Scotland by Murray Pittock;

Author:Murray Pittock;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300268966
Publisher: Yale University Press

THERMOPYLAE

If the west coast shipyards in Scotland pioneered the latest steamship technology, the last Indian summer of sail was supported by the technical expertise of the country’s east coast yards, including the ‘Aberdeen Bow’ devised by Alexander Hall & Co in 1839. The Bow increased the speed and sailing performance of schooners and then clippers, a class of swift sailing ships developed from schooners which combined speed with size. The clipper rose to prominence in the second quarter of the nineteenth century with increasing demand for the rapid transport of China tea to Western markets following the First Opium War of 1840–42 (see below), when Hong Kong island came into British hands and five ports opened to British commercial trade in China. Following the Aberdeen proto clipper Scottish Maid in 1839, the first clippers proper were developed in the late 1840s and Jardine Matheson’s search for the latest technology played a role. George Thomson of Pitmedden (1804–95), like Sutherland at P&O an Aberdeen Grammar School boy, founded the Aberdeen White Star Line in 1825 (later taken over by Cunard), and was deeply engaged in the tea trade from 1848, for which clippers were a key mode of transport, sometimes as a cover for the opium trade. These ships were widely regarded as ‘essential to the commercial intelligence of the India-China trade’, and the Jardine Matheson clipper fleet was ‘larger than the navies of some small nations’.15

The composite clipper had an iron frame covered with wood, and it was these that became the fastest unpowered full-size ships ever built. In 1860, ‘registered sailing ship tonnage’ was still ‘ten times that of steam’, and was still four-fold greater ten years later, as sail enjoyed a brief Indian summer dependent on onboard mechanization and no need to refuel. These sailing ships were not so much survivors as examples of fusion between new and old technologies. Thermopylae, built in 1868 for George Thomson by Walter Hood & Co – a major supplier to the White Star Line and clipper specialists since the construction of Kosciusko for Thomson in 1862 – was just over 64 metres long and 11 metres in the beam, but only just over 6 metres deep, weighing less than 1,000 tonnes gross and displacing 2,000 tonnes. Her hull was sheathed in copper. She carried a figurehead of Leonidas, King of Sparta, who fell defending Greece from Persian invasion at Thermopylae in 480 BC. Despite symbolizing the defence of the West, Thermopylae like other clippers was intended to convey produce from East Asia. Her maiden voyage to Melbourne in just over 60 days remains the fastest trip ever made to Australia by sail, and her ‘record day’s run’ was well over 600 kilometres, though Donald McKay’s American-built clippers gained other records (including the incredible 861 kilometres in 24 hours achieved by Sovereign of the Seas). The Melbourne Argus commented (13 January 1869):

The splendid and almost unprecedentedly rapid passage made by the new clipper ship Thermopylae, from London to this port, has created more than ordinary interest in nautical and commercial circles .

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