Cutty Sark wind. The ship was named after Cutty-sark, the nickname of the witch Nannie Dee in Robert Burns's 1791 poem "Tam o' Shanter". The ship's figurehead, the original of which has been attributed to carver Fredrick Hellyer of Blackwall, is a stark white carving of a bare-breasted Nannie Dee with long black hair holding a grey horse's tail in her hand. In the poem she wore a linen (Scots: a short chemise or undergarment), that she had been given as a child, which explains why it was "cutty", or in other words far too short. The erotic sight of her dancing
Great Tea Race of 1866 she was lost either in 1889 or 1893. "Taitsing" continued in the China trade, carrying her last cargo of tea in 1874/75 (101 days Foochow to New York). She was lost on the Quirimbas Islands in 1883, en route from Swansea to Zanzibar. "Cutty Sark", built in 1869, in the belief that the Suez Canal and steamships would not take over the tea trade, remains as virtually the sole physical reminder of the tea clipper era that was epitomised by the Great Tea Race of 1866. Great Tea Race of 1866 In the middle third of the 19th Century, the