Surviving ships from the age of sail are rare. Most lasted only a few voyages before they were scrapped – that’s if they weren’t sunk or lost at sea. I’ve been to the replica Golden Hinde in Southwark as part of my research for A Pair of Sharp Eyes, but Drake’s ship is of course much earlier than the ships that sailed from Bristol in the eighteenth century, and HMS Victory, which I visited years ago on a trip to Portsmouth, is much later (and bigger).
For now I make do with the Cutty Sark, and we travel down to Greenwich on a gusty afternoon in mid-August, when the trees are bending in the breeze. The bunting that decorates the ship’s cordage flaps frantically, and almost succeeds in evoking the sight and sound of a clipper in full sail.
But a Victorian metal ship in dry dock is very different from a Bristol galley or a West Indiaman sailing the Atlantic. Beautifully restored, the interior of the Cutty Sark is sparkly clean, filled with wondering tourists, and despite the gale-force winds, her hull doesn’t move a fraction.
Still, it’s an evocative experience to explore the ship and learn about its history from the wealth of artefacts and documents on display. Ten thousand tea chests shipped at a time: the figure gives me some conception of how much cargo a small vessel might carry. The cabins are tiny, and the masts far, far taller than I like to think, given what I know about the ages (and mortality rates) of sailors in early-modern times. I picture my own sons up in the rigging, shinnying along the spars when they were young, and my imagination won’t oblige: the thought is just too frightening. I am happier peering into the captain’s cabin, the state-room, the carpenter’s shop and the galley. All very compact, so that I reflect that life on board a merchant ship was probably something akin to living in a caravan, if rougher. Narrow shelves, tiny lockers, and bunks that recall Henry Fielding’s observation that the one allotted to him on his voyage to Lisbon was the same width as a coffin.
We proceed to the National Maritime Museum, which is amazing. We are so lucky to have the Cutty Sark, and even luckier to have the museum (admission free). You can read all you like, but there’s nothing better than visiting a historic site to appreciate what life in the past was really like. For merchant sailors before the twentieth century: plainly hard and very dangerous.
