Rush to tea time helped shape boating history

Alex Coolman

NEWPORT HARBOR -- It started with tea and silk, and it ended with

boats that tore through the ocean like rockets.

The trade between the West and China during the 18th and 19th

centuries was more than a cultural exchange: it was the driving force

behind a nautical revolution.

That’s the message that’s driven home by “Mariners and Mandarins,” the

new exhibit at the Newport Harbor Nautical Museum.

The exhibit displays many of the Chinese items that European consumers

found most tantalizing: things like ornate fans, elaborately engraved

silver ewers, lacquer boxes and, above all, tremendous quantities of tea.

An extensive collection of paintings also showcases the scenes of port

cities -- like Shanghai, Canton and Singapore -- that exercised a

powerful force on the Western imagination.

But one of the most striking aspects of the show has to do with the

way the tea trade affected nautical history.

Demand for tea transformed sailboat design, said Marcus De Chevrieux,

museum curator.

Because the first shipments of tea in a season could command the

highest prices, and because the product itself was highly perishable,

boat builders worked to make their crafts faster and sleeker than they

had ever been before.

The result, De Chevrieux said, was the development of the famous

“clipper” ships, boats whose knife-like bows cut through the water at

unprecedented speeds.

“It was the highest level of achievement in sailing ship design that

there was,” he said. “Clippers were the last evolution.”

The irony of the vogue for clipper ships, said museum director Wayne

Eggleston, was that it arrived just as sail-powered crafts were about to

become commercially obsolete.

“This was just before the advent of steam-powered ships” in the

mid-to-late 19th century, Eggleston said.

The exhibit also charts the development of nautical navigation

technology -- from its most primitive beginnings in 12th century

astrolabes to more advanced sextants of the 19th century. The collection

of artifacts, in fact, goes beyond the borders of the overall show theme,

charting the larger trajectory of human understanding of navigation.

“It’s stuff the Smithsonian would kill for,” De Chevrieux said of the

collection.

FYI

The exhibit runs through Nov. 10 in the grand salon of the museum,

which is located in the Pride of Newport riverboat at 131 E. Coast

Highway. Admission is free. For more information, call (949) 673-7863.