The Cutty Sark, the world's last remaining tea clipper and a major London tourist attraction, was seriously damaged by fire on Monday -- but restorers insisted they can salvage the historic ship.
A British national treasure and one of the world's most famous ships, the 138-year-old vessel was engulfed in flames at dawn.
Police are treating the fire as suspicious.
The symbol of a golden age of sail ships racing to bring goods from far-flung corners of the world looked a miserable sight as its blackened skeleton smouldered.
The Cutty Sark has been in a dry dock at southeast London's Greenwich, once the heart of British maritime power, since 1954. The legendary ship is now a museum.
Firefighters took more than three hours to extinguish the blaze completely.
However, only good fortune prevented the damage from being much worse.
The vessel has been undergoing a ?5 million (US$49 million) restoration since November, due to end in 2009.
Fifty percent of the ship's timbers had been put into storage during the conservation project. About 80 percent of what remained was damaged, said Chris Livett, the chairman of Cutty Sark Enterprises.
He insisted the ship had weathered many a storm in its time and was "not dead yet."
"This is going to make us even more determined to get this ship back up and running and keep her as original as possible," he said.
"She is part of our national heritage, she is a national treasure and something that we are determined to conserve.
"Fortunately she is iron-framed and it is the iron frames that have saved her. If they'd have been timber, we would have been looking at a pile of ash," he said.
Police were speaking to the site's security staff and officers were to trawl through security camera footage.
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