To get around the distortion of the hull, the conservers came up with the elegant idea of raising the hull three metres in the air and supporting it with steel props. It is a fascinating piece of engineering which allows the visitor to walk right under the hull. At just above dock level the gaps have been glassed in, so that the ship looks as if it is floating. It is a very clever and practical idea.

despite being heavily taxed was enjoyed by all social classes, mainly due to the fact that it was smuggled in vast quantities into Britain, so much so that at one time, more illegal tea was smuggled into the country through the Netherlands than through the legal importers of the East India Company. The reason for the opium trafficking was the fact that the East India Company had to pay for the tea in silver, as the West had little in the way of trade goods that China wanted. To redress this so called trade imbalance, the East India Company grew opium in India and sold it to smugglers to run into China. The smugglers naturally had to pay for the opium in silver.

Determined to support the Company the British Government slashed the tax on tea from one hundred and twelve percent to twelve and a half percent. As tea became cheaper sales boomed and were further increased by the Temperance Movement, who in the 1840’s, promoted tea as an alternative to alcohol. A second Opium War broke out between 1856 and 1860 which resulted in more ports being opened up to Europeans including the important tea port of Hankow which was hundreds of miles up the Yangtze River. All this did not profit the East India Company much as the British Government was later forced by the Free Trade Movement to end the Company’s monopoly with China. This left the tea trade wide open and with demand for tea sky rocketing ever upwards there were fortunes to be made. Clipper ships like the Cutty Sark were built with the express purpose of shipping tea from China to London in the fastest possible time. Speed was vital and as the first home got the highest prices the ships became increasingly competitive and so the great tea races began. To give you an idea of how competitive these skippers were, there was a race in 1866 where five ships starting within hours of each other sailed 15000 miles from China to England over a period of ninety nine days, and when the first ship, called Ariel, arrived off the Kent coast,, she was only ten minutes ahead of her rival the Taeping.

It was into this fiercely competitive trade that the Cutty Sark was launched in November 1846.She was owned by John Willis, who at nineteen, had brought home his first tea cargo and now owned a fleet of clipper ships. The Cutty Sark was 64.74 metres in length with a beam of 10.97 metres and a displacement of 2100 tons. She was able to carry 1700 tons of cargo and her 32000 square feet of canvas was tended by a crew of between 28 and 35. At the time that Willis placed the order for the ship, American clippers were the fastest ships and although the British ships were some of the finest in the world they had yet to win a single tea race. In 1868 the Aberdeen clipper Thermopylae had set a new record of 61 days for a voyage between London and Melbourne in Australia, and Willis was determined that his new ship would do better. Not only was there a great deal of money to be made by having the fastest ship, there was also a huge prestige for the owner. The Tea Races were reported in the National Press and huge amounts of money were wagered with the event being treated like a National sporting event, much like the Grand National today.

The firm of Scott and Linton were contracted to design and build the boat within six months with strict penalties applied for non compliance. The design was a judicious mix of some of the most successful clipper designs and a light composite hull. This was all quite experimental for its time, and as it was being built to Lloyyds A1 Standard ,problems soon arose with Lloyyds wanting the hull to be strengthened. Half way through the build Scott and Linton ran out of money and the job was completed by William Denny and Brothers. When finished, the Cutty Sark maximum logged speed was seventeen and a half knots, so she was not faster that the Thermopylae on paper , but in heavy weather with strong winds she had the edge. So John Willis had been successful in making one of the fastest clipper ships in the world. However his dream of winning the tea race was not to be.

The most famous race against Thermopylae occurred in 1872, the two ships leaving Shanghai together on 18 June. Two weeks later Cutty Sark had built up a lead of some 400 miles, but then lost her rudder in a heavy gale after passing through the Sunda Strait. John Willis' brother was on board the ship and ordered Moodie to put in to Cape Town for repairs. Moodie refused, and instead the ship's carpenter Henry Henderson constructed a new rudder from spare timbers and iron. This took six days, working in gales and heavy seas which meant the men were tossed about as they worked and the brazier used to heat the metal for working was spilled out, burning the captain's son. The ship finally arrived in London on 18 October a week after Thermopylae, a total passage of 122 days. The captain and crew were commended for their performance and Henderson received a £50 bonus for his work. This was the closest Cutty Sark ever came to being first ship home. She was not to make many more Tea races, because by now the Suez Canal had been open for a few years and gradually steamships were taking over the trade and prices were dropping. However there was another cargo that clipper ships could still carry competitively and that was wool from Australia.

It was on this route that the Cutty Sark showed what a wonderful ship she was. On one return trip from Britain to Australia she took 77 days, but on the return only 73 days. No ship was faster, not even her old rival Thermopylae, and for ten years the Cutty Sark was the fasted ship on the Wool trade. In one famous incident in 1889 that caught the publics’ imagination, the passenger steam ship R.M.S. Britannia recorded in her log that when she was steaming at 15 to 16 knots she was overtaken by a sailing ship. That ship was the Cutty Sark.

But the era of the clipper ships was coming to an end, and by 1895 only ten remained. The rest had been wrecked, foundered or been condemned. They were to be replaced by huge four masted steel barques with much larger carrying capacities. They would continue in the grain trade well into the 20th century, but for the Clipper ships the bell was tolling. In 1895 the Cutty Sark was sold to a Portugese company and renamed the Ferreira. She carried cargoes all over the world becoming more and more dilapidated as the years passed. In 1922 she put into Falmouth for a short time looking nothing like the famous Cutty Sark. Even so she was recognised by a retired sea captain Wilfrid Dowman, who as a sixteen year old apprentice, had seen her when he was in the sailing ship Hawkdale. Sickened at her sorry state he was determined to save her for the Nation and pursued her back to Portugal where he bought her. Luckily his wife Catherine was a member of the wealthy Courtauld family so there was plenty of money to enable his dream to come true.

Once back in Cornwall and spruced up, the Cutty Sark became a cadet training ship and during the summer she was also opened up as an attraction, with visitors arriving by rowing boat. Thus she became the first historic ship to open to the public (H.M.S. Victory followed shortly afterwards) since Francis Drakes Golden Hind in Deptford in the 1580’s. When Wilfred Dowman died in 1936 the ship was incorporated into the Thames Nautical College at Greenhithe on the River Thames. However after the Second World War the college obtained a much more modern ship ,H.M.S. Exmouth, to carry out her training in, and so the Cutty Sark was seen as outdated and unwanted. The future looked bleak, but at the last minute Frank Carr, the director of the National Maritime Museum, stepped in and persuaded the London County Council, to make a site in bomb damaged Greenwich available for the Cutty Sark. In 1951 the Festival of Britain was in full swing, so the Cutty Sark was given a lick of paint and moored off Deptford to test the public reaction to her full time preservation. People loved her and in two years raised over £250000 towards her conservation. In 1954 the Cutty Sark was floated into her permanent dock at Greenwich and the channel leading to the Thames sealed off. She was safe at last.

Besides being the last of the Clipper ships her other and some would say more important justification for being preserved was to be a lasting memorial to the Merchant Navy and all those brave men who lost their lives in Two World Wars.
By the way I am sure you know this, but the name Cutty Sark comes from the poem Tam O Shanter by Robert Burns and describes a beautiful witch cavorting in a ‘cutty sark’ a sort of short shift. If you drink up the whiskey, it all makes perfect sense.

Opening times, transport links and maps can all be found at the website below.

The Cutty Sark

Two days after the stranding every available lighter and coaster in the West Country was assembled to offload all the cargo and passenger belongings in a race against worsening weather. Divers were sent down to inspect the hull and because the forepart was so damaged they used explosives to shear off the bows from the relatively undamaged remainder of the ship which then floated free. Since this part of the ship contained all the machinery , boilers and passenger accommodation it was decided to tow it to Southampton. The owners, The White Star Line, they of Titanic fame, had a new bows built in Belfast , towed around to Southampton where it was grafted onto the old part of the ship. Thus the Suevic was reborn to sail another day.

During the First World War she served as a troop ship, then in 1929 was sold to a Norwegian whaling company and renamed Skyttern. She survivd as a whale factory ship until 1942, when during the Second World War her crew scuttled her in the Skagerrack to prevent her falling into German hands.

You can still get down to the old lifeboat station on the Lizard and it is easy to see the rocks where the Suevic was stranded. The RNLI have placed a board on the path near the café’s illustrating the story. While you are drinking in the wild beauty of this the most southerly headland in Britain take the opportunity to walk up the coast path to the Lizard lighthouse. (you can drive there as well, it has a large car park) The light house was established in 1619 by a philanthropic Cornishman, Sir James Killegrew. The lighthouse is 19 metres high, but stands 70 metres above sea level making it one of the highest in the country and its light can be seen for 26 nautical miles.

Lizard Light

The whole site had been recently refurbished with lottery money and has a small but interesting museum, a shop and of course you can also do conducted tours of the lighthouse which is great because you get to stand right at the top with the light going around revolving on its bed of mercury. The views are breath taking and the whole area is still relatively unspoilt. The cafes further down are very nice and not too expensive. For the more hardy among you let me recommend the walk across the cliffs to Kynance. The scenery is magnificent, and you feel that you are in a separate country all off its own. Well that’s Cornwall for you.

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]]> http://www.submerged.co.uk/the-wreck-of-the-suevic-2.php/feed 0 http://www.submerged.co.uk/the-wreck-of-the-kyber.php http://www.submerged.co.uk/the-wreck-of-the-kyber.php#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2012 15:45:15 +0000 Peter Mitchell http://www.submerged.co.uk/?p=2089 The Kyber was an iron windjammer of 1967 tons, launched on Merseyside in 1880 for the Indian trade of the Brocklebank Shipping Line. In 1899 she was sold to the Calgate Shipping Company of liverpool and it was under this management that she embarked on what was to be her last voyage.On September 16th 1904 the Kyber was at the mouth of the Yarra River, Melbourne Australia, with orders to sail for Queenstown in Ireland with a cargo of 3000 tons of Victorian wheat. The voyage went well and on March 1905 she was 138 days out from Melbourne approaching the Cornish coast, when she was spotted by the lighthouse keepers on the Wolf Rock running before a freshening south westerly wind on course for the Lizard. However, as the day wore on the weather worsened with the wind rising to a near gale forcing the Kyber inexorably into Mounts Bay, which is between Lands End and the Lizard.

Painting of the Kyber about to strike the cliffs

The men at the Coast Guard station were joined by the Cox’n of the Porthleven lifeboat who had seen the Kyber wallowing in heavy seas too far to leeward to get around the Lizard. He sent also sent a telegram to Falmouth for tugs to attend the vessel. As night fell the situation on the Kyber was getting desperate. All the sails were blown away making the ship impossible to manage in the heavy seas. Captain Henry Rothery let off distress signals and fired rockets when he was able to make out the outline of the Lizard light through the driving rain but it was all to no avail, around eleven o’clock that night, as the ship was pushed closer to the shore the captain let go two bow anchors to halt the drift of the Kyber, which was now, only 400 yards from the rocky cliffs of Portloe. The wind was whipping the sea’s to a frenzy with huge waves driving straight over the ship as she sank into the deep troughs, becoming submerged from stem to stern. Although the anchor ropes were bar taught they still held firm. On land the drama was hidden by the driving rain and pitch black sky, so it was not until dawn the following morning that the rocket crew from Sennen were alerted. The lifeboat could not be launched as the storm had flung great rocks all over the slipway so the rocket crew made its way up the hill towards Portloe.

The Kyber, smashed to matchwood
At the same time as dawn broke the crew on the Kyber, who had been clinging to the rigging for over seven hours were in desperate straits half drowned and almost frozen to death. The ship was by now just a collection of bits of wood still held together by hope, but still she inched closer towards the cliffs as her anchors started to drag. As the Rocket crew ran as fast as they could towards the stricken ship, disaster finally struck. The anchor ropes were as stiff as iron bars under the immense strain and when a huge wave tore over the ship, it pounded onto her port side, turning the Kyber to leeward. The mizzen mast collapsed, then the fore and main mast, flinging the crew into the water. The stern smashed down onto the rocks breaking the vessel amidships. Within a few minutes the Kyber was a mass of debris scattered all over the beach surrounded by a sea full of floating wheat.

Leonard Willis
Only three of the crew escaped. John Harries an apprentice managed to jump overboard just before she struck, Gustavus Johannson and Leonard Willis dropped from the stern onto a patch of rocks and were rescued by fishermen and coastguards who had rushed to the scene with the Rocket brigade, who arrived to find that their job was done. The bodies of Captain Henry Rothery and 22 of the crew were later recovered and buried by the side of the tower at St. Levan church.

Only this small marker for the souls of the Kyber
St. Levan Church is set in a pretty secluded valley some distance from the village of St. Levan. The church proper goes back to the 15th century but some parts are Norman. The Kybers’ grave is right by the tower, and near a great cleft stone known as the St. Levan Stone. It dates back to pre Christian times and has an interesting prophecy made by the Saint which says, that when a packhorse with panniers astride can walk through the crack, then the world is done. You can see more on this interesting Church at their website.

St.Levan Church

The Church - The St.Levan Stone

Nearby to the tower is the grave of Vice Admiral Cecil Ponsonby Talbot KBC,KBE,DSO. 1884-1970.
The career of this man is incredible. It reads like a ‘Boys Own’ comic. He was in the Boxer Rebellion in China and served at Jutland. Furthermore he became one of the first submarine commanders of the Geat War, and also joined the Naval Air service in airships and blimps. Serving with distinction in the Second War he became the youngest Admiral since Nelson. The list goes on and on. I have copied a few photos from his Sons’ excellent website just to give you a flavour of those bygone days. I urge you to visit the two sites below, to learn more about this truly remarkable man

Vice Admiral Sir Cecil Ponsonby Talbot

Vice Admiral Ponsonby Talbot, photo collection

Airship No1 - Talbot is in the chair

The Vice Admiral - Subs at Torquay

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