The Great Tea Race comes to a thrilling end

THIS MONTH... 1866

- Emma Slattery Williams

Captain John Keay desperately waited for a tugboat to take his ship, the high-speed clipper Ariel, up the Thames and into dock at London. Victory in that year's tea race, and the prize money that went with it, was within his grasp, but a rival had been in sight not far behind for hours now. Even after 99 days at sea and nearly 16,000 nautical miles, the winner was going to be determined by mere minutes, and good luck, on 6 September 1866.

DID YOU KNOW? BREW BEGINNINGS Catherine of Braganza, daughter of John IV of Portugal, helped popularise drinking tea for pleasure instead of medicine in England. When she arrived in 1662 to marry Charles II, she brought tea leaves as it was already a common drink in her home country.

For just over a decade, clipper captains like Keay had competed in an unofficial annual race: to load the first crop of tea in China and sail as quickly as possible to be the first to unload it in Britain, where thirsty tea drinkers were waiting to have their cups filled with the freshest leaves. Originally introduced to the British en masse in the mid-17th century, tea had grown into one of the nation's biggest imports by the 1800s. The hot drink was beloved at all levels of society and tea houses had proliferated, partly thanks to members of the temperance movement who encouraged the beverage as a healthy alternative to alcohol.

Such was the demand for tea that once the East India Company's monopoly on the trade ended in the 1830s, competition among merchants got heated. They developed and refined designs for faster ships able to handle the conditions on the voyage between Britain and China. Clippers were the elegant result. Slim, streamlined and with a huge number of sails across their three masts to catch every gust of wind, they could reach high speeds even when laden with goods, making them ideal for transporting tea (as well as the opium being sold to China).