In the middle third of the 19th century, the clippers which carried cargoes of tea from China to Britain would compete in informal tea races to be first ship to dock in London with the new crop of each season. These races were also known as the races from China. The consignees of these cargoes wanted to be first in the market with this new crop, so they started to offer a "premium" to a ship that was the first to dock in London in that tea season.[1]:13
The premium existed as an extra freight payment written into the bill of lading. The first ship known to sail with this contractual provision was Vision, with a premium of an extra £1 per ton in 1854. A more general premium had become established by 1861, when an extra 10 shillings per ton was given to the first clipper arriving in London, being written into the bills of lading of all the ships loading in China at the beginning of the tea season.[1]:13
A fast sailing clipper would usually obtain a higher rate of freight than other vessels. So the passage time of ships was important for negotiating the price paid to carry their next cargo. The first identifiable ship to carry a tea cargo with an increased freight based on her performance record was the American China packet Oriental, receiving £2 10 shillings per ton more than any other vessel loading that year. (The normal rate of freight varied between about £3 10s and £5 10s per ton during the 1860s.) When the premium ceased to be offered to clippers after 1866, clippers still competed for the ability to negotiate a better price for their next tea passage.[1]:13, 72, 157
History
The main commodity, which promised considerable profits to merchants, was Chinese tea. Carried on old ships,[2] it sometimes stayed on the road for 12 months, damp and saturated with the smells of the hold, moldy and rotten, because of which it lost quality and its price fell.
In 1834, the East India Company lost its monopoly on trade with China. In the years immediately after this, the independent British tea merchants used ships called Blackwall frigates for China trade. These were smaller versions of the East Indiaman that had been used during the monopoly. As well, some ships were built with finer lines (to achieve faster voyages) during the second half of the 1830s[lower-alpha 1] or were transferred from other routes,[lower-alpha 2] having characteristics of clippers.[1]:34–35[3]:25–26
The conclusion of the First Opium War in 1842 resulted in the imposition on China of five treaty ports, giving British merchants better access to Chinese trade. By 1843, these benefits had also been extended to American ships. American merchants built China packets to carry tea back to the United States.[3]:28
In 1849, the Navigation Acts were repealed, based on the principle of free trade. The carriage of tea from China to the United Kingdom was therefore no longer restricted to British vessels, so American ships could now take cargoes to London. In 1850, the American China packet, Oriental made a record-breaking outward passage of 81 days from New York to Hong Kong. British merchants immediately contracted her to carry tea to London, paying a very favourable £6 per ton (compared to the usual £4 per ton of 50cuft (1.4m3) offered to British ships[lower-alpha 3]). She made the trip from Whampoa to London in 99 days. This produced comment in the British press who managed to take some comfort from the British clipper John Bunyan, earlier in the year, sailing from Shanghai to Deal in 101 days and London in 102. This happened at the end of the previous tea season. It was not a fair comparison as the British ship had benefitted from the more favourable monsoon at that time of the year.[1]:66–69,70–72
In 1851, from Hood's Scottish Shipyard in Aberdeen (Great Britain, Scotland), clippers went after the Americans: «Stornaway» and «Cryselight». In 1852, the clipper «Challenger» came off Green's shipyard in Blackwall, built according to drawings developed on the basis of measurements from the Oriental.[4]
«Hound Dogs of the Ocean»[5] is the nickname in British Isles for clipper ships that delivered cargo from China in three to four months[6]
Since 1860, the British have not chartered American clippers. The clipper «Flying Cloud» was the last American ship to bring tea to London. Since 1859, when 11 clippers left Chinese ports at the same time, tea races began to be held regularly.[7]
Between May 26 and May 28, 1866, 16 clippers launched from the raid of the city of Fuzhou (China). After a long journey, September 5 clipper ships: Taiping and Ariel with a difference of 10 minutes at the mouth of the Thames took on board the pilots. There was a lot of hype in the press about this, and the owners of Taiping, having received the award, shared it with the owners of Ariel. And the captain of the Taiping shared his personal bonus with the captain of the Ariel.[8]
The tea races attracted public attention at the time and were widely publicized in newspapers.[9]
A clipper is not in the table if he participated in less than two races x — Participated «n» — place lost — «Ariel» during the next «tea race» went missing (died), and nothing is known about his fate, as well as about the fate of the crew.
Cutty Sark is the only (accidentally) three-masted composite tea clipper that has survived to this day, and therefore the world's most famous representative of the magnificent galaxy of sailing clippers, the Hounds of the Ocean. In proportions, design and size, the ship is close to the unsurpassed racer — the clipper 'Thermopylae. Clipper «Cutty Sark» was built in 1869 at the Scottish shipyard «Linton & Scott» by special order of the shipowner John Willis, to participate in tea races. The length of this three-masted vessel with 29 main sails was 64.8 m, beam 11.0 m, draft 6.4 m. The Cutty Sark holds the 24-hour record of 363 miles, average ship speed (according to some reports 17.5 knots).[11]
Since 1870, Cutty Sark has been operated on the tea line, but the results shown are rated as average. The clipper's highest achievement was third place in the race 1871, when the Cutty Sark only let the legendary hounds ahead — «Titania» and «Thermopylae».
Sunset
In 1860, the steamship 'Scotland' made its first voyage from Shanghai to Hankou. In 1863, the steamer Robert Low brought cargo from Hankow to London, most of which was tea.[12] In 1866, SSAgamemnon travelled from Liverpool to Shanghai in 80 days and back in 86 days. Her sister ships, Ajax and Achilles were launched in 1866 and 1867 respectively. (Ocean Steam Company) In 1869, the Suez Canal was opened,[12] and the path for steamships was significantly reduced. In 1887, from Bombay to London by steamboat took 16.5 days, from Melbourne — 35 days.[13] They began to come first, to carry the best cargo, to get more profit. Large sailboats had to go to other routes.
↑ The "ton" used in the bills of lading of British and American ships was a measure of volume. At this time, the British ton was 50 cu ft and the American ton 40 cu ft.
Related Research Articles
A clipper was a type of mid-19th-century merchant sailing vessel, designed for speed. The term was also retrospectively applied to the Baltimore clipper, which originated in the late 18th century.
Cutty Sark is a British clipper ship. Built on the River Leven, Dumbarton, Scotland in 1869 for the Jock Willis Shipping Line, she was one of the last tea clippers to be built and one of the fastest, at the end of a long period of design development for this type of vessel, which ended as steamships took over their routes. She was named after the short shirt of the fictional witch in Robert Burns' poem Tam o' Shanter, first published in 1791.
Thermopylae was an extreme composite clipper ship built in 1868 by Walter Hood & Co of Aberdeen, to the design of Bernard Waymouth of London. Designed for the China tea trade, she set a speed record on her maiden voyage to Melbourne of 63 days, still the fastest trip under sail.
Ariel was a clipper ship famous for making fast voyages between China and England in the late 1860s. She is most famous for almost winning The Great Tea Race of 1866, an unofficial race between Fuzhou, China and London with the first tea crop of the 1866 season.
Blackadder was a clipper, a sister ship to Hallowe'en, built in 1870 by Maudslay, Sons & Field at Greenwich for Jock Willis & Sons.
Lothair was a British clipper ship built by William Walker and launched in Rotherhithe, London, on 2 July 1870. After many years of service as a tea clipper, she was operated by merchants in Italy and Peru before being lost in 1910.
Sir Lancelot was a clipper ship which sailed in the China trade and the India-Mauritius trade.
The Taeping was a tea clipper built in 1863 by Robert Steele & Company of Greenock and owned by Captain Alexander Rodger of Cellardyke, Fife. Over her career, Taeping was the first clipper to dock in London in three different tea seasons. This compares with the highly successful Fiery Cross, who won the "premium" in four separate tea seasons.
In the middle third of the 19th century, the clippers which carried cargoes of tea from China to Britain would compete in informal races to be first ship to dock in London with the new crop of each season. The Great Tea Race of 1866 was keenly followed in the press, with an extremely close finish. Taeping docked 28 minutes before Ariel - after a passage of more than 14,000 miles. Ariel had been ahead when the ships were taken in tow by steam tugs off Deal, but after waiting for the tide at Gravesend the deciding factor was the height of tide at which one could enter the different docks used by each ship. The third finisher, Serica, docked an hour and 15 minutes after Ariel. These three ships had left China on the same tide and arrived at London 99 days later to dock on the same tide. The next to arrive, 28 hours later, was Fiery Cross, followed, the next day, by Taitsing.
Fiery Cross was a famous British tea clipper which sailed in the Great Tea Race of 1866. She was the first ship home in the tea seasons of 1861, 1862, 1863, and 1865.
Flying Spur was a British tea clipper, built of teak and greenheart in 1860.
Ambassador is a United Kingdom tea clipper built in 1869. She was a composite clipper, built with wooden planking over an iron skeleton and was W. Lund & Co's first tea clipper. She is now a beached wreck in southern Chile.
Lahloo was a British tea clipper known for winning the Tea Race of 1870, and finishing second in the Tea Race of 1871. She sailed from Fuzhou to London with over a million pounds of tea in 1868.
The SS Erl King was built at A and J Inglis, Pointhouse, Glasgow and launched in 1865 and owned by Robertson & Co London. She was designed as an Auxiliary Steam Ship - steam power would be used to supplement the propulsion from the sails, when there was no wind or if there was a light head wind. She was fitted with a propeller that could be lifted up when sailing, so as to reduce drag. The engine was not powerful enough to push the ship, with all the windage of standing rigging, directly into a strong headwind. Auxiliary steam power had the advantage of allowing this vessel to use the Suez Canal when it opened in 1869 - something which was not possible for sailing vessels.
Lord of the Isles was the first iron-hulled tea clipper, built in Greenock in 1853. She served in the tea trade until 1862, and also made voyages to Australia. She is known for a record passage between Greenock and Shanghai, and for her close finish in the 1856 Tea Race from China to England, docking in London just ten minutes before Maury. This race was the basis for the plot of a 1927 movie by Cecil B. DeMille The Yankee Clipper.
Windhover was a British tea clipper built in the closing years of construction of this sort of ship. She measured 847 tons NRT. Like the majority of the tea clippers built in the second half of the 1860s, she was of composite construction. She was built by Connell and Co, Glasgow, Scotland in 1868.
John Willis & Sons of London, also called the Jock Willis Shipping Line, was a nineteenth-century London-based ship-owning firm. It owned a number of clippers including the historic tea clipper Cutty Sark.
Alfred Basil Lubbock MC was a British historian, sailor and soldier. He was a prolific writer on the last generation of commercial sailing vessels in the Age of Sail. He was an early (1911) member of the Society for Nautical Research, served on its council (1921–1924) and contributed to its journal, The Mariner's Mirror.
Osaka, A composite barque, built by William Pile, Sunderland, at Yard No. 179 for Killick Martin & Company, the company founded by Captain James Killick and launched on 12 July 1869. William Pile also built Osaka's sister ship Miako, for Killick Martin & Company launched on 15 April 1869.
The Great Tea Race of 1872 was a regatta, held in 1872 between two "tea clippers" Cutty Sark and Thermopylae.
References
1 2 3 4 5 MacGregor, David R. (1983). The Tea Clippers, Their History and Development 1833-1875. Conway Maritime Press Limited. ISBN0-85177-256-0.
1 2 MacGregor, David R (1993). British and American Clippers: A Comparison of their Design, Construction and Performance. London: Conway Maritime Press Limited. ISBN0-85177-588-8.
Campbell, George Frederick (1954). China Tea Clippers. A. Coles.
Skrjagin, L. N. (2015). Золотой Век Паруса (корабли Семи морей)[The Golden Age of Sail (Ships of the Seven Seas)]. Modelist-Konstruktor. On earth, in the heavens and on the sea (in Russian) (9): 19–24.
Hume, Cyril L.; Armstrong, Malcolm C. The Cutty Sark and Thermopylae Era of Sail. Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1987 (hardcover, ISBN0-85174-500-8).
Matheson, Marny. Clippers for the record: The story of ship Thermopylae, S.S. Aberdeen, and Captain Charles Matheson. Melbourne: Spectrum, 1984 ( ISBN0-86786-051-0).
Crosse, John; Thermopylae and the Age of Clippers. Historian Publishers, Vancouver.
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