Cape Horn. The end of the world.
On Cape Horn stands a monument commemorating the many lives lost as sailing vessels from 1500 CE onward tried to thread their way around the end of the world. Rocks and shoals lurk just below the surface, and how do you know which channel will take you through all these islands if you’ve not been this way before? It is a bleak and barren maze.
The area is fairly well charted now, for until 1914 when the Panama Canal opened, this was the only link between the Atlantic and Pacific unless you sailed all the way around Africa and Australia. To circumnavigate the world you had to come through here. Where Shackleton’s ship broke up in the ice, marooning his crew; where rigging routinely became so ice-encrusted that you could not work the sails; I enjoyed a lovely dinner of mussels, mashed potato, and ribeye and then stepped out onto my little balcony to view Cape Horn in utter comfort. A staggering thought: Shackleton and the frozen rigging were only a century ago. The Cape used to be dreaded and forbidding; now it’s a tourist attraction.
The little pink lighthouse on the Cape is managed by the Chilean Coast Guard and is manned all year by a keeper who signs up for one- or two-year stints. At the moment, the keeper and his wife, who are about six months into their contract, live there with their three children, the youngest of them born on the Cape. The keeper maintains the light and handles the fancy meteorological equipment, which I believe includes Doppler radar.
The lighthouse on Cape Horn.
The heavy seas of yesterday and last evening, which occur so often around here, settled down around 3 this morning and the sea has flattened out to two-meter swells. Winds are about Beaufort scale four, down from seven or eight. The balmy summer air temperature reached 59°F today. In short: smooth sailing.
Birds abound, especially albatrosses and shearwaters. For this Ohio farm girl who never got farther south than Corpus Christi, Texas, albatrosses are exotic. I never saw one until two days ago. There are whales here, but they are hiding at the moment. I don’t blame them. Why display yourselves to the tourists when you’ll get nothing in return?
And I think about my childhood in Port Jefferson, Ohio. You will find me returning to this theme frequently, for it fascinates me: I read THE WAR WITH CAPE HORN by Alain Villiers when I was ten. Then, neither my parents nor I could ever have imagined, no matter how wild our thoughts, that I would be sitting here seventy years later with my binoculars, watching albatrosses glide past Cape Horn.