It's only a setback

The orange flames flickered, danced above the Cutty Sark in the dark. This wasn't "flaming shot" night at the local bar but instead, at 4:45am , May 22 the graceful clipper ship Cutty Sark sat in dry dock in England on fire. It took the responding firefighters more than two hours to put the blaze out. By midmorning the fire investigators along with the ship's restoration director, Ian Bell had begun their assessments of the damage.

The Cutty Sark is the world's only surviving extreme clipper ship and had been undergoing a $49 million dollar restoration when she caught fire. Much of her original material such as the teak wood, masts, saloon, deck houses, captain's cabin and 50% of the planking have been in storage since the project began and fortunately escaped the fire.

She is a composite built extreme clipper ship designed by Hercules Linton, displacing 963 tons and slipped into the water on November 22 1869. The extreme clipper was considered the fastest of the commercial sailing ships and the sleek lines are due in part to the composite construction, combining iron frames with the wood hull. The Cutty Sark has survived with most of her original construction and is not only the best survivng example of it but was of exceptional quality before the fire.

She began her service on the China Tea Trade for a couple of seasons before her permanent dry-docking in 1949 as a museum ship. Between that time, she was a regular fast sailer in the Australian wool trade after steam ships took over the tea trade, was a Portuguese training ship, had spent time rerigged as a barquentine and by 1922, was used as a stationary training ship until her dry-docking.

"We're treating this as a suspicious incident", said Bruce Middlemiss, police inspector.

The restoration that was expected to take four years will continue, although the fire may move the completion date further into the future. The Cutty Sark is too exceptional an example of the sleek, fast sailing ships of the past to not restore to her former glory. To be able to stand on timbers that were growing in 1415 and experience real history, not a replica of it.