Meaning of tea clipper | Babel Free

Definitions

A clipper or fast-sailing vessel formerly employed in the tea trade.

Examples

“There was the Lightning whose record of thirteen days from Boston to Liverpool, many a steam freighter today cannot beat. There was the Flying Cloud, that sailed from New York around the Horn to Frisco in eighty-nine days. Famous clippers both of them, like the Hurricane, Stag Hound, and the Great Republic. But they are gone like the British tea clippers, the Titania, Spindrift, Caliph and Lothair, and the Lahloo which won the race from Foo Chow to London in 1870, in ninety-seven days. The Cutty Sark is perhaps the only old tea clipper still afloat.”

“Their wealth of sails (one memorable tea clipper had 63) demanded huge crews while their narrow holds limited them to relatively small cargoes and correspondingly small margins of profit.”

“The variety is endless: Viking longboats, Portuguese carracks, Spanish galleons, British men-of-war, American tea clippers, paddle-wheel steamers and those swift, sleek ocean liners of the 1930s.”

“The opening of the Suez canal, just after the Cutty Sark was built, quickly made tea clippers redundant as steamers benefited from a shorter sea route.”

“Built in 1869, it was one of the last tea clippers used to transport goods to Britain from as far as Australia”

CEFR level