Sold to the Portuguese, and the End of an Era
Sadly for Cutty Sark, 1895 marked the end of her time under the red ensign. Jock Willis was by now 75 and had no heirs to whom he could pass on the family business. He was a second-generation owner, and his sale of Cutty Sark drew to a close the John Willis & Sons Shipping Company, which had been established by Willis’s father and lasted nearly until the end of the 19th century.
By 1895, due to the ever-increasing maintenance requirements of these ageing vessels, Willis had already sold off a sizeable portion of his remaining shipping fleet. Cutty Sark herself was 26 years old, just four years shy of her original life expectancy, and the repairs and maintenance required to keep her going were rising in cost each year. And so it was that, after a quarter of a century at sea and having carried well over 30 million lbs of goods, Cutty Sark’s life as a British ship had come to an end.
Willis only had four vessels left in his possession by the time Cutty Sark returned from her final Australian voyage in 1895. One of these vessels, Coldinghame, became Richard Woodget’s command after Cutty Sark; one wool run from Brisbane was enough for him, though, and Woodget retired after that last voyage and returned home to Norfolk shortly thereafter. Although he was not to realise it, however, the voyage of 1895 was not to be Woodget’s final appearance at the wheel of Cutty Sark. When the ship was brought back to Britain in the 1920s by a retired sea captain named Wilfred Dowman, Woodget was invited back to his former command to review the restoration work that had been undertaken.
Captain Woodget at Cutty Sark’s wheel in 1924
National Maritime Museum, London (A8728)
Cutty Sark’s Certificate of British Registry was cancelled on 22 July 1895, with a note that the ship was to be sold to new owners in Portugal. However, it was not Willis who sold Cutty Sark to the Portuguese; the sale was completed in fact by a bank clerk by the name of John Richards, to whom Willis had sold Cutty Sark. Quite why Willis sold her to a bank clerk is not known, nor how a then 30-year-old bank clerk could have afforded to purchase Cutty Sark. What is known is that just 16 days after Willis sold her to Richards, she moved into further new hands, as Richards sold her to the Lisbon-based company Joaquim Antunes Ferreira & Ca.
Cutty Sark had originally cost Willis more than £16,000 to construct, but time had taken its toll and Richards secured a meagre sum of £1,250 from her new owners, a depreciation of some 92 per cent against her initial cost. It is sadly unknown how much Richards paid Willis for her, although it is highly unlikely that any such transaction would have left the ‘middleman’, as Richards was, out of pocket. For many years Richards’ role in the sale of Cutty Sark was not known, as it had been assumed that Willis sold the ship directly to the Portuguese. A more curious question than the amount he obtained for her is why Willis appeared to rush into a sale, rather than wait to secure a better price, as Richards was able to. During her time in Willis’s fleet, Cutty Sark performed with considerable distinction; the transfer of ownership in 1895 was ultimately an anticlimax to what had been a very admirable and financially rewarding relationship.
What is known for certain is that the maintenance costs for Cutty Sark had begun to rise during her later voyages. During her final voyage it became clear that the copper cladding about her hull would need to be replaced, which would have been a significant expense for Willis to bear. In addition, her rigging was considerably worn, and a full refit was likely due. This may have included the replacement of some of the spars, which had begun to suffer from the regular beating the rigging was taking on the voyages back from Australia. According to Basil Lubbock’s abstract logs, taken in great detail but from unknown sources, that last voyage to and from Sydney saw damage to the topgallant mast from the foremast; the port yardarm from the upper topsail on the foremast, twice, along with the starboard yardarm from the same upper topsail; cabin doors broken by waves; and three chainplates.
This was not the first time Cutty Sark had required such expenditure; as with any mode of transport, the more miles travelled, the greater the wear and tear and cost of general upkeep. However, with increased insurance costs due to the age of the ship, and with steamships beginning to take the better cargoes from Australia, the potential for Willis to make a decent profit was declining, and this was the case with practically every voyage. As well as steamships, the newly built sailing ships of the day had cargo capacity five to six times that of Cutty Sark. She was thus beginning to become less and less economical as the years passed by, despite her continuing excellent performance at sea.
By 1895, the effort being expended by Willis was becoming more and more difficult to justify and the mammoth cost of fully rerigging Cutty Sark and re-cladding her hull was likely the ultimate cause of the sale. He had already begun to negotiate her sale prior to her arrival in London, and there can be no doubt that, despite her speedy passage from Australia, the cost of making Cutty Sark fully functioning again was simply prohibitive for Willis. It is likely that the requisite renovations would have taken more than a year’s worth of profits from the business, which, considering that Cutty Sark was only a few years shy of her 30-year life expectancy, was not a risk worth taking for someone of Willis’s advanced age.
In Cutty Sark’s latter years under Jock Willis, she appears to have suffered slightly from an element of mismanagement. Whether this was from Willis himself or from his agents at home and abroad is sadly not clear. What is known is that in both 1892 and 1893, Cutty Sark was kept in port for much longer than was normal, effectively causing her to miss two seasons of higher-priced wool runs. With maintenance seemingly no longer a top priority for Willis, and the ship no longer in a position to secure the most profitable cargoes, it is hardly a surprise that Willis elected to sell Cutty Sark in 1895. The financial cost of running his fleet appears to have become too great, and after a lifetime of being heavily involved in all aspects of the business, it may simply have been the right time for both Willis and Cutty Sark to move on to the next chapter in their lives.
So it was that after 26 years under the red ensign, and after becoming known the world over under the name Cutty Sark, Willis sold the ship on and she ended up under Portuguese ownership. Her new owners, obviously keen to move away from Cutty Sark’s past career, chose to rename the ship to better reflect their own business and undertakings. Cutty Sark was to become Ferreira, and she arrived at her new home in Lisbon on 28 October 1895 with her new name already on display. Despite the name change, her Portuguese crews continued to refer to her as pequina camisola – or ‘little shirt’ – and did the best they could to maintain her, despite limited resources. The impact Cutty Sark had made on the shipping community during her time under Willis was clear for all to see, and this was never more clearly demonstrated than when Ferreira arrived in port. From almost every port she visited under the Portuguese flag, stories remain of sailors and locals alike stopping in their tracks to marvel at the sight of Cutty Sark under sail again. No matter what her new name might be, to many she remained Cutty Sark.
Ferreira at the Albion Dock at Surrey Commercial Docks, London
National Maritime Museum, London (H0418)
Jock Willis passed away in 1899, aged 82. His legacy is considerable. Several of the fastest sailing ships ever seen on the high seas were of Willis’s creation, while many of the sailing records from port to port around the world belonged to the Willis fleet. While the names of these vessels are now mostly forgotten, cast into the shadows by Cutty Sark’s lasting fame, ships such as The Tweed and Blackadder were wonderful vessels capable of matching the very best that Willis’s rivals had to offer. Willis’s fleet brought the Victorian world closer together by taking myriad cargoes from East to West and vice versa, and drew on crews from dozens of nations to provide a world-class service. He can rightly be considered a pioneer of the golden age of sail, and his achievements will live on through Cutty Sark’s survival.