Hercules Linton

He subsequently moved to the Liverpool Underwriters Registry where from early in 1862 he was assisting John Jordan, the Chief Surveyor.

How Willis found and selected Scott & Linton to design and build a state of the art extreme clipper is not known.

[citation needed] On the surface it seems Willis must have been taking a risk but he used all his business experience to negotiate an agreement which provided a high degree of protection.

The price of £17 per ton was extremely competitive and given the total lack of experience in building a composite clipper ship of anything close to the size and complexity of Cutty Sark makes one[who?]

If Scott and Linton were unable to complete then Willis had the right to enter the yard and finish the work paying for materials out of the withheld stage payments.

Agreement was eventually reached with Lloyd's but not before causing a delay which in turn delayed the receipt of stage payments, affected cash flow and reduced the profit by causing Scott & Linton to absorb the extra cost of labour and materials to comply with the negotiated additions.

He was normally based in Belfast but in May 1869 he was temporarily seconded to Glasgow due to the resident Lloyd's surveyor's involvement in a shipyard accident.

After everything was finished and final costs taken into account, the creditors were owed even more money than the amount outstanding when they made the ill-advised decision to complete the three ships.

In December, 1869 Linton took a job as head of the modelling and design department at Leckie, Wood and Munro who were shipbuilders and engineers.

At the beginning of April 1870 he resigned due to his involvement with a new firm of shipbuilders Morton, Wyld & Co. who started operations at the yard previously occupied by Scott & Linton.