[intense music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Majestic, powerful, and deadly.

For over 400 years, British ships ruled the waves.

[explosion] These magnificent vessels helped shape history across the globe.

I'm Rob Bell, and in this series, I'll be exploring six of the world's greatest ships.

This time, I discover the incredible story of the Cutty Sark.

ROB BELL: This ship was built for one thing-- speed.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Designed to conquer the oceans, she witnessed murder on her decks.

Francis collapsed unconscious, and he would never wake up.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Battling for survival in an age of steam power, she's the ship who wouldn't give up.

♪ ♪ [faint sirens] Greenwich, 2007.

[sirens] A national treasure burns.

[intense music] Flames rip through the body of one of the most iconic sailing ships of all time, the Cutty Sark.

Over a decade ago, this beautiful ship was almost destroyed in a catastrophic fire.

Yet today, she stands proud, a phoenix risen from the ashes.

[tense music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): How a wooden ship could endure such a fierce blaze is a mystery, but the Cutty Sark's story is one of survival against the odds.

♪ ♪ The most beautiful sailing ship ever built, a fearless navigator of the wild oceans, she endured drunken captains and murderous crews, then found herself locked in a life-or-death struggle against a disruptive new technology, steam power.

[steam whistle blowing] Yet when she first set sail in 1870, the Cutty Sark seemed destined for glory.

A clipper built to carry precious cargoes of tea from China, her sights were set on becoming the fastest ship on the seas.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ROB BELL: This is the hull of the Cutty Sark.

And when you come down here and see her like this, she's just stunning.

I think the first thing that strikes you is just how elegant and soft her lines are.

And this is a cargo ship carrying heavy loads, but there's no sign of clumsy, bulky outline down here.

♪ ♪ And the keel here heads straight down and cuts into the water like a knife.

And then when you come right to the bow here, all those lines converge to a point as sharp as an arrow.

♪ ♪ When you look back at this design, you're left in absolutely no doubt that this ship was built for one thing-- speed.

[intense music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): With her streamlined hull and towering masts holding 32,000 square feet of sail, the Cutty Sark was one of a new race of super ships.

The clippers could go four times as fast as other cargo ships.

♪ ♪ To achieve these speeds, first they had to solve a huge engineering problem-- a tiny creature that was the scourge of every ship, the barnacle.

ROB BELL: How could barnacles affect the speed of the ship?

There's been lots of studies in recent years about the effect that barnacles will have on sailing ships, but even 10% of the hull being covered would mean that something like 50% more power would be needed to get the ship to go the original speed.

So just a small amount of barnacles could really slow a ship down.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): But the Cutty Sark's copper-clad hull was the ultimate defense against the tiny crustaceans.

And the fact that the hull is copper-lined, was that an advantage for speed?

Absolutely.

The copper bottom is 60% copper, 40% zinc with a trace of iron, and some of the copper from that alloy would almost leach into the water and stop things like barnacles and other creatures in the sea attaching to the ship.

Putting this copper bottom on was of absolute necessity.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): From her very first voyage, it was clear this young clipper was something special.

[majestic music] But for all her glorious design, her first few years on the tea run would be anything but plain sailing.

ROB BELL: One of her first brushes with disaster came in her famous race against a rival sailing ship, The Thermopylae, just two years after she first set sail.

But in order to understand why she was locked in this race in the first place, you need to comprehend the explosion in popularity of a very British beverage.

[majestic music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Victorian Britain was tea-mad.

Once an exotic luxury shipped from China for the upper classes, tea was fast becoming the nation's favorite drink.

♪ ♪ ROB BELL: How big a business was the Chinese tea trade, then, at the time of the Cutty Sark making her first voyages?

The Cutty Sark could bring cargo valued at about 270,000 pounds.

In today's terms, I think that's about 18 million pounds.

So huge amounts of money were involved.

ROB BELL: In one shipment?

- In one shipment.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Fortunes could be won or lost on the tea run.

The fastest sailing ships ever built competed to be first back to London with the new season's crop of tea.

ROB BELL: Why was there such a race to get the tea home?

It's rather like a wine, isn't it?

You're the first to have it.

You could make vast sums of additional money having that first tea, literally thousands of pounds, the difference.

ROB BELL: Wow.

Yeah, it was really huge.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): With all the frenzy and speculation of a Grand National, these ocean-going races gripped the nation.

HELEN DOE: Tea races caught the imagination of the press and the public, and inches of newspaper columns were devoted to these very races, you know, which ship would be the first to arrive back with this precious commodity.

And so these ships became great celebrities of the time when sail ruled the world.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The Cutty Sark's owners were convinced that she was a winner.

So in 1872, the ship found herself in a sensational showdown with her greatest rival, the tea clipper Thermopylae, in a race from Shanghai to London.

[intense music] The two clippers raced neck and neck through the South China Sea, heading for the wide and treacherous waters of the Indian Ocean.

ROB BELL: In the past, Thermopylae completed the voyage five days faster than the Cutty Sark.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): But halfway through the race, the Cutty Sark found herself 400 miles ahead.

Victory was well within her grasp.

Yet, in the treacherous waters off the Cape of Good Hope, she was about to face the full power of the unpredictable ocean.

[waves crashing] [thunder] In a heavy storm, the Cutty Sark was hit by such rough seas that her rudder was torn off.

Now, as you can see here, the rudder on a ship this size is pretty vast.

That's a good few meters in height there.

Now, to fix this usually would take an extensive amount of work in a dry dock, but the ship's captain, George Moody, knew that by pulling into port, the race with Thermopylae would be over.

So to keep the race alive, he proposed a radical solution.

His crew would have to make and fit a brand-new rudder while still at sea.

This is the workshop of the ship's carpenter, Henry Henderson.

As you can see, it's pretty pokey in here, which meant that a lot of the work on the new rudder would have had to have taken place on the deck, which wouldn't have been easy on a busy working ship.

But to make sure that this makeshift new rudder held together, it needed to be bound up with solid iron stays, which meant that the Cutty Sark needed a blacksmith.

And that's where, as legend has it, a young stowaway stepped forward.

He'd been brought up in a smithy, so he showed the crew how to build their own forge on the deck of the ship.

Now, with the Cutty Sark being tossed around in high seas, having a forge on deck with red-hot cinders flying about and molten metal being poured would have presented some pretty serious health and safety risks for the crew.

And when a heavy wave struck, the ship's apprentice was badly burned when the forge tipped over.

And at the same time, the young blacksmith was thrown down the deck whilst carrying a red-hot bar in a pair of pincers, which almost struck the sailmaker in the face.

And just picturing that commotion up here, it's like some potentially lethal form of slapstick.

[gentle music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): It was a massive gamble.

In appalling conditions, the crew managed to forge and fit the makeshift rudder.

Carpenter Henry Henderson was rewarded with 50 pounds for saving the ship, 5,500 pounds in today's money.

And the British Board of Trade hailed his sterling work as a model way to make a replacement rudder at sea.

The Cutty Sark reached London just seven days after Thermopylae.

She'd lost the race, but the heroic endeavors of her crew had made her famous.

[intense music] Despite losing the race to Thermopylae, the Cutty Sark's first few years as a tea clipper were a great success.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): She delivered a total of over 4,500 tons of tea.

That would be worth 144 million pounds today.

But looming on the horizon was a new breed of ship poised to challenge the supremacy of sail, the steamer.

[steam whistle blowing] The young clipper would soon be fighting for her place on the ocean, while for the crews who sailed her, life was a daily battle to stay alive.

Sailing Cutty Sark would have involved conditions that are incredibly difficult for us to imagine today.

[somber music] Cutty Sark operated on a watch system, so this meant that the crew would basically work four hours on, four hours off, unless the call for all hands went out, in which case that went out the window and everyone would be on deck.

Now, you can imagine if you've only had four hours off work.

That doesn't give you much time for a decent sleep.

So there were some who would get a bit drowsy when they were actually on watch.

There were a number of nasty punishments.

We know that one of the apprentices was punished by having a nest of baby rats dropped onto his face, so I'm sure he didn't make the mistake of falling asleep again.

One of the perhaps more terrifying punishments that was well-known throughout the sailing world was to be sent up into the rigging to ride the gray mare, so this would be a terrifying ordeal, to be sent up high into the rigging and to be shocked awake to make sure that you never made the mistake of falling asleep on your watch again.

[intense music] ♪ ♪ [sails flapping] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Even when the sailors made it to their bunks, they'd be lucky to get any sleep at all.

This is the deckhouse where junior members of the crew would have tried to grab a few moments' sleep between watches.

Unlike a lot of ships from earlier periods, it does actually have bunks.

But as you can see, they're not that big.

Now, men back then were generally smaller.

The average height of a man in 1870 was about 5 foot 5 inches, but still, that's not that much shorter than today.

So I'll show you here.

There's no way that they would have been able to fully stretch themselves out and get comfortable.

I'm quite a way off being able to do that here, but that wasn't purely sadistic on the part of the ship's designers.

The idea was that if you were forced to squeeze yourself up into a ball like this, there'd be less chance of you falling out of your bunk while you're asleep.

That said, I think I'd probably struggle to fall asleep here in the first place.

It's not that comfy.

[tense music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Despite the discomforts of life at sea, the Cutty Sark was the toast of the tea run.

But almost as soon as she'd made a name for herself, the good times came to an abrupt end.

In 1870, she had been one of 50 tea clippers in China, but just seven years later, she was one of only nine left in the trade.

The rest of the ships running tea to London were all powered by a new, radically different technology, steam.

[intense music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The modern age had arrived, bringing noise, power, and steamships poised to grab the tea run for themselves.

In 1869, they got their chance with the opening of the Suez Canal.

This incredible feat of engineering gave steamships a massive shortcut.

HELEN DOE: Now, the Suez Canal had a dramatic impact on shipping going to the Far East, because now steamships, instead of going all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, could go through the Suez Canal and could get to the Far East far more effectively and cheaper.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The new route shaved over 3,300 miles off the journey from Shanghai to London, but the clippers couldn't harness the power of their sails on the narrow waterway, so they still had to go the long way around, taking an extra 12 days.

And so, essentially, this was the death knell of the tea clippers.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The Cutty Sark had lost the tea run.

Desperate for a cargo, she stooped to the lowly trade of tramping.

HELEN DOE: Now a tramp ship is a ship that goes from port to port looking for cargoes.

And so, essentially, they'll carry anything, because a ship is only of use to its owner when it's carrying something, because that's when it's earning money.

And so the Cutty Sark becomes just utilitarian cargo ship.

This really changed her status.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): These vagabond years took their toll.

She tramped all over the world, picking up whatever she could find-- castor oil, paraffin, and coal.

But the tramping trips to Australia were the worst.

There, gold rush fever made it hard to hold on to skilled crews.

HELEN DOE: At the height of her fame as a tea clipper, crew would fight to get on board to be part of this famous ship.

As she travels now to Australia, and you have gold in Australia, you get the opposite happening.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): As soon as the ship reached port in Sydney, sailors deserted, heading straight for the goldfields.

Struggling to find good crew, these were dangerous times for the once proud clipper.

In 1880, she set sail for Australia under the command of James Wallace, a man with only two years' experience as a captain.

The first mate was Sydney Smith, known for his tyrannical methods.

The Cutty Sark was about to enter one of the darkest periods in her history-- the fabled hell ship voyage.

[intense music] ♪ ♪ ROB BELL: On the 10th of August, 1880, The Cutty Sark got caught in a terrible storm en route to Japan, and it was all hands on deck to try and keep control.

The ship's first mate, Sydney Smith, shouted to the lookout, John Francis, to let go the lazy tack controlling one of the sails.

But Francis seemed not to understand, and there may have been good reason for that.

Whilst Francis had been recruited as an able seaman, the crew suspected that he was, in fact, an untrained kitchen hand.

Smith lost his temper and stormed towards Francis, threatening to throw him overboard.

Francis replied that if he came any closer, he had a capstan bar waiting for him.

Now a capstan bar is one of these large wooden bars used to turn the wheel when raising the anchor.

Now Smith, just next to him, however, had a broken capstan bar of his own.

He picked it up, marched towards Francis, and clocked him over the head with it.

Francis collapsed unconscious, and he would never wake up.

[somber music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): When the ship reached Indonesia, hoping to keep his first mate out of trouble, it's thought Captain Wallace took matters into his own hands and helped Smith escape from his cabin and onto an American ship.

As the ship headed toward Yokohama in Japan, Captain Wallace knew he was facing disgrace.

Once word got out that he'd helped Sydney to escape, his career would be in tatters, and he'd very likely face trial for aiding and abetting a murderer.

So as the ship neared port, Wallace decided there was only one way out of the situation.

And it would require drastic action.

[intense music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Less than a decade since her glory days on the tea run, the Cutty Sark cut a tragic figure on the high seas.

Misfortune and mayhem led to one journey being dubbed the "hell ship voyage."

In 1880, the Cutty Sark had reached one of the darkest points in her history.

Her first mate had murdered a crew member, and her captain, James Wallace, had helped the killer to escape.

Now, realizing that his actions would lead to both the ruin of his career and social disgrace, Captain Wallace brooded on his fate.

[intriguing music] At 4:00 AM on the night of the 9th of September, 1880, the helmsman reported seeing Wallace pacing backwards and forwards on the deck.

♪ ♪ Then, just moments later, he heard a splash.

[splash] ♪ ♪ ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): In the open sea, there was no sign of the captain, only sharks circling the water.

And Wallace was never seen again.

[ominous music] ♪ ♪ ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Abandoned by her captain and with a growing reputation for unruly crews, the Cutty Sark had sunk to a new low.

♪ ♪ And the reckless behavior of her next captain would risk the ship and the lives of everyone on board.

This is the captain's dining room on board the Cutty Sark, and it comes complete with this rather strange fixture here.

It's called a gimbal.

It's actually a glass holder and will stop your drink from spilling, even at sea, because it will sway along with the movement of the ship.

Now, it's safe to say this would probably have seen some fairly heavy use from the ship's next captain, William Bruce.

He was a chronic alcoholic.

And during a particularly heavy bender with his first mate, the ship only narrowly avoided a collision whilst at sea.

Bruce's drinking also made him somewhat forgetful, as he failed to stock the ship, meaning that his crew almost starved.

[ominous music] A ship is very dependent on the feeling the crew have towards it, their morale, a sailing ship in particular, because to sail a ship at high speed, it requires a well-trained and well-motivated crew.

If you don't have that, the ship itself is not effective.

If you like, the men on board are the mechanism of the ship, and it's like the engine breaking down.

[intense music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The Cutty Sark had reached rock bottom.

Begging for food from passing ships, she limped to New York, where Captain Bruce was sacked and the poor Cutty Sark tramped on.

Her new cargo from the sheep farms of Australia was raw wool.

Greasy and smelly, it was a long way from her fragrant days carrying tea.

It seemed like yet another humiliation, but wool was becoming a booming trade, and it was wool that gave Cutty Sark a chance to reforge her career.

LOUISE MACFARLANE: Just above us you can see Cutty Sark's main hatch, so the majority of cargo would be winched and lowered through this space.

And the big challenge is getting as many, of course, wool bales into the ship as would be possible.

And what they would tend to do is use a piece of wood to insert in between two bales, and then they'd use a jack screw to actually squeeze the wool bales into space as firmly as possible.

On average, Cutty Sark managed to load over 4,000 bales at a time.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The fine Merino wool fetched a good price back in London.

In today's money, a shipload was worth more than 12 million pounds.

Her shameful days of tramping were over.

[pensive music] Now part of a flourishing industry, she got the good captain she deserved.

Richard Woodget was a fearless navigator with a reputation for getting the best out of his crew and his ship.

On the wool route across the Pacific, pushed along by the roaring 40s, the powerful westerly winds running around Cape Horn, the clipper achieved her fastest times yet, covering 300 miles in a single day.

♪ ♪ The Cutty Sark was back, reborn as a wool clipper and ready to take on one of the most feared oceans on the planet, the Antarctic.

♪ ♪ The biggest threat facing The Cutty Sark in Antarctica was icebergs.

And we know that at one point, the ship's keel passed just meters above a giant iceberg that would have torn it to pieces had it hit.

This meant that accurate steering was more important than ever, but it wasn't easy.

Now, the ship's wheel here is obviously towards the back of the ship near the rudder, but as you can see, from here, you can't see the front of the ship at all.

I can hardly see past this first mast.

This meant that a whole chain of sailors was set up, shouting communications from the front, back to the helmsman, so he could correct his steering angle.

It's a bit like trying to drive an articulated lorry with your driving position somewhere near the rear license plate.

It's near on impossible.

[dramatic music] LOUISE MACFARLANE: In 1893, Captain Woodget recorded in his logbook the experience of actually encountering these icebergs.

He suggests at one point that one of the icebergs he thinks is a thousand feet high.

This seems an incredible possibility to me, but that's certainly what he records in his logbook.

He also talks about the sounds that the icebergs were making.

They'd be like the crack of a rifle and sounds of cannons as the icebergs were moving and cracking, which must have been an absolutely terrifying thing to actually-- to encounter.

[iceberg creaking] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): When the freezing waters turned rough, the ship and her crew were tested to their very limits.

[ominous music] Captain Woodget's log, 28th of June, 1891.

"An immense sea rolled up right aft.

It dropped on board both sides with tremendous force, smashing in the door of the fore and after houses.

It rushed aft, covering the poop.

The water was up to my waist whilst I was hanging on to the rail.

You could see nothing but the boats and the masts.

The whole ship was completely submerged.

During the 31 years that I've been sailing the seas, I never saw anything approaching it in size or steepness."

[waves crashing loudly] [gentle music] ♪ ♪ For 11 years, Captain Woodget steered the Cutty Sark to safe passage across the oceans.

And as an amateur photographer, he documented the daily lives of his crew.

His portraits are a fascinating glimpse of a bygone age.

♪ ♪ ROB BELL: The years of The Cutty Sark under Captain Woodget are widely considered the happiest in her history.

Yet by 1895, the age of sail had truly come to an end.

Steamships had now taken over.

The next few decades saw the Cutty Sark sold to the Portuguese, and she even had her name changed to Ferreira.

But despite her best working days now being behind her, her fame with the public was only just beginning.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): For 27 years, the Cutty Sark sailed under the Portuguese flag.

Then in 1922, she came home, bought by a retired sea captain and put to work in Falmouth Harbor as a training ship for Navy cadets.

[upbeat music] And her return sparked the beginning of one of the most bizarre episodes in her history.

[lively jazz] 1923, America under Prohibition.

In towns and cities all over the US, a flourishing trade in illegal liquor kept the authorities on their toes.

While in London, royal wine merchants Berry Brothers and Rudd were hatching a plan to crack the underground US whiskey market with the help of the Cutty Sark.

ROB BELL: Berry Brothers and Rudd has a special relationship with the Cutty Sark.

Can you tell me a bit more about that and how it came about?

So we go back to 1923.

In this very room, two of the partners of Berry Brothers, Hugh Rudd and Francis Berry, sat around the table here with the artist James McBey and were looking to come up with an idea for a whiskey for the United States.

And James McBey started scribbling.

And what he scribbled on the napkin that day became what we see in front of us here.

This is the original label with the ship shown upon it, almost exactly the same as the sketch that James McBey would have done back in 1923.

Lovely.

[lively jazz] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The new whiskey was delivered to the rum runners who made a living smuggling all kinds of liquor to the shores of the US.

GEORDIE WILLS: There was a huge issue at the time with bootlegging.

What you had were a lot of the more established brands were often filled with the wrong liquid.

When you had a new brand that was coming into the market, it was much more difficult to fake.

ROB BELL: I guess there was an assumption, then, that if you had a bottle of Cutty Sark, it was going to be Cutty Sark on the inside, as well as on the outside.

That was the assumption.

We also had a situation where the person that got it into the market, a guy called Captain Bill McCoy, was one of the most trustworthy men in the industry.

He was teetotal.

He was one of the original rum runners, taking the spirit from the Bahamas into the Florida Keys.

And his name is where the term "the real McCoy" came from.

He was the one that got hold of the good stuff.

ROB BELL: Well, seeing as we got the bottles here-- Should we pour some?

It would seem sad not to taste it and not to see what that success was all about.

[lively jazz] Give it a little swirl.

Cheers.

Cheers.

♪ ♪ ROB BELL: So there is a product that stands out as a liquid.

GEORDIE WILLS: Yeah.

ROB BELL: Also has a bottle with the label and the iconic Cutty Sark on the front.

And I suspect it would never have been successful if it hadn't been for the ship.

Cheers to the Cutty Sark.

Ah, lovely.

[gentle music] ♪ ♪ ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The Cutty Sark had survived seven turbulent decades at sea.

But by the end of World War II, her days as a naval training vessel were over.

[somber music] Suddenly, this once grand ship faced a very uncertain future.

ROB BELL: Even for a ship as well-loved as the Cutty Sark, retirement can be a dangerous thing.

In Falmouth, she'd been moored up alongside one of Britain's oldest warships, HMS Implacable, a veteran from the Napoleonic Wars.

These carvings behind me here are from her stern.

And just like the Cutty Sark, by the 1940s, HMS Implacable was in need of some seriously expensive upkeep.

But after the war, the government had simply run out of money.

So in December 1949, she set sail on her final voyage to be scuttled by explosive charge off the Isle of Wight.

The director of the National Maritime Museum at the time was there and recalled that he wept.

Today, this is all that's left of her.

And unless Cutty Sark could find a benefactor, she too would face a similar fate.

[pensive music] ♪ ♪ [upbeat music] ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): But this grand lady of the sea wasn't sunk yet.

After the tragic end of poor old HMS Implacable, the Cutty Sark was given a permanent berth in Greenwich and restored to her former glory.

♪ ♪ Since she opened to the public in 1954, 17 million people have clambered aboard.

The Cutty Sark had earned her place in the nation's hearts.

But one night in 2007, she would face her greatest ordeal yet.

[sirens wailing] On the night of 21st May, 2007, a fire ripped through all three decks of Cutty Sark, reaching, it's believed, temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees.

This was an absolutely terrifying sight, not just for those who are actually working on the ship, but those who lived in the vicinity, who were seeing this historic ship, this London icon, potentially being destroyed.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): Impossibly, the wooden ship survived.

But how could she endure such a fierce blaze?

On that terrible night, the Cutty Sark was saved by a remarkable piece of good fortune.

I presume because most of the ship is made out of wood, does that mean that most of it was destroyed by the fire?

No.

Luckily, all that was here was a very, very small percentage of the hull planks, the iron frames, and new decks which have been laid on the main deck.

All the brightworks, the deckhouses, the captain's cabin, and 95% of the timber structure was at Chatham Historic Dockyard, so they're all safely being restored, thankfully.

That was an amazing stroke of luck.

Yeah, huge.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): After the fire, the initial feeling of despair soon turned to one of hope.

At the time of the blaze, the Cutty Sark had been closed for restoration.

Because so many of her valuable parts were awaiting repair in the Historic Dockyard at Chatham, only 5% of the original fabric of the ship was lost.

It enhanced the legend of the Cutty Sark that she rose like a phoenix from the ashes of the fire.

The ship that can survive anything.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The cause of the fire was discovered later.

A dust extractor left on over the weekend had overheated.

In the years since the blaze, Simon and his team have brought the old ship back to life using materials and techniques both modern and traditional.

With this section that we're standing here, Simon, I can see that there are a few joins and maybe small sections that have been inserted.

SIMON THOMPSON: Some will have been historic repairs when she was at sea.

And there's certain elements you can see where there's grooves worn into the timber, which is all part of her story.

It's the kind of wrinkles of her.

When you think of the people who used to sail on these things, who took such care of them, because if they didn't, their lives were in peril.

So there's a real kind of affinity between the sailors and the ship.

ROB BELL: It's beautiful.

[uplifting music] The restoration certainly seems to have been a massive success, and I imagine it's a huge source of pride for everyone involved.

Are you proud to be working here?

Oh, totally.

The way I look at it is the captains of these ships used to have competitions with each other, who had the best-turned-out ship.

So I view what we're trying to achieve here is the ship when she's first leaving port, but looking as beautiful as possible.

And it's such a beautiful thing.

Victorian engineering, I think, is just something else.

ROB BELL (VOICEOVER): The Cutty Sark is the ship that never gave up.

She came through fire and storm, endured drunken captains, reinventing herself time and again to become the greatest survivor of the heroic age of sail.

There's no doubt that the coal- and later oil-powered ships that replaced vessels like the Cutty Sark revolutionized our world.

They were part of the Allied victory in World War II and are now the backbone of global trade.

But when you step on board a great sail ship, you can't help but feel a sense of loss of vessels like this on our oceans.

The Cutty Sark wasn't built just to fulfill a commercial function.

She was also built to be beautiful.

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