survivors of the tea trade and after trading blows in the wool trade, they went their separate ways. For many years Thermopylae worked in the lumber trade, operating out of Vancouver while the Cutty Sark was sold to the Portuguese and tramped the North Atlantic under the name of the Ferreira. It is ironic that this famous pair was reunited under the Portuguese flag in 1895, when Thermopylae was purchased by the Portuguese government as a training ship and renamed the Pedro Nunes. It was under this guise that she perished, for in 1907, the Portuguese had no further use for her and sent her out into the Atlantic where she was given a naval funeral and torpedoed, a sad end to such a perfect little vessel. Only the Cutty Sark soldiered on, shuffling into obscure ports, all threadbare rigging and peeling paint until she was finally rescued and restored in 1922. I should also mention that the City of Adelaide, a beautiful little clipper built in Sunderland in 1864 and originally operating in the Australian trade, is the only other clipper to have survived, rotting away in a number of Clyde backwaters. Yet even as I write she is being transported from what looked to be her grave in Irvine, Scotland to Adelaide, where her preservation will take place.
Australian stevedores load bales of wool aboard a tall ship. This cargo was heavily compressed in order for it to be crammed in the hold.
Commercial sail still had a long way to go, but by 1900 twilight was setting in. The clippers were finished and those that weren’t destroyed endured the indignity of being turned into coal hulks to feed the rapacious steamships. It was the turn of the mighty four-masted barques to take their turn. These latter day tall ships had their own majesty and beauty. Some were almost double in length to the clipper ships. Studding sails and flying kites were a thing of the past and sharp lines, sleekness and speed were replaced by vessels shaped by more utilitarian needs: cargo capacity, ease of handling, practicality. Speed was often of very little import in these later vessels, which were often treated as little more than floating warehouses. It would be the dark waters of Cape Horn and the screaming wasteland of the Roaring Forties that would prove to be the final refuge of the mighty windjammers. Racing home to Europe from Australia loaded with a cargo of grain, these powerful vessels ran before the great winds of the Southern Ocean with only the lonely albatross and the relentless westerly gales for company. Even with small crews, rust-spattered decks and blistered hulls, they still had a power, grace and beauty that no mechanically driven vessel can ever hope to replicate. The final grain race took place in 1939 and the last ships were finished off by World War II. Only a handful of tall ships survive as museums or training ships. We all should feel the death of commercial sail, for with the passing of these great ships, the oceans have lost something beautiful, something that transcended mere function.
The wool clipper Miltiades anchored in Sydney Harbour. She has no cargo aboard and rides high out of the water, showing her perfect lines to good advantage.
The writer Joseph Conrad served aboard Loch Etive and the Torrens, clippers that raced alongside the Cutty Sark and Thermopylae on the Australia run. He felt the loss of the great sailing ships keenly perfectly summed up the loss with great poignancy:
History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. A modern ship does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway with a thudding rhythm in her progress and the regular beat of her propeller, heard afar in the night with an august and plodding sound as of the march of an inevitable future. But in a gale, the silent machinery of a sailing-ship would catch not only the power, but the wild and exulting voice of the world’s soul.
APPENDIX
Principal records set by British and American clipper ships
East coast of North America to California
1851 Flying Cloud New York to San Francisco 89 days
1854 Flying Cloud New York to San Francisco 89 days
1861 Andrew Jackson New York to San Francisco 89 days
California to east coast of North America
1853 Comet San Francisco to Boston 76 days
1853 Northern Light San Francisco to Boston 76 days
1853 Sovereign of the Seas Honolulu to New York 82 days
China to England
In calculating any record from China to England, you have to make allowances for the seasonal monsoon. The south-west monsoon blows from May to September, while the north-east monsoon blows from October to April. This means a ship leaving during the south-west monsoon would often have to beat down the China Sea, which added many days to the passage.
One must also make allowances for vessels sailing from Shanghai as opposed to Foochow or Hong Kong. Shanghai is 600 nautical miles to the north of Foochow and this could add several days to a passage, particularly during the south-west monsoon.
Against the south-west monsoon
1869 Sir Lancelot Foochow to London 89 days
1869 Thermopylae Foochow to London 91 days
1871 Titania Foochow to London 93 days
1867 Sir Lancelot Shanghai to Mizen Head 96 days
1869 Titania Shanghai to Deal 96 days
With the north-east monsoon
1873 Lothair Hong Kong to Deal 88 days
1864 Taeping Amoy to Deal 88 days
1874 Halloween Shanghai to Start Point 89 days
1852 Witch of the Wave Canton to Dungeness 90 days
1855 Nightingale Shanghai to Beachy Head 91 days
England to Australia
1868 Thermopylae London to Melbourne 63 days
1854 James Baines London to Melbourne 64 days
1874 Thermopylae London to Melbourne 64 days
1874 Ben Voirlich Plymouth to Melbourne 64 days
Australia to England
1854 Lightning Melbourne to Liverpool 63 days
1886 Cutty Sark Sydney to Ushant 67 days
1869 Patriarch Sydney to Ushant 68 days
Transatlantic
1854 James Baines Boston to Rock Light 12 days
1854 Red Jacket Sandy Hook to Bell Buoy 12 days
The tea clipper Maitland running before a fresh breeze. This vessel was built in Sunderland in 1865 and on her maiden voyage she ran out from Sunderland to Hong Kong in 87 days. Only the Ariel has bettered this passage, making the run in 83 days from London to Hong Kong in the same year.
A map that picks off the track of the five main protagonists in the 1866 China Tea Race showing their daily progress. Given that all of the vessels arrived within 48 hours or so of each other, it is interesting to note how frequently their courses diverged, particularly in the China Sea. The various coloured tracks denote the different vessels as follows: Black: Ariel. Red: Taeping. Blue: Serica. Dotted: Fiery Cross. Green: Taitsing.
CREDITS
All page references refer to the print edition.
I: The Aberdeen Clipper Chrysolite, engraving from Illustrated
London News, author’s private collection, courtesy of State
Library of Victoria, Australia
II-III: The Sobraon Loading at Circular Quay, 1871, courtesy of
State Library of Victoria
INTRODUCTION
VI: Ariel and Taeping, Charles Vickery, courtesy of marineoilpaintings.blogspot.com
VIII-IX: Clippers on the River Min, Richard Linton, courtesy of artist, www.lintonmaritimeart.com.au
CHAPTER ONE
X: Ship in Light Airs, Robert Salmon, courtesy of Sotheby’s 2: Opium Ships off Lintin, 1824, William John Huggins, courtesy of Christie’s
3: (top) The Opium Clipper Sylph, William John Huggins, courtesy of Sotheby’s, (bottom) Shenandoah, Randon Rynd, courtesy of artist
4: (top) America vs Maria, Shane Couch, courtesy of artist, (bottom) Malabar, William Clark, courtesy of Yale Center for British Art
5: (top) Oriental Arriving in London Dock, George Campbell, courtesy of Adlard Coles Nautical, (bottom) Oriental, Illustrated London News, author’s private collection
6: San Francisco, courtesy of Library of Congress
7: (top) USM Ship Pacific, Day and Son, (bottom left) The First Pan, (bottom right) Clipper Cards, all courtesy of Library of Congress
8-9: Flying Cloud, Richard Loud, courtesy of artist, www.maritimeartstudio.com
10: (top) Clipper Robin Hood, Samuel Walters, courtesy of Bonhams, (bottom) Golden Point, Ballarat, 1851, David Tulloch, courtesy of State Library of Victoria
11: (top) World Sailing Routes, David R MacGregor, courtesy of ss Great Britain Trust, (bottom) On the Bowsprit, Daily Graphic, courtesy of Marguerite Blanck Collection
Clipper Ships and the Golden Age of Sail Page 14