Cape Horn...a sailors Everest

by Brian Hancock on 27 Feb 2003 Cape Horn, two words that make an offshore sailors heart pound just a little bit faster. What is it about those words, or more to the point, that small island at the southern tip of South America that is held in such regard and fascination by so many sailors?

That’s not an easy question to answer in the short space of a website front page, but since the Around Alone yachts are currently in the vicinity, it’s a good question to pose. First though some history.

Cape Horn was discovered by two Dutch sailors, Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten while on an expedition in search of South Pacific gold riches.

Earlier they had sought support from the city leaders of the town of Hoorn in Holland, and raised enough money to build two ships, one they named Hoorn after the town, and the other, the larger of the two, they named Eendracht.

In January 1616 they landed in Patagonia where they beached the ships in order to clean them before continuing on to the Pacific. During this process the Hoorn was accidentally set alight and destroyed.

Later they sailed south in search of a way around the tip of South America and passed through a strait between the mainland of Argentina and an island which they named Staten Island. They named the strait the Strait of Le Maire.

Further south they rounded a small island after which they were able to continue sailing north and west without impediment. They had successfully made it around the tip of South America and they named the southernmost island Hoorn after the ship that had burned. Later the name was changed to Horn and it remains that way today.

The Horn itself is indeed just a small island, only five miles long and about a mile across. It is part of the Hermite Group, an archipelago in Southern Chile. It rises 1,400 feet out of deep Southern Ocean waters and is a striking landfall.

The southern headland, the face that is most often photographed by sailors, looks a lot like Diamond Head in Hawaii except for the Wandering Albatross and giant Andean Condor that wheel and soar around the steep, rocky buttresses of the island.

In the old days Chilean farmers used to ferry their sheep across to the island and allow them to graze on the lush vegetation, but those days are over, replaced instead by a thriving tourist trade. If the weather is right you can easily make landfall on Cape Horn, tie up to a permanent mooring buoy, and stroll a well maintained boardwalk up to the light-keepers hut where you can buy postcards and sign a visitors book. Much of the romance is gone, sadly replaced by a media spectacle brought on by a burgeoning cruise ship industry.

Despite the fact that droves of tourists now visit this once mystical place, it still holds a lure for many thousands of sailors. There is a marked difference between stopping in to buy a postcard and sailing 3,000 miles across windswept waters to get there.

The only way to experience this amazing place is by sailboat after a long, arduous passage, and for the Around Alone sailors it is indeed a major accomplishment, say nothing of adventure. Watching the land rise out of the ocean while massive Southern Ocean breakers pile into the steep sides of the island is a rare and spine-tingling sight.

Experiencing it alone on the deck of a heaving sailboat is nothing short of incredible. One only has to look at a chart and see the numerous shipwrecks in the area to know that many able-bodied sailors have perished attempting to round the same corner.

It is the sailors Everest, and like Everest, despite being a readily accessible destination, it is still the sports ultimate challenge and for that reason alone it holds an endless fascination.

Perhaps it will never be like it was in the days of clipper ships, or even as it was in the middle of last century when more modern sailors like Robin Knox-Johnston, Francis Chichester and Chay Blyth rounded the Cape, but it’s still a powerful symbol and important landfall.

The indomitable Bernard Moitessier may have described it best when he wrote, 'A great cape, for us, can’t be expressed in longitude and latitude alone. A great cape has a soul, with very soft, very violent shadows and colors. A soul as smooth as a child’s, as hard as a criminal’s. That’s why we go.'