THE virtual destruction of the 19th century tea-clipper Cutty Sark comes like a hammer-blow to my heart.

Not merely was it one of the most beautiful artifacts I have ever seen, but it was the most perfect alliance of form and function. Cutty Sark was designed to bring tea at high speed across the world, and then, when the tea-trade had become dominated by steamers which could navigate through the new Suez Canal, it brought wool from Australia, sometimes at 15 knots, day and night, making four hundred land-miles between noon and noon.

Ship for ship, and mile by nautical mile, the Cutty Sark could outrun the early steamships, but it was unable to pass through canals under its own way, and of course, could be becalmed.

With their raked prows and their huge spread of sail, the clippers were the most beautiful ships ever built, their deep draught enabling them to sail close to the wind, which meant added speed.

They were the final aria in the long opera which had first joined keel and canvas in the xebecs and dhows of the Mediterranean. But never had timber and sail achieved such dynamic harmony as they did on those vessels fleeting across the South China Seas towards the Cape of Good Hope, with their cargoes of Assam, Darjeeling and Greenleaf.

This was also the era of the sea shanties, the worksongs of sailors as they hauled the shrouds and reefed the sails, from Brest and Liverpool, San Francisco and Shanghai. The British merchant fleet was larger than that of the rest of the world put together, employing thousands of Irishmen from the ports of Dublin, Waterford, Cork, Claddagh and Belfast. The sea-shanties fused Irish melodies with the airs of the English West Country, of the Highlands, and of New England; hence 'The Leaving of Liverpool', 'The Rio Grande' and 'The Mermaid', which belong to no nation and to all. So steam abolished not just sail but song, and the clippers were the last ships on which sailors weighed the anchor to rhythmic singing: Yo oh heave-ho.

Relationship

The dynamic relationship between the English language and the call of the sea was sealed by the coincidental emergence of three great laureates of the ocean, during the brief reign of the clippers: the Pole, Joseph Conrad; the Englishman, John Masefield, and the Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson.

Joseph Conrad's novels, beginning with Nigger of the Narcissus of 1897 and Lord Jim a couple of years later, gave to the idiom of the sea-novel a gravitas it has retained ever since. John Masefield's Salt Water Ballads, written when he was just 21, provided a new and enormously popular poetic medium.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide,

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

But it had been Stevenson's Treasure Island of 1883 which imperishably united the sea and English literature. It is one of the most powerfully influential books in all of anglophone culture.

A child today in Nebraska or in Alice Springs will have probably heard of Long John Silver, Blind Pugh and the Spanish Main. Hence modern films like Pirates of the Caribbean can still entrance the portly, pot-bellied McMicrosoft generation of teenage landlubbers, for whom all obsolete technology is otherwise repulsive; yet their youthful follicles bristle, and some ancient Viking gene is stirred, by the very words foret'gallant and fo'c'sle, and of the sound of the yards cracking in a brisk trade-wind.

So, to be sure, Cutty Sark can be claimed as a triumph for the Dumbarton shipyard which built her in 1869; but she was a truly divine proof of the human need for beauty.

The rugged shipwrights of the Clyde had an aesthetic which rejoiced in the clean lines of the ship they hewed from wood, around the steel-frame which gave the clipper its bodily strength.

This enabled the clipper to take the pounding of the huge waves as it rounded the Horn, leaving the Indian Ocean and entering the brutal Atlantic.

Moreover, Cutty Sark was so utterly elemental, a triumph of the rudiments of hand and wood, wind, canvas and sea.

And those who steered the clipper out of Shanghai were the last of a maritime culture which once employed hundreds of thousands of men, and which enabled Europe to spread its power around the world.

With steam, that culture largely perished within a generation.

Sailing

All that truly remained of it until this last weekend was one of the greatest sailing vessels of all time - and now Cutty Sark is in ashes.

Whatever they erect in its place will be an ersatz confection, which might as well be of plasterboard; for its timbers would never have felt the rush of brine on their seaward side, never have echoed to barefooted sailors dancing to the hornpipe above, nor felt the brisk spume of an Atlantic squall. The Cutty Sark is dead: RIP.