Tuesday, 10 December 2019
Riding the Underground, 2 transfers, and an hour twenty later, we arrive in Greenwich just a short walk to the famous clipper ship. Cutty Sark is a British clipper ship. Built in Scotland in 1869, 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.
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Wood planking over an interior steel framework....................................that's alot of tea!
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As a museum ship, we see much effort was expended to tell the story.
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We saw meticulous preservation/restoration on an old ship with some unfortunate fires in recent years.
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Beautifully maintained woodwork....................................grey colored steel structure added for support.
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Representation of where cargo is brought down through the decks - in this case, wool, hauled from Australia after the shift from the tea trade. Also, a nice, original collection of the captain's tools.
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From stem to stern, Muntz cladding over timber planking over a steel skeleton. Muntz metal is a form of brass with about 60% copper, 40% zinc and a trace of iron.
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Near the bow, we checked out a neat collection of figureheads.
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Onto the National Maritime Museum...
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We spent much of our time here in a special exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Many interesting exhibits held our attention for some time.
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We then walked up a long climb to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
Gerri is checking her I-phone coordinates against the Prime Meridian, Longitude Zero (although the real, actual, zero is roughly 125 yds east of this line).
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Many historical spaces and equipments are on display here.
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Also, within the museum spaces are the amazing John Harrison clocks. John Harrison (1693 – 1776) was a self-educated English carpenter and clock maker who invented the marine chronometer, a long-sought-after device for solving the problem of calculating longitude while at sea.
Development versions:
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To the left, the H4, with which John Harrison proved that time-based determination of longitude was practical. To the right, a time piece, 135 years later, as used on the clipper Cutty Sark.
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We also watched a series of planetarium presentations, adjacent to the observatory, before we left for "home".
A night time view of Canary Wharf, across the Thames River - we'll pay it a visit in a few days for our final tour in London.
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