Something new: ship in a bottle

Life aboard a colonial tea clipper, with its motley crew sweating on the sails by day and swigging ale come night, might not have been particularly … fragrant.

But a romantic notion survives of those 19th-century voyages; clippers racing across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope to deliver decadent commodities to London from the far-flung Orient.

Now historic English perfume house Penhaligon's has bottled what it imagines was the aroma of those ships as the fragrance Lothair, part of its Trade Routes Collection.

The Lothair was a 792-tonne ship built in Lavender Dock, London, in 1869, and named after the titular character in a novel by British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli.

As well as sailing to Yokohama, in Japan, and New York, in the United States, the clipper took tea to London, making the journey from Hong Kong in 1873 in 89 days.