Cutty Sark

Cutty Sark is a composite-hull tea clipper built at Dumbarton in 1869 for the China trade, one of the last and fastest of her type. Iron framing planked in wood let her carry large sail areas; she later made record wool passages from Australia. Preserved in dry dock at Greenwich since 1954 and restored after a 2007 fire, she is the sole surviving extreme tea clipper and a centerpiece of the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. Her name comes from a short shift worn by the witch in Burns’s poem Tam o’ Shanter.