ONE could probably sail the seven seas before finding anyone
better qualified to write about the Cutty Sark than Mr. Alan Villiers. He combines an old-fashioned worship of sail with a style that is strong, forthright and fresh. Certainly, of her captains, who would have known the ship better than Mr. Villiers, only Captain Woodget might have succeeded. But a captain, even of a China clipper, who could teach his apprentices to cycle between decks, who could roller-skate on the main deck and who would photograph his ship in the middle of the ocean from a plank lashed between two lifeboats, was an exception; and he could scarcely write about himself as well as Mr. Villiers does. Launched in 1870, when steam-power was already in use, the Cutty Sark was more than another clipper ship built for the China tea-run. She was intended to wrest from the ' Ther- mopylae her honour of reaching Melbourne, on her maiden voyage, in sixty days. This the Cutty Sark never did, nor did any other sailer, but many were the records of speed and endurance she set. Her rivalry ' with the Thermopylae endured to the end, but her greatest victory—a moral "one— was in 1872, when the Cutty Sark lost her rudder in the Indian Ocean. Her crew performed the extraordinary task of fitting another in mid-ocean, and in that fashion she reached London.
A. D.
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