In 1869, the year that the Suez Canal was opened, a beautiful new ship splashed into the Clyde at Dumbarton, in Scotland.

She was a clipper, a three-masted square-rigged vessel of fine lines built for long-distance racing. New and advanced as she was, she was already out of date; but she captured the last of the limelight as one of the fastest ships in the world.

The Suez Canal presaged the end of the golden age of sail and many sensible owners put their money into power, investing in the steamship’s commercial virtues of speed and predictability.

There were more than a few owners, though, who thought that sailing ships still had a future. Sail owners reckoned that steamships were not yet the masters of the long-distance routes to China, Australia, New Zealand and South America.

John Willis, an owner who had been a captain in the China tea trade, was committed to sail. He commissioned Hercules Linton to draw him a ship of 963 tons, 212ft long, 36ft in the beam, her planks fastened to an iron frame.

Willis named his ship Cutty Sark and embellished her with a figurehead of the witch in Robert Burns’s Tam O’Shanter, wearing the skimpy blouse called a cutty sark.

He sent his ship to Shanghai for a cargo of tea. There were still merchants who believed tea was better carried in a wooden ship than in an iron steamer where it might be contaminated. Cutty Sark brought it back in 109 days and went out again the next year.

In 1872 she and Thermopylae loaded tea together at Shanghai and raced to London. Cutty Sark lost her rudder in a storm and soon lost the replacement, too. With immense difficulty her crew made and fitted a third; but she lost the race.

It was always dangerous and exacting to keep a ship racing at high speed. Part of the price of China tea was damage, shipwreck and drowned sailors.

After 1877 the tea clipper age was over and like other vessels Cutty Sark had to go tramping for cargoes, loading anything she could get: jute, rice, molasses and paraffin. Now she performed the dreary chore of humping coal from Australia to China, 1,200 tons a time.

But from 1883 she had her long Indian summer, 12 years of fame racing Australian wool around Cape Horn to London, mostly under the command of Captain Richard Woodget. He typically sailed her out to Sydney in 75 days and back to the English Channel in 80, and once came back in 67.

They were years of adventure, danger and consummate seamanship in the great gales of the Southern Ocean, of frightening confrontations with icebergs on the way to the Horn.

“We found ourselves surrounded by icebergs,” Woodget wrote in his log in February 1893, “cracking like thunder, yet we could not see them.”

Cutty Sark brought home her last Australian cargo in 1895. She had her glorious time and earned her keep for 25 years; and her name endured. “It was thrilling on the old Cutty,” said Captain Woodget. “She sailed like the witch she really was.”

— Trevor Fishlock is author of Conquerors of Time, Exploration and Invention in the Age of Daring (John Murray)

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