When I was young, I remember being told about the Cutty Sark, a now preserved Victorian tea clipper. It was a story bound up in an empire that was coming to an end as I was growing up. And, less obviously, it was a story about the limits of renewable energy in a world that was rapidly turning to fossil fuels.
Tea was initially the preserve of the wealthy. Imported from China in the seventeenth century, demand for this slightly bitter leaf grew rapidly alongside the sugar that provided the additional calories behind the European Enlightenment. For centuries before that, Europeans had lived in a permanent state of mild inebriation resulting from the consumption of small beer (in the north) and mild wine (in the south) as the only alternative to bacteria and virus infected stream and river water. Boiling water for tea (and coffee) overcame the toxins without the attendant alcohol, allowing consumers to hydrate without getting drunk.
It didn’t take long for tea drinking to filter down the class hierarchy. So that, by the nineteenth century, tea had become the staple drink of the British. And since the wealthy needed some means of maintaining their status, they chose to emphasise their importance by consuming the first new tea to be imported into London.
In its way, this was a mania on a par with the Dutch fashion for tulip bulbs 200 years earlier. Demand for fresh tea was so great that the tea races began as shipping lines competed to race the 16,000 miles through the Strait of Malacca, across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, along the West Coast of Africa and across the Bay of Biscay, along the English Channel to London. The route taking some 100 days, beginning in late May and ending in early September.
On the back of the mania, tea clippers like the Cutty Sark took renewable energy past previous engineering limits. Their long, thin hulls, coated in a copper-zinc alloy, were designed to eliminate drag even as their 32,000 square feet of sail on 150-foot masts and 11 miles of rigging was designed to fully harness every last breath of wind to propel them at average speeds of 17 knots (20mph) and more (in 1854, the Sovereign of the Seas recorded a burst at 22 knots, but it was average speed that mattered in the tea races).
Read more: Consciousness of Sheep
