|
Rounding Cape Horn
During the night our vessel approaches Cape Horn from the East. The ship drops anchor beside the island's leeward cliff-face at dawn.
The greying morning signals yet another perfectly calm day. The ship's reading is 'Latitude 55.59 South. Seas slight at 1.3m'. Quite eerie, really, for this place.
MS Amsterdam pauses in the lee of the Ilsa del Hornos while it grows light enough to see a Chilean Navy corvette anchored below the cliffs up which steps lead to a bleak weather station on the plateau. When the Cabo los Hornos was first approached in this direction from the La Maire Strait, Cape Horn was described by its Dutch discoverers as 'a crouching lion'. Close-up it resembles nothing like a lion. Nor has it anything in common with South Africa's Lion's Head or indeed with Cape Point, whose warm, cruel, wave-beaten cliffs - seen from the sea - look welcoming by comparison.
We cruise slowly around the back of Cape Horn Island, with the archipelago to the North on our starboard side - a maze of submerged mountains, their above-water peaks brushed with thin mist. On the port side, we see black, jagged towers of rock guarding Cape Horn's western flank. At last, sailing South of Cape Horn, we turn about and pass the Cape itself for the first time, sailing from the Pacific through the Southern Ocean towards the Atlantic. The face of the Horn, its dark cliffs frowning, rises 1,275 feet straight from the sea. There is a new (1990s) navigational light on a ledge about 400 feet above the constantly seething ocean, but no sanctuary there. Only danger.
Even before we have reached the eastern extremity of the island, where we first saw the weather station, the heights have fallen away; our course has turned north-east, further from the Antarctic Circle, and the fanciful air of foreboding in Cape Horn's shadow has lifted. We have sailed right round the Horn, literally, in a circle, and the neighbouring rocks protruding from the sea, with their surrounds of jagged black teeth, hold no threat now.
From the height of our glass-railed, eighth-storey balcony on ms Amsterdam we see a small yacht sailing over the still silent ocean towards The Horn. It is taking the gap; a beneficent gap in the weather. Two yachtsmen at the helm, searching with full sails for a following wind, flash a signal to our ship. They're bound for Desolation Island up the Pacific coast, possibly.
We watch them rounding the horn, as the sun sinks slowly in the West.
God, I envy them!
Never mind. There are many famous descriptions that capture most aspects of the adventure and excitement of rounding The Horn.
Here are just five books on the subject, selected from my bookshelf:
1. Two Years Before the Mast, by R. H. Dana, Jr.
( Dana's famous Two Years...contains just seven days in his little brig as it struggles to make the necessary westering around the Horn. While volunteering to furl the jib the vessel plunges into two huge seas, driving him under water, then raising him into the sky as clings to the sail. The extracts are passages describing those dangerous and exhilarating days
2. The Flight of the Condor, by Michael Alford Andres
(The author left Australia as a young journalist to explore South America. Later he returned to produce documentaries on wildlife in Pategonia for the BBC.
His work led this famous book of acute, understated observation )
I shall quote two extracts
3. The Far Side of the World, by Patrick O'Brian
(O'Brian - among the most authentic writers of English sea stories - looks at Cape Horn through the eyes of Captain Fitz Roy, who explored the area for the British Admiralty in the early 1800s. Fitz Roy made a second voyage through the same formidable tangle of cliffs, surf and shrieking winds as master of the Beagle, with Charles Darwin aboard.)
4. Sir Francis Drake's . . .Voyage Round the World
by Francis Pretty
(cross-refer to Reading for background to the author's relationship as a sailor and recorder of Drake's famous voyage.) Extract concerns the fleet's rounding the Horn.
5. Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin
(Charles Darwin's account of rounding the Horn is meticulous and charming in its detail. I have selected extracts from his book with only two modifications to his original style: Creating shorter paragraphs for Web readers, and emphasising a few of his observations. For instance I have put the phrase "and seem destined to last as long as the world holds together" in italics where he refers to the vast snowfields covering Patagonia. Would it were so, but the glaciers and snowfields are rapidly disappearing, and are probably even smaller today than when I was there in 2004.)
(Extracts follow as separate pieces)
|
