Into the Screaming 50s (Cont.)

Outside Magazine August 2002

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Into the Screaming 50s (Cont.)

MANY PEOPLE IMAGINE CAPE HORN to be a fearsome finger of land extending from the tip of the South American mainland. It's actually a small island, the southernmost of the myriad islands, islets, and rocks that constitute the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego. One does not, therefore, need to "round the Horn" to get from the South Atlantic to the South Pacific. When Magellan made his pioneering passage in 1520, he relied on a channel 250 miles to the north, and so did the next four men to sail around the world. As far as they knew, there was no passage south of the Strait of Magellan.

In 1616, Willem Schouten, an entrepreneurial Dutchman hoping to circumvent the Dutch East India Company's "monopoly" on the Strait of Magellan, sailed south along the coast of Tierra del Fuego in search of an alternate route to the Pacific. At 55 degrees, 59 minutes south latitude—farther south than anyone had ever sailed—he found it. The turning point was a four-mile-long island whose southern aspect rose up to form a vaguely menacing promontory 1,391 feet high. Schouten named it after his home port of Hoorn, near Amsterdam.

In time, as ships grew larger and less maneuverable, bold navigators began to favor the great seaway to the south over the tight, rock-strewn confines of the Strait. That meant sailing into the heart of the Screaming 50s, the high latitudes of the Southern Ocean. There the westerlies sweep around the world unimpeded by any landmass, and the waves stack up into liquid mountain ranges—"greybeards," the old Cape Horners called them, after their foaming crests.

Getting a square-rigged sailing ship around the tip of the continent—especially east to west, against the prevailing wind—was the ultimate test of seamanship. Such vessels could rarely "point" efficiently upwind. A crew might fight for weeks to gain some valuable sea room—distance, that is, away from the dangerous Fuegian coast—only to lose it all in a single storm. Thus the goal was not "rounding" the Horn, but "doubling" it—in other words, sailing from 50 degrees south in one ocean to 50 degrees south in the other. Only then, hundreds of miles north, could a ship be considered safely around.

Before leaving Ushuaia, the Argentine port on the Beagle Channel that is Pelagic's base, I bought a folding map with the irresistible title "Cape Horn Shipwrecks." On it, bright-red sinking-ship icons denote more than 150 nautical disasters, from the Orangie Boom (1643) to the Logos (1988). As we made our way south I ticked off the wrecks: Affghan, Cubana, Dreadnought, Indian Empire, Lady Prudhoe, Siam... There was poetry in those names, but unspeakable horror as well. The death tolls were sometimes fantastic. The San Telmo, with 622 on board, last seen on September 2, 1819. The O'Higgins, 1826, 506 souls...

Seventy-five of the map's icons were lined up in neat rows south of Cape Horn, like headstones in a graveyard. Often the precise location of a ship's demise was not known; those 75 were simply lost at sea. There were many ways it could happen. Southwest of the Horn the ocean floor jumps up from 2,200 fathoms—13,123 feet—to 55 in the space of a few miles. The result: horrendous ship-breaking seas. If a vessel's sails were blown away, she might turn broadside, roll, and fill like a bathtub. Or, after weeks of battling the waves, her seams might open so extensively that no amount of pumping could keep her afloat. There was fire—certain cargo, especially coal, sometimes spontaneously combusted as a result of the friction generated by pounding seas—and there was ice, giant bergs drifting across the Drake Passage. But the sailor's greatest fear was the rugged lee shore that stretches for some 200 miles northwest of Cape Horn. Driven up against it in a storm, no ship stood a chance.

Nevertheless, by the mid-19th century, the waters off Cape Horn were bustling. In 1849, the first year of the California Gold Rush, 800 ships doubled the Horn. Some of them—clipper ships like the Flying Cloud—could do it in as little as a week. The clippers were gone by the 1870s, but windjammers, often built of and rigged with iron, continued to sail around the bottom of the Americas right up until the completion of the Panama Canal, in 1914. The Ditch marked the end of the Horn as a commercial trade route, though a few stubborn Finns continued to haul Chilean nitrates by sail right up until World War II.

Military ships still double Cape Horn, and so does the occasional supertanker too big to fit through the Canal. Other than that, nobody really needs to sail around the Horn anymore. And yet they do. There are now five major around-the-world yacht races that pass south of the great capes—Africa's Good Hope, Australia's Leeuwin, and the Horn. Novak has raced around the Horn five times, initially in 1977's Whitbread Round the World Race.

Aboard the Micalvi, an old naval vessel that serves as a sort of yacht club in Puerto Williams, the little navy town where we cleared into Chilean waters, we met an old Aussie pal of Novak's, Mike Wignall, who'd just sailed in from Bluff, New Zealand. In one two-day storm, he'd faced 70-knot winds; despite dropping all his sail, he'd still had to drag warps—long lines—off the stern of his boat to slow it down. When I asked him why he'd come via the Horn instead of heading directly for his destination of Valdivia, several hundred miles up the Chilean coast, he replied, "Aw, mate, you just kinda have to, don't you?"

The Micalvi's logbook tells many such stories. Calling the Horn "the sailor's Everest" may be overstating it a bit, but for ambitious mariners, rounding this small island has clearly become an important life-list experience. Which in part explains Ushuaia's growing charter-sailboat community. Novak and his fellow skippers, most of them French, make up a small and self-selecting fraternity of very competent seamen—the rightful heirs, perhaps, of those who sailed before them.

Not everyone agrees, of course. "There is no comparison whatsoever of yachts taking tourists around Cape Horn and the sturdy commercial windjammers, who made it for a living and without the modern instruments," sniffs Roger Ghys, a retired Belgian sea captain who is the general secretary of the International Brotherhood of Cape-Horners, an organization whose rapidly thinning ranks consist of men who actually doubled the Horn on square-rigged ships.

Fair enough, Captain. But the fact is that the Horn's baleful glare still beckons a certain kind of sailor, who for whatever reason needs to confront the uttermost parts of the earth and the power of the sea. It probably always will.

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