The Cutty Sark — A Phoenix?

It wasn't just a fire — it was history going up in smoke. The world's best-preserved relic from the great age of sail reduced, it seemed earlier this week, to so much kindling.

Not much was left once the flames were put out. But this ship, the Cutty Sark, has always been a lucky girl. A lot of her wasn't here at the time of the fire ... the masts, the planking from the hull, fittings, even the figurehead named Nana, had all been taken away to a warehouse as part of a major restoration project.

Amazingly, the destruction looks worse than it is. The Cutty Sark, though badly damaged, was not destroyed. With money and time — lots of both — she can be fixed. But the fire did cause a major scare that something unique and precious — and even loved — had been lost forever.

For fifty years before the fire, housed (some say held captive) in a dry dock in London's East End, the Cutty Sark had been a tourist draw and an irresistible location for interviews. When we needed a place to talk to Tom Standage a couple of years ago, about a book he had written about tea and the role of various drinks in history, the Cutty Sark was the obvious place — it being one of the great clipper ships.

"This is one of the clippers, the great ships, that were used to bring tea back from China, all the way 'round the world, amazingly quickly, to sate the British desire to drink tea," Standage told CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips. "So this is the tea delivery technology."

She was the best kind of technology — the beautiful kind. She was engineering and commercial utility and art all rolled into one. And she combined two concepts at the center of the image the British have of themselves: Ships and tea.

Launched in 1869, the Cutty Sark dominated the tea trade from the South China Sea for the next decade. And she did more. As Standage points out, she didn't just service a market — she created one.

"This ship was able to cover the distance from China to Britain very quickly," he noted, "but actually there wasn't any particular reason why you needed to be in a hurry. Tea will keep for years if you store it properly. But instead they made a big deal about how this was the new season's tea and which ship it had come from, you know. So if you had the tea from the ship that had won the clipper race that was somehow cooler than some other kind of tea. So the whole thing was somehow the beginning of commercial marketing."

Commerce, which had been the reason for the Cutty Sark in the first place, was also her undoing. She came along just as sail was being overtaken by steam. She fell on hard times, was sold and resold and put to various uses — or none at all. Finally she was rescued by being turned into a museum.

"Since she went into dry dock in 1957 in Greenwich, she has sort of gained this mythology around her," said historian Tristram Hunt. "And as the things we value have retreated from everyday life — the seafaring, international exchange, the Empire — then all of these have been accredited to her, so I think her fame now is probably more enduring than it was."

Once when British monarchs reviewed the fleet, the Royal Navy could assemble the most powerful battle flotilla afloat.

But when the fleet was last assembled two years ago to commemorate the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, where the fabled Admiral Nelson destroyed the French Navy in the Napoleonic War, a French aircraft carrier was the biggest ship to be seen in an international fleet.

And the most impressive tall ships — always the stars of these shows — were all foreign.

So the Cutty Sark fire is now being seen as an opportunity. It has spawned a new movement. If the damage, while bad, can be repaired — if the ship can be rebuilt — why not really rebuild her? Why not fix her so that she can actually sail again?

"There is a lovely idea to patch her up and set her free, like a cheetah sort of unleashed," said Hunt. 'Free the Cutty Sark! Let her sail again!'"

It would be a long voyage from her current burnt-out shell to a seaworthy vessel. But in 138 years, the Cutty Sark has already come a long way. Why not dream of her sailing on a little further?