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
Cutty Sark it was possible for a sailing vessel to take a tug through the canal, this was difficult and expensive. Furthermore, sailing conditions in the northern Red Sea were unsuited to the design of a tea clipper, so they still had to sail around Africa. Less obviously, steamship design had taken a large step forward in 1866 with "Agamemnon", using higher boiler pressure and a compound engine, so obtaining a large improvement in fuel efficiency. Ships of this type could compete with clippers before the Suez Canal opened. When the tea clippers arrived in China in 1870, they found a big