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The loss of a fine landmark – at least for a while Libby Purves, the Times columnist, has a nice appreciation of the Cutty Sark, which was partly destroyed by fire yesterday. The burning of the Cutty Sark clipper ship appears, judging by some reports, to have been started deliberately. I have long since given up trying to fathom what goes through the minds – for want of a better word – of the pondlife who get a buzz out of torching old monuments like this 19th century vessel. An active hatred or pranksterish contempt for the past soon spills over into a defilement of the present and eventually, lack of interest in the future (very Burkean, ed).
Some time ago, I reflected on how the clipper ships like the Cutty Sark were a demonstration of how globalised the 19th Century was in terms of trade. Anyway, let’s hope the vessel can be restored. It is certainly one of the finest sights in Greenwhich, in the eastern part of London and a major tourist attraction.
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I dunno the first thing about building ships, but on first impressions it seems what is required is the blueprints and the authentic materials used in her construction.
If this is arson, what I would like to see done to the culprit is almost beyond description. Greenwich is a lovely spot, and the Cutty Sark is one of the (many) things that gives it its charm.
It might be we could actually learn something from the old Tea Clippers.
Fast, no jettisoned oil or fuel, powered by renewable energy, low environmental impact construction mostly of renewable resources – that are also carbon sinks…
It ticks all the green boxes and looks as if it could be cheap too.
A larger, modern, largely computer controlled, equivalent could probably have a small crew and fairly minimal running costs.
Still less environmental impact would have those galleys run by slave power.
Phil, don’t be daft. Those clippers were slaves to the wind and were tossed about like toys.
Phil,
Although modern sailing vessels can be very efficient, they still can’t get round not being able to go into the wind. This makes journey times hard to predict, and undermines their usefulness. They would also require more (and better trained) crew than a power vessel.
Single hulled sailing vessels tend to heel away from the wind, and this makes safely stowing cargo more difficult. Multi-hulled sailing vessels large enough to be commercially viable have never been built, but even if they were, I suspect they would be far to wide to use any existing port facilities.
However, there is some serious research into the use of very large kites to provide supplemental power for large ships when the wind is behind them.
There is some interest in the Cutty Sark here on the banks of the Clyde, since it was built at Dumbarton. It’s very sad news indeed, all the more so since the only other surviving clipper in Britain, the Carrick, currently in the Maritime Museum at Irvine having spent many years moored in central Glasgow (I remember it as a rather sad sight with no masts and a pitched roof in place of a deck), was recently declared beyond restoration. I hope we’ll soon hear of better news regarding the Cutty Sark.
Maybe this sort of thing is what Phil has in mind. There’s a picture of it here.
Jacob – If you are volunteering… I can’t see anyone else though, not even Infra Greens – except to bang the drum maybe. Ramming Speed!
Elija, I didn’t say build a replica. I had in mind something bigger and hi-tech modern with computer controlled systems and from what I understand modern sailing ships have back-up engines… I suppose you could secure containers. The wind is a resource that it seems a shame to waste.
On many trade routes the winds are quite predictable in strength and direction although this does mean that the ship may have to take an arced route instead of a straight line. If the hourly cost of running the vessel is reduced by using wind power then a little extra time may be a fair trade off. Depends on the cargo. To my mind the saving in fossil fuels is a bonus and CO2 emissions irrelevent. The real buzz is in designing a vessel and efficient aerofoils that could bring on the science of big ship wind power from where it stagnated in the middle of the 19 century.
However if the ship had both sails and engines it does not have the drawbacks of being solely reliant upon the wind and, in any case, many of the sailing ships of the clipper era had journey times that still rival modern vessels.
I remember Dr Gabb explaining how the maritime museum at G. has been partly undermined by some of the detailed models of ships being removed (and other things removed as well) and replaced by P.C. displays.
On rebuilding it is the skill of the craftsmen (what F.A. Hayek used to call “tacit” knowledge – i.e. knowledge that can not be put into words or on bits of paper or other displays) that will determine whether it can be done or not.
Whether or not the old knowledge has been lost.
The correspondents who hanker after a return to sailing ships seem to have overlooked the last ship featured on this website. The Stella Marske, if I rightly recall, 150,000 tons, crew of 19.
My knowledge of sailing ships is limited to reading Horatio Hornblower, but somehow I don’t think 19 men can work a sailing ship that size…
The impression I ‘ve always gotten was that clippers were the SSTs of their day. They were relatively small, to make them more streamlined, and needed large crews to handle their huge course of sails. This translated into small cargo capacity and high speed. Thus, they were economical only carrying high-value persishable or luxury goods. Tea was the classic cargo. There was also a thriving trade carrying Chinese porcelenware to the Eastern US, and trade chinaware is avidly collected over here.
Modern sailing vessels would not closely resemble traditional ones. Downwind sails would probably be very large kites, attached to the ship only by cables, and kept trimmed remotely by computer and electrical servo motors.
Upwind sails could well be entirely rigid, resembling flattened pillars rising vertically from the hull. Such designs have been successfully tested. They too could easily be centrally controlled.
Even if fixed masts and flexible sails were used, control would be largely automated.
However, such vessels would almost certainly require thrusters and engines if they are to be able to dock without extensive help from tugs, and be able to pass the Panama and Suez canals without tugs. It would be expensive to have to fit engines as well sails, even if the engines need not be as powerful. Also, once you have a stern screw or screws, you vastly increase hull drag, making your sails much less effective.
There may well be opportunities for modern commerical sailing vessels or hybrid vessels, but the engineering issues aren’t trivial.
The first generation of modern sail freighters will probably be based on a more or less schooner (fore and aft rigged) design with stowable masts for going under bridges, etc. Single masted schooner rigs, which is what sloops really are, have been highly automated on luxury yachts. I think it could scale quite well. Push-button sailing is easily conceivable. Streamlined folding props are a pain in the stern on modern sail auxiliaries, but I think those problems will go away with scale.
I think rigid wings, etc will wait for the next generation.
She won’t get rebuilt with public money, there isn’t any since the budget that could do it is being directed at the white elephant reserve in east London otherwise known as the Olympics. Not that white elephants are a particually endangered species. If anything happens it will happen through private charitable donations, so this black cloud could have the silver lining of show how effective that is.
HMS Warrior combined screw and sail, getting over the drag problems of the screw hanging out the back when sailing by having it detachable and able to be hoisted up into the ship. They didn’t actually use this facility because it was such a pain to do.
Personally I would go with impellors, when you shift to sailing mode just slide covers over the ports to it and it would add no drag. Not sure how well they scale though.
Question for sailors among us: Most of the sailboats I have seen have had fore-and-aft sails like a sloop. They use a spinnaker only some of the time.
Yet, the big sailing ships seem to be rigged mostly with square rigs. The fore and aft sails are smaller and confined to the bow.
Why is that? Wouldn’t a square rig make it more difficult to sail upwind? And, if sails were to be added as auxiliary power to cargo ships, would they be square rigged or fore and aft?
Jack, among traditional, common rigs, the most efficient design is a Bermuda rigged sloop. A single mast. Schooners (multiple masted, fore and aft rigged) don’t point (head up wind) as well as sloops because the upwind sails shadow (disturb the airflow over) the downwind sails. But they are still pretty good over a variety of headings and, mostly, are a lot easier to sail with a small (or automated) crew than square riggers.
My understanding of square riggers is that they are optimized for broad reaching and running (~135 degrees off the wind or more). This is why they sought out ‘trade’ winds, winds that were going where they wanted to go. I suspect although I do not know, that favorable ‘trade’ winds made certain areas more accessible and therefore more developed and and desirable than others.
Some of my friends and I, in some of our late night, two or three pitcher sailing conversations, discussed commercial sail and the general consensus was for mechanized schooners with auxiliary power. A few people suggested that with efficient storage, batteries could save power while under way for use later, but the general consensus on that point was that most of the time that energy is best spent going faster rather than charging batteries.
An interesting point about square riggers pointing up wind, viking boats were technically single masted square riggers. And yet they out pointed anything of the time and even did respectably well by todays sloop standards. Generally speaking, the big problem is the more masts, the less you can point.
I should also add that wind shadow is a speed reducer going dead down wind as well. Most racers under most conditions will tack (zig zag) down wind rather than heading straight down. This is for at least two reasons. Firstly, dead down the mains’l shadows the spinnaker, and secondly, sails are more efficient as airfoils than as air plows or parachutes, therefore pointing up to a broad reach generates smooth flow over the sail and makes it much more efficient.
Johnathan Marks and others here probably sail more and better than I do, not to mention have better historical knowledge, and they may have corrections or amendments to these comments.
I was thinking about both Paul and Johnathan as potentially having a lot to contribute to this topic and I hybridized their names. Just to correct, Johnathan is an avid sailor and Paul has phenomenal knowledge of what drove trade and I suspect he can also answer about the capabilities of ships, historically.
My apologies to both of you, Johnathan Pearce and Paul Marks.
When I was a kid I dreamed of building the model of the Cutty Sark, but I could not afford it…. and by the time I could have I was off to college, and then the family home burned down and with it most of my large collection of model ships and planes (some of which were displayed in the local hobby store for a few years whilst I was a teen).
I have never walked the decks of that ship, but I loved the look of her from childhood.
My suggestion, should they find the arsonists, is to loan him to the Belfast Unionists for their July bonfires. You know, tie him onto a few beams in the middle of the wood pile and toast to his screaming demise…
Hell, I’d even visit ‘the other neighborhood’ for that summary pleasure.
I have two hopes for the outcome. First that the culprit is caught, and, second that there is a realistic appraisal of what can be reconstructed for future display. Recall the boastful young man:
“This was my grandfather’s axe. Many years ago my father replaced the head, and I have replaced the handle.”
It was a stroke of extremely good fortune that so many of the vessel’s interior fittings, the masts, etc were in storage elsewhere at the time, and at least one of the decks which was destroyed was due to be replaced anyway. I just hope that the ironwork has escaped significant damage, as it would be a lot more difficult to put right.
I’m also wondering when some over-excitable journalist will decide to pin the blame for the fire on a- Qu’aeda…