You are standing underneath a ship. A real one — thirty-odd metres of Victorian sailing clipper, hoisted three metres into the air so you can walk right beneath the hull that used to slice through the open ocean. This is the Cutty Sark, one of the fastest sailing ships ever built. And its name means "short nightie."
I'll explain. Built in eighteen sixty-nine, this was a tea clipper — a racing ship, built for one job: to get the first tea of the season back from China to London faster than anyone else, because the first tea home sold for the most money. Speed was everything, and this ship had it. So when they named her, they reached for the fastest thing in Scottish literature. In Robert Burns' poem "Tam o' Shanter," a farmer rides home drunk, stumbles on a coven of witches dancing, and gets fixated on one young witch wearing a "cutty sark" — old Scots for a short undershirt, a nightie. He shouts out in appreciation, which is a mistake, and the whole coven chases him. He only escapes b
ecause witches can't cross running water — but as he crosses the bridge, the witch lunges and grabs the tail of his horse, and it comes clean off in her hand.
So look up at the figurehead on the front of the ship. That's her. That's Nannie, the witch, and if you look at her outstretched arm, she's clutching a horse's tail — the exact moment from the poem. They named their multi-million-mile racin
