Cutty Sark by Eric Kentley

Author:Eric Kentley [Kentley, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472959522
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ferreira

Scrawled across Cutty Sark’s Certificate of British Registry (Fig. 21) are the words:

Certificate cancelled & Registry closed 22nd July 1895 on Sale of the Vessel to Foreigners (Portuguese Subject). Advice from owner.

But the owner who advised the Registry of the sale was not John Willis but John Richards of ‘37 Wroughton Road, Balham… Gentleman’. The address is of a modest Victorian terraced house, still standing. The 1891 Census notes that Richards, his wife and children were sharing the house with a bank clerk, his wife and his sister. Richards’ own occupation is given as ‘merchant’s clerk’, amended in the 1901 Census to ‘merchantile clerk’. By the time of the 1911 Census, Richards had left trading affairs and had become an ‘engineer’s clerk’ for a firm of electrical engineers. Cutty Sark, purchased when he was no more than 30, was not a stepping stone to building up his own fleet – why did he buy her? It is an unsolved mystery.

In fact, 16 days after he had bought Cutty Sark from Willis he sold her to the Lisbon-based company Joaquim Antunes Ferreira & Ca. for £1,250. It renamed her Ferreira and she arrived in Lisbon for the first time on 28th October 1895.

The following year, the ship began to follow a regular triangular route from Lisbon to Portugal’s African colonies, then across the Atlantic to Brazil, New Orleans or Barbados. She was still occasionally visited by those who remembered her clipper days – and around 1903, in an unnamed foreign port, her bell was allegedly stolen by an officer who had once served on board. The Portuguese crew then stole the bell of the nearest ship, the barque Shakespeare. The original bell was returned nearly 30 years later when the ship came back into British ownership, the culprit taking Shakespeare’s bell in exchange.

In the 27 years that she flew the Portuguese flag, Ferriera sailed hundreds of thousands of miles without mishap, but there were two occasions when the ship came close to being wrecked.

The first was when she was caught by the Great Hurricane of 1906, which struck Pensacola, Florida, in the early hours of 27th September, killing 134 people and damaging over 5,000 houses. Ferreira was moored at Muscogee Wharf alongside a large Swedish barque, Alfhild. Both were torn loose from their moorings by the storm and crashed into the pier, destroying it. Alfhild was swept past Ferreira but her progress was stopped when she embedded her bow in the old clipper ship.

At the end of the year Ferreira was towed to Mobile for repairs and, although she soon returned to Pensacola, it would be four months before she was able to leave. She was supposed to take a timber cargo down to Rio de Janeiro, but just eight days after sailing she ran ashore on the Cosgrove Shoal near Key West and lost her rudder.

In 1907 the number of old tea clippers afloat was reduced by another one with the sinking of Thermopylae. She had left the wool trade

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