RACE 2

This is the story of how Hercule Linton designed a revolutionary clipper called the Cutty Sark for the John Willis Shipping Company of London and how he was cheated leaving his company, Scott Linton bankrupt. The book describes how, on being ordered off his ship by Willis following her launch, Linton publicly cursed him saying that so long as he owned her Cutty Sark would bring him only bad luck. The story tells of the misfortunes of the Cutty Sark over the next twenty years where men died unexpectedly, one of her captains commits suicide and another murder and how the Cutty Sark failed in everything her owner tried. She was and was continually dogged by bad luck to a point that good seamen would not serve on her. She even had difficulty finding cargos, the tea trade having been taken over by steamers following the opening of the Suez Canal. Then her luck changed and she achieved everything Linton hoped and cumulating in the great race with the SMS Kaiser William II, the German Kaiser’s great hope of demonstrating Germany’s naval dominion over British sea-power. The story is told by Bobby, a 14-year-old boy and the illegitimate grandson of Sir Daniel Roberts. Bobby stows away on the Cutty Sark on her first voyage to China in 1870. He intended to join a whaler and sail for the South Sea Fisheries to make his fortune but his friend’s enthusiastic farewell party caused him to get on the wrong ship. He stays on the Cutty Sark for the next twenty years serving under her many different and mostly ineffective captains until the great Captain Richard Woodget takes command and her luck changes. Bobby rose through the ranks and finishes as second-in-command. A new, lucrative trade carrying wool from Australia to London starts and saves the clippers because the voyage around Cape Horn is is too long and dangerous to be undertaken by steamers.