Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader loves tall ships. He will often go out of his way to see them under sail. If he knows that one will be in port somewhere, he will seek it out.

As a young villain, in the days before he was Maximum Leaderly, your Maximum Leader visited Britain for a long summer. During that summer (1985 in fact), he went to Greenwich and saw the tea clipper Cutty Sark. It was a memorable visit. Your Maximum Leader imagined racing from China with a load of tea to get the top prices in London. Wonderful stuff…

Well… Last night the Cutty Sark burned. The ship has been closed for restoration, and last night it was engulfed in flames. According to the wire services:

Firefighters responded to an early morning alarm at the ship’s dry dock. The flames were out about two hours later.

“At the moment we are treating the fire as suspicious, as we would do any fire of this scale and importance,” police Inspector Bruce Middlemiss said. Surveillance cameras showed several people in the area at the time the fire started, but there was no indication that any had been involved in igniting the fire.

“There is no evidence or intelligence to lead us to think this was an arson,” Middlemiss said.

The ship is the world’s only surviving example of an extreme clipper, regarded as the ultimate development of a merchant sailing vessel. Most of the original hull had survived since the ship was built for the tea trade of the 1800s.

Cutty Sark had been closed to visitors since last year for a $50 million renovation.

The leaders of the restoration project said the damage was not as bad as they feared.

“I’m relieved. I came here thinking the ship had gone on her last journey,” said Richard Doughty, chief executive of the Cutty Sark Trust.

However, “this will have resulted in millions and millions of pounds of damage. This is a ship that belongs to the world, and we’re going to need financial help,” said Doughty.

Your Maximum Leader is glad to hear that the ship, it is believed, can be repaired. He hopes that they can rebuild the Cutty Sark as a museum to a lost age of sail.

By the way… Do any of you know what a “cutty sark” is? (Without googling?) Robert Burns fans probably do…

Carry on.