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Catch up!! Le blog Anglais de Saint-Jo

CUTTY SARK: a British clipper ship.

Cutty Sark is a British clipper ship (= bateau à voile). Built on the River Leven, Dunbarton, Scotland in 1869, she was one of the last tea clippers to be built and one of the fastest, coming at the end of a long period of design development, which halted as sailing ships gave way to steam propulsion.

Cutty_Sark_

The opening of the Suez Canal (also in 1869) meant that steamships now enjoyed a much shorter route to China, so Cutty Sark spent only a few years on the tea trade before turning to the trade in wool (=laine) from Australia, where she held the record time to Britain for ten years.

cutty-sark


Cutty Sark is listed by National Historic Ships as part of the National Historic Fleet. She is one of only three remaining original composite construction (wooden hull on an iron frame) clipper ships from the nineteenth century in part or whole.

The ship has been damaged by fire twice in recent years, first on 21 May 2007 while undergoing

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conservation. She was restored and was reopened to the public on 25 April 2012.

 

Le Cutty Sark doit son nom à la sorcière Nannie Dee qui apparaît dans Tam o' Shanter, le poème de Robert Burns (1790). Comme Nannie porte une chemise trop courte, Tam la surnomme cutty-sark, ce qui signifie littéralement « chemise courte » en scots (cutte ou kutte et sark pour shirt). 

Dee

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