Cutty-sark (witch) "chemise", or "shirt". The earliest recorded literary usage of the term "cutty sark" (as opposed to older usage of the two separate words) is by Dougal Graham in c. 1779 (the year of his death): "A cutty sark of guide harn sheet, My mitter he pe spin, mattam." In Burns' 1791 poem Tam o' Shanter, the drunken Tam, riding home on his horse, happens upon a witches' dance. Among the dancing figures is a particularly beautiful young witch named Nannie (Scots pet-form of Anna), "ae winsome wench and wawlie" (line 164). She is wearing a "harn" (linen) "sark" (nightshirt) which
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