In 1869 Scottish shipowner John “Jock” Willis commissioned the Cutty Sark at Dumbarton to beat his rival Thermopylae in the China tea trade, where the first fresh crop into London fetched a premium. Her composite build paired a wrought iron frame with teak and American rock elm planking, sheathed below the waterline in Muntz metal that leached copper and kept barnacles off, and her prismatic coefficient of 0.628 gave her a knife-edged hull. She was named for the short linen shift worn by the witch Nannie Dee in Robert Burns’s Tam o’ Shanter, and her figurehead still holds the horse’s tail the witch tore off. In the great race of 1872 from Shanghai she led Thermopylae by about 400 miles until her rudder snapped in a gale near the Sunda Strait. Captain George Moody refused to seek shelter, and carpenter Henry Henderson built a new rudder at sea over six days, arriving a week behind.

The Suez Canal, opened the same year she was built, and the fuel-saving compound steam engine soon pushed sailing ships out of the tea trade, and she was reduced to hauling castor oil, jute, and coal. In 1880 first mate Sidney Smith killed seaman John Francis, Captain James Wallace let him escape in Indonesia, and after days becalmed in the Java Sea with a mutinous crew, Wallace jumped overboard. His replacement William Bruce embezzled wages and sold the crew’s food. Revival came in the Australian wool trade under Captain Richard Woodget, who drove her through iceberg fields in the Roaring Forties, and in 1889 she overtook the steamer SS Britannia at 17 knots.

• Sold to a Portuguese firm in 1895, she became the Ferreira, which her crew called Little Shirt.
• In 1922, as the last working clipper, she was spotted in Falmouth by retired captain Wilfred Dowman, who bought her.
• She survived an 800-ton tanker ramming her bow on the Thames in 1952 and went on display at Greenwich in 1954.
• On May 21, 2007, an industrial vacuum left plugged in overheated and set her ablaze, but over half her original fabric was in storage.
• Restorers raised the ship three meters on steel struts so her hull no longer sags on its keel.