NOVEMBER 22, 1869
The Cutty Sark, which for 10 years held the record for the fastest journey time from Australia, is launched on the River Leven at Dumbarton.
One of the last tea clippers to be built, it was quickly rendered obsolete by the rise of the steamship and the completion of the Suez Canal. Switched to bringing wool from Australia in December 1883, the ship left New South
Wales with 4,289 bales of wool, arriving in London in just 83 days. This was 25 days faster than the nearest rival that year and heralded the start of a new career taking wool to Britain in time for the January sales.
In July 1889, the log of the modern passenger steamship SS Britannia recorded that, when steaming at 15-16 knots, it was overtaken in the night by a sailing ship doing 17 knots, which proved to be the Cutty Sark.
The ship was named after Cutty-sark, the nickname of the witch Nannie Dee in Robert Burns’s 1791 poem Tam o’ Shanter. In the poem, she wore a linen sark – a short chemise or undergarment – that she had been given as a child, which explains why it was cutty, or far too short. In 1895 the Cutty Sark was sold to a Portuguese firm and renamed Ferreira. Crews referred to the ship as Pequena Camisola – or little shirt.
In 1953, Cutty Sark was given to the Cutty Sark Preservation Society and the following year was moved to a custom-built dry dock at Greenwich, where it remains to this day.