Dan Snow's History Hit - The Cutty Sark

Episode Date: July 13, 2024

1/4. Join Dan for the first episode in a mini-series telling four stories of ships that have shaped Britain and its maritime history, from the trade that kickstarted the global food chain to the technology that revolutionised our ability to conquer the seas.The Cutty Sark was the fastest ship of her day and could carry over a million pounds of tea from China back to Britain for a thirsty Victorian public. She ruled the waves at the height of Britain's imperial century as she carried trade goods across the globe as far as Australia. To make the treacherous journey across the world's biggest oceans, she was equipped with state-of-the-art technology and surveyed by the Lloyd's Register, the world's first ship classification society. Before the Lloyd's Register, shipbuilding in Britain was something of a wild west.Dan and Senior Archivists from Lloyd's Register Foundation Max Wilson and Zach Schieferstein meet on board the Cutty Sark to delve into the story of this magnificent ship and what it tells us about shipbuilding and trade in the 19th century.You can find out more about Lloyd's Register Foundation, its history and its work that supports research, innovation and education to help the global community tackle the most pressing safety and risk challenges. Just go to https://hec.lrfoundation.org.uk/Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Peta Stamper is the production manager and Beth Donaldson is the production coordinator for the series 'Ships that Made the British Empire'.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In the 1780s, things were looking a bit terminal for the British Empire. The American colonies, well some of them, not Canada, thankfully, had successfully won their independence. Britain seemed to have lost its great source of cotton, of tobacco, timber. It looked like a savage, irreversible economic blow. There was turbulence at home in Britain. Can you believe it?

There were three prime ministers in one year. Times were tough. And Britain's enemies celebrated. But remarkably, over the next two generations, something really extraordinary happened. Far from faltering, the British economy boomed. British trade exploded. It seemed that you didn't need to physically control raw materials

or resources in order to trade them, to exploit them, to carry them in your ships, to insure the cargoes. Britain's industry, its factories, were in the grip of a revolution. Machines were now doing the work of men and women. Britain's shipyards were producing vast numbers of ships to carry these new exports or bring in the raw materials to feed them. The British were able to explore, they were able to find new sources of timber and cotton, sometimes by extending formal control by conquering areas, but often by just bribing and beguiling, coercing local elites to open up access to markets. All of this was made possible by Britain's powerful

navy which ensured that its merchant ships were able to have free reign over the world's oceans. So I always think that Britain's trading power was really even greater than Britain's collection of colonies and possessions suggested because British merchants and ships and financiers thronged the wharves of ports in places like China and Syria and South America, which actually lay outside Britain's formal empire, but were very much part of Britain's international trading system. And this is a podcast about a central plank of that system, the vessels, the ships that carried the British flag, British goods, finance and language to every continent.

So this is the first episode, a little mini-series, that brings you the story of four ships that shaped Britain's maritime history and that of the world as well. From the trade that kick-started the global food chain that we recognise today, recognise today, to disasters that revolutionise our ability to survive on the oceans, to sail, to plough those oceans without peril. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. This is a collaboration with Lloyd's Register Foundation. They have a long history of these stories because they are the world's first ship classification society and they hold some of the detailed records we have about our maritime history. This is episode one, the Cutty Sark. Trade in Britain's Century. Well, I'm really in my happy place now.

I've got the solid teak deck of a ship beneath my feet. I'm surrounded by a forest of sheets and halyards, and above me is a cathedral of sail. Iron masts stretching far into the sky, crossed by yards, all gleaming. their paintwork perfect, as if ready to go to sea. I'm standing on one of the greatest sailing ships ever constructed, the mighty Cutty Sark. It's here in the heart of London. It's sitting on the concrete on the banks of the Thames, but if you close your eyes, you can just believe that you're surging at 17 and a half knots on the

world's fastest sailing cargo ship through the South China Sea, the trade winds at your back, acres of sail filling and powering this mighty ship, leaving its wake straight and true behind us. But I open my eyes, I look around, and I'm in Greenwich, which is actually not much worse. Greenwich is a wonderful place. Not only is the Cutty Sark here, I look across at the old Naval College, the beautiful 18th century building in which naval cadets once trained to fill the ranks of heroes in the Royal Navy. Beyond that we have the National Maritime Museum and on a hill above the Royal Observatory, which means how many meters away now from the Greenwich Meridian? Zero degrees. Which since about 1884 has been the universally recognized world standard

for recognizing longitude which helps sailors work out where they are on the earth's surface stops them hitting things and helps them get to where they want to go in safety it's a beautiful summer's day in london and the cutty sark is well the varnished wood is gleaming golden in the sunlight i've got the whole place to myself it's before opening and it's just a fabulous experience and the Cutty Sark is, well, the varnished wood is gleaming golden in the sunlight. I've got the whole place to myself before opening, and it's just a fabulous experience. Below me, I've got the tween deck, which would have been packed with crates of tea when it was doing the China trade. Then we've got the lower hole beneath that, also full of cargo.

And above me, well, you've just got this giant rig. On the way to China, Cutty Sark would be expected to go through patches, a very light breeze. And so they created the most enormous rig they could. The mast above me now, the main mast, was originally stood 45 metres high above the deck, capable of carrying a huge amount of sail to catch whatever little breeze there might be, whatever puff of wind to help take them over the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea. This was the fastest and most perfect cargo-carrying sailing ship ever built by human hands right in the dying days of the age of sail. Just the steam engine

was chuff-chuffing its way to mastery. And what I love about Katisak is that she was built as a way to rage against the dying of the light. She was built as one last throw of the dice, as people thought perhaps sail, perhaps wind, might be able to take on steam, might be able to defeat the screw-driven ships that were coming onto the scene. She was built in Scotland in 1869 by John Willis. He was a businessman.

And she's an embodiment of Britain's maritime and trading wealth of the period. People like John Willis were interested in exporting manufactured goods from the workshop of the world here in Britain and then buying commodities to bring home for the market elsewhere around the world. In the case of this ship, particularly, the tea from China. Having walked the main deck, I'm going to go below now because I'm going to meet a couple of guests

who can really tell me the story of the Cutty Sarks' contribution to Britain's empire of trade. I'm meeting Max Wilson and Zach Schiefer-Stein, both archivists at Lloyd's Register Foundation. I'm going to help me trace the history of the Cutty Sarks with the incredibly detailed documents in the Lloyd's Register archive that still survive. Hi Zach, hi Max, how's it going? Yeah, very well thanks. Yeah, very well. We are on one of the greatest ships of all time.

Absolutely, yeah. Have you been on here before? You've written so much about it, have you ever been on, Zach? No, I've never been on, so my first time being on board, so it's a great experience. We could put a face to the name. Max, in the 19th century we all focus on the big red blotches on the map, the British Empire, but actually Britain's trading empire, if you trading empire extended way beyond that, didn't it? Where is Britain trading at this point?

So the common saying that we know of with the British Empire is that the sun never sets on the British Empire. The idea being that it's so large that the sun is always shining at any given point at one of its territories. that the sun is always shining at any given point at one of its territories. And so over the 19th century, following the defeat of Napoleon, this is often referred to as Britain's imperial century over the 19th century. So Britain's trading with its own colonies, it's conquering places and trading with them, but it's also trading much wider as well.

Yeah, I mean, it's worth making the point that by the time Queen Victoria ascends to the throne, the British Empire is already about 2 million square miles. It governs 100 million people. By the time of her death in 1901, it's about 12 million square miles and it's governing about 370 million. So it's grown hugely over this period. And so over the course of the 19th century, the Victorians are enjoying all these new products for the first time. And it's because it's trade and commerce that are driving the empire. So they're enjoying tea from China and India. It's coffee from the Middle East and the East.

It's spices from the Southeast, textiles from Egypt, timber from Canada, frozen meat from Australia and New Zealand, sugar from the Caribbean. And all of these things are being brought to Britain as raw commodities from these colonies. They're being used to make things raw commodities from these colonies. They're being used to make things in the manufacturing heartland of Britain and as a result all of these products are then made available to the colonies to be purchased either directly through or from

Britain itself. At this point Britain is regarded as the workshop of the world, so it has this major industrial and manufacturing heartland and over the 19th century you see this grow into things like mechanical engineering, ceramics, textiles, printed material, and a number of other luxury goods as well. And so all of these lucrative trades are being underpinned by Britain's powerful merchant fleet, which is delivering all of these goods. And who's protecting that merchant fleet? Because there are dangers on the high seas. So the merchant fleet is being protected chiefly by its very skilled, well-funded, powerful Royal Navy, which exists from 1805 and Britain's victory in the Battle of Trafalgar, largely unchallenged in the world.

And it's this Royal Navy that is really Britain's force in the world on the high seas, protecting that merchant fleet and the shipping lanes. What about this amazing ship we're on? How does this reflect the extraordinary shipbuilding, the innovation that took place here in Britain in the 19th century? So to maintain their edge shipbuilders and architects are having to pioneer and innovate new technologies and techniques of shipbuilding. We see this starkly over the 19th century. There are a number of quite key big developments and you know the reasons behind this are to maximize the speed of cargo delivery, it's to harness the cargo carrying capacity of

these ships, to bolster the safety of passengers and goods and to increase the number of journeys because the Empire is growing. There's a need to control it and there's a need to increase Britain's share of the global merchant trade. And so really over this period we start to see a number of really big changes in there's a need to control it and there's a need to increase Britain's share of the global merchant trade. And so really over this period we start to see a number of really big changes in shipbuilding. We see the move from the south to the north in terms of geography of the shipyards, you know, in places like the Humber, the Mersey, the Tyne, the Clyde. And we see the transformation of shipbuilding as being regarded more as a craft to where it is today as an engineering and technical science,

which is unsurprising obviously for an island nation that's making its living by the sea this is reflected by things like the creation in 1860 of the royal institute of naval architects as we know today but obviously it's the two major developments are fuel and materials so fuel in terms of the transition from sail to steam to diesel and in terms of materials from wood to iron to composite to steel. And to give an idea of, I suppose, the rough idea of this change when we're talking about fuel, in 1840, steamships make up just about 4% of Britain's overall merchant fleet. By about 1870, so just one year after the Cutty Sark is launched. Steam ships are about 20%. And then by 1890, steam ships make up nearly sort of three quarters, 75%. And to give an idea of, I suppose, the wider material change,

the Liverpool-based Bivy line in 1850 takes delivery of an iron screw steamer, which is about 276 gross registered tonnes. 20 years later in 1870, so again one year after the Cutty Sark is launched, it takes delivery of a steamship that's more than 3,000 tonnes. So it's increased by 10 times and so these shipyards that are being located across the 19th century in Hull, in Newcastle, Middlesbrough, Hartlepool, Liverpool, Dundee, Aberdeen, Glasgow, they are pioneering all of these most advanced iconic ships of the era and Cutty Sark represents a really unique chapter in that technological change Zach Max has told us it's the coming of steam the dawn of the era of steam

Why are they building a massive sailing ship in 1869? well, the sailing ships were still very reliable at that time and The reliability of the steam ships wasn't sort of tested as of yet And ships like the Cutty Sark that were built for a purpose of transporting tea, they were built for the speed of travelling long distances, getting the first tea of the season ready to sell for those high premiums. The Cutty Sark was built in 1869, built in Dumbarton in Scotland, by a relatively small shipbuilding company of Scotland Linton. It was commissioned by John White Hat Willis.

I'll let you guess why he got that nickname. And the first captain was George Moody, whose son would go on to serve on the ship as well. And he was sort of there inspecting the construction of the ship of the time. Give me the stats. How fast? So the fastest recorded speed was about 17.5 knots which is about 20 miles an hour doesn't sound too fast but for the time incredibly fast for a big container ship at the time that's insane yeah yeah and the further she traveled in the 24 hour period

was roughly 350 360 nautical miles in a day, which again is impressive. And it wasn't uncommon to make the journey from Shanghai to ports in Britain in about 100 to 120 days. And again, doesn't seem like it's that quick, but for the time it was really setting records. Record breaking. And not that many crew on board? No, no, relatively small crew considering. This changed depending on the journey, the trade,

who was owning it and where it was going. An average number is about 26 crewmen. Given that people might know HMS Victory, a big naval, that had something like 800 men on board. We get a sense of just how few people this ship was designed to be sailed by. Yes. Again, that changed over time when they changed the mast at one time to make it easier to have less crew. And we know that when it was under the British flag, there was about 650 people served on it throughout its entire lifetime, which, you know, when you compare that to massive war steamers and naval ships, it's really small. And we're on one of the cargo decks now, but this would have just been packed with chests of tea, would it?

Yeah, yeah. And whatever else she was trading. I mean, she's famous for the tea trade, but was also involved in war and cargos of all sorts, really. Was she bigger than what had come before? Yes. For the type of ship she was, had a gross tonnage of about 963, a length of 212.5, breadth of 36 feet, and a depth of 21 feet. It was a substantial-sized vessel. Is the economics to just carry more tea faster, you make a lot more money. Yeah, in simplified terms, yeah. And Zach, I think what's so interesting about Britain's period of naval domination is, yes, it ships at sea, yes, it's trade, but there's a kind of explosion of activity here in London as

well. It becomes the centre of all these service industries, whether it's surveying and insurance and legal affairs, and actually that legacy endures to this day. Yeah, yeah, it does. What was the job of the Lloyd's Register? To sort of start off with that, I'd say Lloyd's of London and Lloyd's of Register often get confused. They're not the same Lloyd's, but they started in the same place. So in the 1680s, have a coffee shop owned by a man called Edward Lloyds and ship owners, ship builders, underwriters, a lot of people in the maritime industries would meet in this coffee shop, have a coffee, talk about business. Edward Lloyds started to sort of, I guess, build on this and he

published a newspaper which eventually became Lloyds List and then from that you have the birth of the Society for the Register of Shipping, which is what Lloyd's Register is basically. So this is keeping track of all the shipping movements? Yes, so it was sort of born out of this desire to have reliable and up-to-date information on merchant shipping and sort of to make it safer as well. So for passengers, for cargo and for the crew, making sure they had a safe, reliable vessel was paramount really. And the role of the surveyors within Lloyd's Register was to make an assessment

of a ship a bit like an MOT for a car is sort of the easiest way I guess to explain it they'd have a preset to find rules for categorizing how good the ship was and it was the first classification society and they would grade the ship and it's changed a lot over the time but at the time we're looking at for the Quitt quick start a1 was the best grade best classification a ship could get and over the years that's been used for anything of good quality but essentially it would be a e i o and u for the hull of the ship and then one two and three for the outrigging the masts and all of that you listen to dan snow's history hit. Stick with us. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest

millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So Zach, with so many different ships being built and journeys being made, as we all know, you need different ships, different jobs, and different tonnages, and different sail configurations. So, Lloyd is kind of stepping back and giving an objective view of the entire industry. Yes, yeah. And sort of how they do this is, A, through the surveyors themselves. So they're initially between the age of 30 to 50, based at major ports throughout the UK.

You think of places like Belfast, Glasgow, Liverpool, obviously London, Sunderland, Hull. And they would go up to the ship owners, ask them if they want the ship surveyed, which at the beginning was a bit of a hard sell, trying to say, we're going to charge you to inspect this vessel. Some people didn't see why there'd be a use for that but as time went on people realized that the safer a ship was the more reliable it was the more people would be willing to go on it as a passenger and the more the insurance premiums would be lower as well so it was really these surveyors that were out in the field doing this job it was a dangerous job still is a dangerous job today. People are still out there surveying ships. But they were sort of organized really by the head office in London.

If you had, say, a surveyor in the Clyde, but the main office is London, that is a fair distance in the 1840s and 50s to try and control what they're doing. And we have this story of the first principal surveyor, George Bailey, threw somebody overboard when they were trying to bribe him. And that's the kind of diligent work that Lloyd's Register wanted the surveyors to have. But one way that they tried to control this was by having what they called the visitation committee. So the chief surveyor, the chairman and chief staff would go to these different outports and just inspect the work, look at the shipyards and just see how they were operating. And it's funny enough as well that John Whitehat Willis, who was the owner of the Cutty Sark,

was on the classification committee of Lloyd's Register. So they had a lot of people in the maritime business and trade within these committees and this work. So Cutty Sark gets A1. Initially, China trade, as we talked about. So it's taken TE back from China. Also, the world trade to Australia. It held the record between Australia and the UK for a while. Where else is it trading? Well, it depends on, again, what the trade was. As you said, China mainly going from Shanghai to some ports in Britain. The world trade was largely Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and Sydney, again, going to ports in Britain. But when she's sold in 1895 to a Portuguese shipbuilding company named Ferreira, she starts servicing trade in the Portuguese colonies,

or what was then the Portuguese colonies. So really you start to see a bit more of a global activity going from places in South Africa, North Africa, South America, and then to Portugal and again to Britain. She's been everywhere. Yeah. She's well-travelled. And then you mentioned it was in Portuguese hands for a while, but it comes back to Britain, does it? Yes, so it's sold to the Portuguese in 1895.

As I said, serves trade going around the Portuguese colonies at the time, survives the First World War, narrowly avoiding a few scrapes, and also narrowly avoiding the fate of its one-time competitor clipper ship, the Thermopylae, which is bombed at one point. So after this, she's the last surviving clipper in the world, is surveyed again by a lodge register staff, this time by Charles H Jordan, who is brought out of retirement to survey the ship because he's one of few people who still understands the skills and techniques needed for a sailing ship and then is purchased by a retired merchant naval captain Wilfred Dalman. Him and his wife purchased the

ship when they see it in port in Falmouth and he sort of opens it a bit to the public, restores it, sees it go back to its original glory and beauty but he sadly passed away in 1936 and then it is used as a naval training vessel for the Thames Nautical Training College alongside some of the vessels during World War II as well so these young naval officers are able to train on board and sort of get an understanding of what it means to to work on and use a 19th century sailing ship and this is where we come to I guess in our in our eyes, the modern period. The Cutty Sark is brought into a dry dock in 1953. The Cutty Sark Preservation Society, which is

formed in 1951 by the then director of the National Maritime Museum, Frank Carr, with a lot of support from the Duke of Edinburgh and other people who are interested in preserving the ship, bring her into dry dock, preserve her, surveyed again by Lloyd's Register, this time for free, and is sort of made to be this historical monument ship, one of only three composite ships left in the world, and, yeah, is here where we are today. Why was she so fast? Why is she a legend? There's a uniqueness, and that's tied up in the legacies with the Cotysark.

One of the things that makes her so fast and is unique about her is that she's a composite ship. So these are iron-framed with wooden planking and they were somewhat inconsistent in their design, so they varied quite a bit. And being a clipper ship, the sail design was also varied. Another reason she's unique is part of one of my favourite sort of legacies of the Curtis Ark is this poetic influence. She is named after a poem by robert burns the scots poet uh tom o'shunter the figure

head was supposed to be the witch from this poem nanny d who chases after tom o'shunter initially along the the stern of the ship you have the engravings of scenes from the poem and there's sort of this alongside the sort of Victorian attitude to design of things being elegant and beautiful but practical at the same time it sort of really reflected in a ship like the Cote Sark the cabins had like mahogany and teak and maple and it was supposed to be a beautiful vessel as well something that was capable of intense speed. Intense speed to bring that tea what is it with the Brits and tea? Why do we need tea so fast from China? What's going on there, Max? So it's ironic that now the drink which is synonymous with Britain and Britishness has actually very little that's native about it at all.

So the Dutch and the Portuguese bring tea to Europe and it makes its way eventually into the London coffee houses in about the 1650s or so. Samuel Pepys becomes the very first recorded Briton to document his tea drinking experience. We don't know what he actually thought about it and we don't know much about what the quality was like either. But in 1662 there's a sort of a landmark moment with tea drinking in Britain and this is the marriage of Charles II to his wife Queen Catherine of Braganza and she helps to popularise tea drinking amongst the British nobility and at court. But it's interesting really because it's obviously at this point very highly taxed.

The East India Company holds this stranglehold, this monopoly on tea from 1669 onwards and so largely it's confined to the upper echelons of society but it becomes something that is widely democratised through smuggling over the course of the 17th and into the 18th century. And it's thought that this really democratises tea drinking among the masses, so much so that it's thought that the illicit trade outnumbers the legal trade. And this leads the Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger to slash the tax on tea in 1783, which finally makes it more affordable for the masses. And the other thing, of course, by the time we get to the Victorian period, makes it more affordable for the masses. And the other thing, of course, by the time we get to the Victorian period, there's this huge influx of sort of temperance movements and religious reform and

social reform, which is aimed at really trying to dispel and move these large industrial working class communities away from things like alcohol. And tea is seen as the answer to try to switch people away from beer. It's sort of marketed for men and for women, as opposed to coffee, which is marketed at this time just for men. And so tea is really put forward by these leaders, the idea of creating like a flourishing, working, industrial community, because it's healthy and it's sweet, and it's energising. And over this period, it becomes really, really well known, you know, in the commonplace and essential item. And of course, by the time we get to the Cutty Sark, you know, more widely, the East India Company's monopoly ends in 1834, free trade reigns in 1849. And from the 1850s, we start to see China's plantations coming under competition from new plantations that are being set up in Calcutta, modern-day Calcutta, where

it's exempt from tax, and from Ceylon, modern-day Sri Lanka. These plantations radically alter their localities, and they provide work for the surrounding areas, but they also see a lot of people working under harsh conditions and very poor pay. And so all of this becomes synonymous and forms a backdrop to the emergence of tea as the national drink and the tea races of which Cotisard becomes known. Zach, you mentioned there were Lloyd's Register people monitoring ships, serving ships all over Britain. Did they go overseas as well? Yeah, yeah, they did. The first appointment we know of for an exclusive surveyor who was only doing work for Lloyd's Register was in Canada. Appointed in the 1850s, 1851. This

continued over time. As Max has spoken about the tea trade in China, we have the first appointment of a surveyor in China in 1869, the same year that the Kutysak is built. And he's not too far away from one of the biggest shipyards in Shanghai. In 1870, we know that he writes to this general committee to say that he's really sort of anticipating the work that will need to be improved and more offices opened and that he sort of sees that China that will need to be improved and more offices opened, and that he sort of sees that China will become this hub for industrialisation. Huge if true.

Yeah, but he's really sort of 100 years ahead of the mark, really. But the Lloyds Register does have more offices open in China. By 1930, there's about 10 offices. There's a national committee. And then they also help in the sort of 1950s, 60s and 70s with a little bit of guidance with the Chinese register of ships. But they are now one of the biggest, if not the biggest shipbuilder in the world. Max, they were taking tea out of China.

What was being sent into China? What's the trade? So it tends to be luxury goods. You know, it's worth making the point that with the tea trade, obviously the British Empire at this point is on the rise, but it's worth making the point that this trade tea trade, obviously the British Empire at this point is on the rise, but it's worth making the point that this trade is being done often on unequal terms. It's often being done at the expense of indigenous peoples and localities. And China is a really prime example of how the imperial trade impacts and is forced on

countries. So China, for example, for many years holds this monopoly on tea, silk, porcelain. And for a long time, they're actually not interested in Western goods at all, and they're trading only in silver. But you can't really talk about the tea trade without talking about the other major trade which comes to tragically alter China's relationship with Europe and the West. And that's opium, which forms a longstanding scourge, which has really dire consequences for Chinese economic and social life. So opium is grown in India, it's then sold and traded illegally in China. Despite it being

illegal the Qing Emperor and his government try to regulate and control this trade and to curb it. All of this leads in 1839 to the destruction of really large-scale opium stocks then held in British warehouses in China and ultimately this leads to the first opium War, which is concluded with a British victory in 1842 and essentially sees European settlers, traders and merchants given special rights within designated treaty ports. So you're prizing open the Chinese market, forcing them to take our trade? Absolutely.

And this treaty, the Treaty of Nanking, is regarded as the first of the unequal treaties. And so eventually there are further clashes between the government and the Europeans. And this leads to the Second Opium War, with Britain and France on one side, China on the other. And again, it results in the supremacy of the Western forces, which inflict heavy war reparations. They expand these rights, they open more treaty ports, and they legalise the opium trade. And so even though you have this really fierce Chinese resistance to this, it's a brutal campaign that sees large loss of life, the subjugation of Chinese law and sovereignty, the loss of territories, and the ransacking and destruction of Chinese cultural sites and artefacts.

So Cati Sark is riding in a way off the back of that. It's going and trading with China through ports sort of prized open by British and French military action. Absolutely, absolutely. And this forms the backdrop to the tea trade, which is becoming so popular in Britain. Zach, what about the later years when steamships were snapping at the heels of these sailing beauties? Cati Sark continued to have quite a long life. Yeah, she did. I mean, in the war trade, it was still setting records for delivering more at the fastest

sort of times. But I think what's really important to talk about here is the opening of the Suez Canal, 1869, again, the year that the Cotysharks built. That really cuts down the time for steamships traveling from these eastern ports taking goods to the west. Whereas, I said earlier, it would take about 100 to 120 days for the Cutty Sark, it could take a steamship going through the Suez Canal 60 days. Why can't Cutty Sark go through the Suez Canal? Well there's different taxes on what vessels can go through

and the price of it and I think the people, the steamers are able to afford these prices. These are larger vessels that can carry more cargo, there's more money there. And even at first, they're not seen as more reliable. And some people wrongly think that an iron hull will damage goods. The steamships, again, become more reliable over time. They're getting bigger and bigger in tonnage and transporting more goods. And the winds in the Red Sea are a nightmare as well. Poor old sailing ships. So the Cadi Start looms very large right through your archive, the Lloyd's Register archive.

What makes your archive just so fabulous if you're interested in this period, if you're interested in our maritime, in fact generally if you're interested in the past? Well they've got a really unique collection of records relating to maritime history. For ships like the Cutty Sark especially, we have a series of records of the survey reports with plans and correspondence and other documents, about over a million of these covering about 94,000 ships. So if you're interested in that history of shipbuilding and the technological developments with that, it provides a really good window into that history. But alongside this maritime history, there's also records that we have that relate to other UK classification

societies. There's work that was done with aviation, with the yacht building, steel testing, engineering in general. And we have records relating to all of these sort of fabulous areas of history. Yeah, I love it because you think of how that impacts all these other parts of history. Every person who emigrated to the New World from Europe would have been on a ship which had had the once-over from your Lloyd's Register surveyors? Yeah, if they weren't classified, they're at least listed in the register. It was known as the Shipping Bible. We have all of these documents, and a lot of them are digitised and freely available. As an organisation, we're in quite a unique position to be able to do these sorts of things and digitise mass amounts of material,

and to be able to fund research into lots of different areas. We've been focused on safety at life at sea since 1760 and we're sort of committed to doing that today. Zach and Max, thank you very much. There's one journey that Cutty Sark made that I think stands out as one of the most dramatic and exhilarating in maritime history. Long before the Cutty Sark experienced war, she was involved in what became known as the Great Tea Race of 1872. It began in Shanghai. Cutty Sark went head-to-head with another ship, the Thermopylae, in a 16,000 mile race across the world's oceans,

the aim was to be first to make it back to London with a precious cargo of tea. The winner had claimed the highest price for that tea. There was money at stake, but there was reputation too. And both crews pushed themselves to the limit on a very treacherous journey across the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope and up through the Atlantic. I've sailed in some of those seas in modern boats and let me tell you, there are big waves, there are vast expanses of nothing but the horizon and there are tricksy winds and currents.

It's a dangerous place to be today, let alone before all our modern safety gear was available. While they are making this jury rudder, the waves wash over the deck and they spray him with hot coals from above, but he doesn't stop working. Join us tomorrow as we tell the incredible story of that race and find out which ship claimed the title

as the fastest sailing ship of all time. Thanks so much to Zach and Max and Lloyd's Register Foundation. You can find out more about their history and their work that supports research, innovation and education to help the global community tackle the most pressing

safety and risk challenges. Go to hec.lrfoundation.org.uk. Goodbye. you