24" x 36" / 61 x 91 cms
Oil on Canvas

Sir Lancelot is most notable for achieving what is widely considered to be the fastest ever China to London transit during the 1869 race season, beating her nearest competitor by a full two days despite unfavourable monsoon conditions. Although events such as the famous Great Tea Race of 1866 (in which Lancelot’s sister ship Ariel lost to Taeping by only 29 minutes) have often been seen as merely publicity stunts, successful Clippers were often able to command a significant premium on goods. Presenting a strong racing pedigree was clearly of great concern to the owners of Sir Lancelot, who poached Richard Robinson from Fiery Cross, another Clipper noted for its speed. Lancelot’s owner, John McCunn, would go on to state that the new captain ‘was the best man I ever had in any ship and knew he got the best racing results out of Sir Lancelot’.

Although the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 prompted a decline in the importance of Clippers, Sir Lancelot was transferred to the Mauritius-Bengal routes and continued to break speed records under the command of Murdo MacDonald. She gained the epithet ‘The Yacht of the Indian Ocean’, an impressive title for what was ostensibly just a fast merchant vessel, indicative of the high aesthetic regard in which Clippers were held. In her final years she was sold to an Indian merchant (Visram Ibrahim) in 1886, and then transferred to Persia before being lost during a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal in 1895 having already survived four close shaves during Monsoons.

Illustrative of her fame that she appears in the poem ‘By the Old Pagoda Anchorage’, 1926, by Cicely Fox Smith celebrating the greatest Clippers - “Sir Lancelot of a hundred famous fights with wind and wave”

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£6,750.00

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