Returning from Portugal to England after 13 years of emigration, Karl Stewart, son of the executed King Charles I, brought with him his wife Catherine from the Portuguese royal dynasty of Braganza and a snuffbox with a mysterious black dried herb. He did not fill a pipe with it, did not stuff it into a nostril, did not chew, but poured boiling water over it, inviting his entourage to taste the fragrant reddish infusion.
So tea came to England, without which the foggy Albion is now completely unthinkable. The Portuguese, who sheltered the British prince, knew the taste of tea for at least one and a half hundred years, and, by the way, the same can be said about coffee. Some time later, the London East India Company presented the king with a precious gift - 2 pounds and 2 ounces of tea so beloved by him, which, by our standards, is 969 grams of tea leaves. And he, with a light heart, blessed the "Venerable Company" - the second name of the Ostindians - to independently import tea from China.
The sea "tea route" was very long and extremely dangerous. The journey from London to the Chinese port of Amoy took about one and a half years only one way. So the first shipment of goods from Amoy arrived in London only in 1689. And tea is a perishable commodity, which means that it was necessary to seriously think about increasing the speed of ships. In addition, the British, despite the monopoly trade with China, had serious competitors - the Americans, whose ships were much faster than the British.
So between England and America began almost two hundred years of rivalry, held under the invariable motto: "Who is faster."
The much faster 18th century, which replaced the sluggish 17th century, significantly revived the tea business. Dozens of sailing ships rushed to the only officially open to foreigners in China port of Canton, lining up in picturesque rows at the anchorage. Each country had its own skillfully finished office building, behind which there were tea warehouses and a place for unloading.
Then Chinese artists fell in love with depicting tall masts of ships with waving national flags on silk and porcelain …
But it so happened that the London East India Company had serious difficulties in paying for the exported tea. And then the British merchants decided to pay the Chinese with opium, which was brought from India, which was at that time a British colony. And even though the British knew perfectly well that the sale of opium in China had been banned since 1796, the profits from the tea trade were so high that they still took risks. Thus, the buyers of tea, at the same time being essentially drug dealers, were in dire need of increasing the speed of ships, not only in order to reduce the delivery time of the perishable product, but also to save them from pursuing military junks. After all, not only did the British import smuggled opium, they also violated the bans on entering those Chinese ports that were closed to foreigners. To this must be added the pirates who lie in wait for them on their way back. All this together required fundamentally different ships capable of delivering perishable goods to Britain quickly and with impunity.
But the Americans already had such ships. In fact, it was they who started the era of building tea clippers. In 1844, two clippers of the same type were launched from American shipyards - first the Hokua and then the Rainbow.
One could, of course, charter these ships. But on the basis of the Navigation Act, adopted back in 1651 by Oliver Cromwell, the transportation of goods to England from Asia, Africa and America by ships of non-English production was prohibited.
Nevertheless, the British once chartered the Oriental clipper, built by the Americans in 1849. He came from Hong Kong to England in … 97 days! The English sailors were delighted with the beautiful lines of this vessel, and later, in dry dock at Blackwall, the ship's craftsmen removed the exact dimensions of the clipper. They did the same with the fastest French ships. In those days, the concept of "industrial espionage" did not exist, but this is exactly what the English shipbuilders did, taking accurate measurements from the best clippers. This allowed the British to accumulate unique experience for the construction of their own ships, which soon gained fame as the best in the world.
Ships of unprecedented beauty began to enter the ocean. These were true masterpieces of sailing shipbuilding. They launched their first clipper, Stornoway, in 1850.
And since the main motive was still commercial profit, the tea clipper races required endurance, courage and a deep knowledge of the laws of the sea from the captain and the crew. And since the cultivation of tea is a seasonal activity, many ships inevitably gathered at the place of loading this product, and sometimes it happened that the captain of one of the clippers, seeing that the loading of the other had already been completed and the tug was taking this ship out to sea, stopped loading and, even without waiting for the documents to be received, he immediately rushed in pursuit of his rival.
Tea clipper captains were usually very young and, apparently, therefore, took risks much more often. And there was a lot to risk. After all, from the minute the ship went out to sea, it was trapped by severe storms, strips of dead calm, shoals and reefs, pirates - lovers of free tea, and most importantly - competitors. The construction of clippers stopped in 1870, although they sailed for a long time … One of the most famous clippers is the Cutty Sark. This name was given in honor of the heroine of the ballad by Robert Burns - a young witch ("cutty sark" - in translation from Scottish - short shirt), who, pursuing the hero, during the chase tore off his horse's tail. This is why the clipper's bow figure is a half-naked woman with a ponytail in her hand.
However, the witch did not bring much fame to the clipper - the ship never managed to arrive first with a load of tea. And in 1872 "Cutty Sark" was the last to arrive, having been late in the race with "Thermopylae" by as much as 7 days, having lost the rudder on the way. For 53 years of active trading life, this ship changed citizenship three times and four times its name. And yet one day he returned to England so as not to go anywhere else.
The era of tea clippers ended when the first steamers replaced them. It was they who, entering the sea under a black plume of coal smoke, intercepted the commercial initiative, becoming much more profitable.
