Cutty Sark is a British clipper ship. Built on the River Leven, Scotland in 1869 for the Jock Willis Shipping Line, she was one of the last tea clippers to be built and one of the fastest, coming at the end of a long period of design development, which halted as sailing ships gave way to steam propulsion; the opening of the Suez Canal meant that steamships now enjoyed a much shorter route to China, so Cutty Sark spent only a few years on the tea trade before turning to the trade in wool from Australia, where she held the record time to Britain for ten years. Improvements in steam technology meant that steamships came to dominate the longer sailing route to Australia, the ship was sold to the Portuguese company Ferreira and Co. in 1895 and renamed Ferreira. She continued as a cargo ship until purchased in 1922 by retired sea captain Wilfred Dowman, who used her as a training ship operating from Falmouth, Cornwall. After his death, Cutty Sark was transferred to the Thames Nautical Training College, Greenhithe in 1938 where she became an auxiliary cadet training ship alongside HMS Worcester.

By 1954, she had ceased to be useful as a cadet ship and was transferred to permanent dry dock at Greenwich, for public display. Cutty Sark is listed by National Historic Ships as part of the National Historic Fleet, she is one of only three remaining original composite construction clipper ships from the nineteenth century in part or whole, the others being the City of Adelaide, which arrived in Port Adelaide, South Australia on 3 February 2014 for preservation, the beached skeleton of Ambassador of 1869 near Punta Arenas, Chile. The ship has been damaged by fire twice in recent years, first on 21 May 2007 while undergoing conservation, she was restored and was reopened to the public on 25 April 2012. On 19 October 2014 she was damaged in a smaller fire. Cutty Sark whisky derives its name from the ship. An image of the clipper appears on the label, the maker sponsored the Cutty Sark Tall Ships' Race; the ship inspired the name of the Saunders Roe Cutty Sark flying boat. Cutty Sark was ordered by shipping magnate John Willis, who operated a shipping company founded by his father.

The company had a fleet of clippers and took part in the tea trade from China to Britain. Speed was a clear advantage to a merchant ship, but it created prestige for the owners: the'tea race' was reported in contemporary newspapers and had become something of a national sporting event, with money being gambled against a winning ship. In earlier years, Willis had commanded his father's ships at a time when American designed ships were the fastest in the tea trade, had owned British designed ships, which were amongst the best available in the world but had never won the tea race. In 1868 the brand new Aberdeen built clipper Thermopylae set a record time of 61 days port to port on her maiden voyage from London to Melbourne and it was this design that Willis set out to better, it is uncertain. Willis chose Hercules Linton to design and build the ship but Willis possessed another ship, The Tweed, which he considered to have exceptional performance; the Tweed was a frigate designed by Oliver Lang based on the lines of an old French frigate, built in Bombay for the East India Company as a combination sail/paddle steamer.

She and a sister ship were purchased by Willis, who promptly sold the second ship plus engines from The Tweed for more than he paid for both. The Tweed was lengthened and operated as a fast sailing vessel, but was considered too big for the tea runs. Willis commissioned two all-iron clippers with designs based upon The Tweed, Hallowe'en and Blackadder. Linton was taken to view The Tweed in dry dock. Willis considered that The Tweed's bow shape was responsible for its notable performance, this form seems to have been adopted for Cutty Sark. Linton, felt that the stern was too barrel shaped and so gave Cutty Sark a squarer stern with less tumblehome; the broader stern increased the buoyancy of the ship's stern, making it lift more in heavy seas so it was less that waves would break over the stern, over the helmsman at the wheel. The square bilge was carried forward through the centre of the ship. Cutty Sark was given masts that followed the design of The Tweed, with similar good rake and the foremast on both placed further aft than usual.

A contract for Cutty Sark's construction was signed on 1 February 1869 with the firm of Scott & Linton, which had only been formed in May 1868. Their shipyard was at Dumbarton on the River Leven on a site occupied by shipbuilders William Denny & Brothers; the contract required the ship to be completed within six months at a contracted price of £17 per ton and maximum weight of 950 tons. This was a competitive price for an experimental, state-of-the-art vessel, for a customer requiring the highest standards. Payment would be made in seven instalments as the ship progressed, but with a penalty of £5 for every day the ship was late; the ship was to be built to Lloyd's A1 standard and her construction was supervised on behalf of Willis by Captain George Moodie, who would command her when completed. Construction delays occurred when the Lloyd's inspectors required additional strengthening in the ship. Work on the ship was suspended when Linton ran out of money to continue. Rather than liquidate the company, an arrangement was made for Denny's to take over the contract and complete the ship, launched on 22 November 1869 by Captain Moodie's wife.

The ship was moved to Denny's yard to have her masts fitted, on 20 December towed downriver

Arleen Lyda Paré is a Canadian writer. She has published three collections of two novels to date. From Montreal, Paré was educated in social work and adult education, worked in social services in Vancouver, British Columbia for much of her professional career, she left her social services job to study creative writing at the University of Victoria. Her first book, Paper Trail, was published in 2007. A blend of poetry and prose about a businesswoman finding herself stifled by the weight of corporate bureaucracy, the book was a shortlisted nominee for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2008, won that year's City of Victoria Butler Book Award, she followed up with the novel Leaving Now in 2012. Her 2014 poetry collection Lake of Two Mountains won the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry at the 2014 Governor General's Awards. A lesbian, she once served on the board of Plenitude magazine. Paper Trail Leaving Now Lake of Two Mountains The Girls with Stone Faces Official website

John Albert Bullbrook was an author and archaeological historian, who went to Trinidad in 1913 as a petroleum geologist. He began his archaeological career in 1919, pioneering the search on the indigenous population of Trinidad. By the early 1930s, he provides evidence of the prominence of reflections on the indigenous history of Trinidad, on the figure of the Carib, in some of the élites’ writings of local history. Famously in a public lecture in 1938, John Bullbrook, by a local specialist in the Amerindian history of Trinidad, made the comment: "To this day we speak of the Queen if the Caribs at Arima, yet I doubt if there is much--if any--Carib blood in her race.". In 1940, for a public lecture and book published under the Royal Victoria Museum and the Historical Society of Trinidad and Tobago, entitled The Ierian Race, Bullbrook wrote: "Probably, if I were to ask any of my audience this evening what was the predominant or the only race in Trinidad at the time of the discovery by Cristobal Colon, the reply would be unhesitatingly: ‘Why, Carib, of course’".

Throughout the 1940s, he conducted extensive excavations in the Amerindian middens in Cedros and Palo Seco. The Cedros site in Trinidad, which he excavated with Irving Rouse in 1946, is considered one of the most important archaeological sites in the Caribbean, consisting of a destroyed shell midden located on the southwest tip of Trinidad; the corrected radiocarbon datings for the finds at this site were given as 190 B. C. and A. D. 100. Bullbrook, as a partisan in the local debate over whether the true natives of Trinidad were Carib or Arawak, lamented in 1960, that the "tradition" of believing that Caribs were the indigenous people of Trinidad was "deep rooted and hard to destroy". In July 1960, Bullbrook, at the first conference in the West Indies on pre-Columbian archaeology held in Fort-de-France, discussed his research into the "Arawaks and Caribs of Trinidad" along with the likes of Rev. Father Pinchon and A. H. Anderson. Articles of Bullbrook's have been published in magazines with a varying range of readers such as The Caribbean, Caribbean Quarterly, Shell Magazine.

He became curator of the Royal Victoria Institute, died at the age of 85. John Bullbrook, having been educated in Great Britain, had previous field experience in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, his techniques represent a significant advance over the ‘museological’ approach that characterized the work of Fewkes and de Booy. His collection of correspondence with Yale University, with a variety of people on the subject of archaeology in the West Indies, with the Historical Society of Trinidad and Tobago. Bullbrook was married to the lesbian painter Amy Leong Pang. Notes Concerning Excavation Of Shell Mounds Or Kitchen Middens. Occasional Papers No. 3. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Royal Victoria Institute Museum, 1963 "The Aborigines of Trinidad". Port of Spain, Trinidad: Royal Victoria Institute Museum, 1960. "The Carib-Arawakcontroversy". Trinidad and Tobago, 1957. "Excavations at Wari, Peru and on the Excavations of a Shell Mound at Palo Seco, Trinidad, B. W. I.". New Haven, Yale University Press, 1953. ′The Ierian Race'.

Port of Spain, Trinidad: Historical Society of Trinidad and Tobago, 1940. "The aborigines of Trinidad". In Richards, comp. Discovery Day celebration, 1927 "The aboriginal remains of Trinidad and the West Indies: A commentary on the pre-European cultures of Trinidad and the neighboring West Indies in connection". Port of Spain, Trinidad: Caribbean Quarterly, 1914