At 34 degrees with a coffee looking at the lake, weatherman says, it’ll warmup with sunny intervals, what the hell kind of language is that, whatever happened to party sunny or mostly cloudy with some sun.
The lake looks cold today
The Cutty Sark
Cutty Sark means a kind of short chemise undergarment in Scots. It was the nickname of Nannie Dee, a character in Robert Burns’ poem Tam O’ Shanter. A bare breasted carving of the lass was the ship’s famous figurehead.
The Thermopoylae and Cutty Sark vied for supremacy for years. In their most famous race the two ships departed Shanghai on the same day bound for London with the first tea shipments of 1872. Despite losing her rudder in a storm while passing through the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra and having to limp on with an improvised replacement, the Cutty Sark arrived in London only one week after the Thermopoylae’s 122 day passage, a feat that became legendary.
In 1890 she was withdrawn from the China trade and put to less glamorous general cargo usage. A voyage that year inspired a young Polish sailor, Joseph Conrad, in his short story The Secret Sharer published 12 years later. On this particular voyage the crew was so terrorized by a brutal, drunken first mate that most of them jumped ship at the first port leaving behind only bound apprentice seamen. The captain drove the ship over 2,000 kilometers over 72 hours. The mate murdered a crewman in a storm and the captain committed suicide when the crew rebelled for him allowing the mate to escape. The trip was concluded under a replacement captain and mate, each even more brutal than the original mate. A layover in Calcutta brought cholera on board, the crew suffered near starvation when not enough provisions were taken on, the new mate committed another murder, and there was a virtual mutiny.
While looking at the lake with a coffee, a song came to mind, which reminded me of the Cutty Sark story.