Following a devastating fire yesterday, Lindsay Jennings looks at the history behind the great Cutty Sark - including her one-time mutinous crew and suicidal captain

SHE was launched on Monday November 22, 1869, at Dumbarton, on the River Leven in Scotland - and became renowned throughout the seafaring world. The Cutty Sark, which weighed 963 tons, was built for John Willis, known as "White Hat Willis" in recognition of his fondness for white top hats.

His aim was to make his ship the fastest in the annual race to bring home the new season's tea from China.

Her name was said to have derived from a poem by Robert Burns titled Tam O'Shanter. In the poem, Tam spots a witch wearing a short petticoat, which in Scotland was known as a Cutty Sark.

Life for the crew on board the Cutty Sark during its 19th Century heyday involved labouring long hours for low wages and poor food with the ever present risk of mutiny and drowning.

When fully manned, it had a crew of about 28 and they usually worked at least 12 hours a day, seven days a week. They were even on deck in bad weather and dangerous conditions when the tea clipper was beaten by huge breaking sea rollers and briny squalls.

The most turbulent seas it encountered were often passing Cape Horn at the bottom of South America on the voyage between Australia and England. The ship could tip up to 40 degrees with willawaws (gusty winds) topping 100mph.

Clambering up the rigging to shorten the sail before the storm, crewmen would cling on for dear life, but some were lost overboard. The ship once lost her mast in a storm off Cape Town in 1916.

Last year, letters written by Clarence Ray, a 15-year-old apprentice on board the Cutty Sark in 1894, were brought to light by his great-nephew, Dick Ray. The teenager wrote to his mother about the basic food on board the ship, including ''salt tram horse'', ''leu pie'' and ''junk and spuds''.

He spoke of dodging the captain's vicious collie dogs and his duties, which included rowing the master ashore for picnics while the ship was in harbour.

Simon Stephens, a curator at the National Maritime Museum, says: ''Life on board was undoubtedly very tough, especially on the way back from China.

''The race to be first to get the tea back to London started right from port in Shanghai and it was all hands to deck. Captains drove their men and the ship hard to get every ounce out of them. But you had to be able to get on with the crew as you had to trust them with your life.''

By the late 1870s, the ship had started to take different cargoes around the world. She took coal from Nagasaki, in Japan, to Shanghai; jute from Manila to New York; and jute, castor oil, tea and the Australian mail from Calcutta to Melbourne.

But, the seamen were far from being one big happy family. During the Cutty Sark's notorious ''hell ship'' voyage in the early 1880s, a seaman was murdered, the crew mutinied and a first mate committed suicide. John Francis, a black former steamboat man, had his skull staved in with a capstan bar by Captain Sidney Smith after ignoring an order.

Smith was confined to quarters by the outraged crew, but at the Javanese port of Anjer, First Mate James Wallace helped Smith escape.

The furious crew downed tools and refused to work, resulting in most of the sailing being done by six apprentices and four tradesmen. Realising his career was finished, Wallace jumped overboard and he was eaten alive by sharks.

The replacement master of the Cutty Sark, William Bruce, turned out to be an incompetent drunkard who stole the crews' wages and left them half-starved.

THE most successful master who commanded the Cutty Sark was Richard Woodget, a brilliant man-manager and fearless navigator. He was an expert at exploiting the Roaring Forties trade winds of the Southern Hemisphere to his advantage and braving the most violent gales and seas on Earth.

Woodget travelled further south than any previous commander, a perilous undertaking because the ship would come into contact with icebergs around Cape Horn. He was also a keen photographer and has left many striking images of the ship passing icebergs.

Dr Eric Kentley, a curator at The Cutty Sark Trust, says: ''The crew would have come from all over the world. There would be Africans, Scotsmen, Chinese, Brazilians. Conditions were extremely cramped and the crew would often have to share bunks. They were hardy souls and they needed to be, sailing on the most dangerous seas on Earth.''

But at least the crew had lavatories, whereas the crew on most other ships would have to answer the call of nature by squatting over the side.

After Cutty returned to the UK from Brisbane in 1895, she was sold to a Portugese firm, J Ferreira & Co, for £2,100. She was bought for the nation by Captain Wilfred Dowman in about 1924, when she was brought back to England to be used as a cadet training ship and was opened to the public.

The Cutty Sark Society, formed by Frank Carr, director of the National Maritime Museum, and patronised by the Duke of Edinburgh, saved her from the scrapyard.

In September last year, she was given an £11.75m National Lottery grant for a massive restoration project and work was still ongoing before yesterday's fire. She had been at the heart of Britannia's commercial seafaring expansion across the face of the globe in the heady days of the empire.

Her supporters can only hope that she will be returned to her former glory once more.