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.
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
