Cape Horn

I

Pitch of the Cape

CAPE HORN, TIP OF THE AMERICAN CONTINENT, HANGS LIKE A pendant far into the sub-Antarctic Ocean; its position Latitude 55° 59′ S. and Longitude 67° 12′ W. of the Meridian of Greenwich. Sweeping around the bottom of the globe (we of the Northern Hemisphere considering ourselves as living on top of the world), following the parallels, we find Cape Horn 1,300 sea miles farther south than the Cape of Good Hope and 600 miles below the latitude of New Zealand’s Stewart Island. Cape Horn is the farthest crag of mainland pointing towards the ice-burdened continent of Antarctica.

It is surprising how little we think of Cape Horn in this age of the Panama Canal. The world has all but forgotten both the epic voyages leading to its discovery and the major role this region once played in the first partitioning of our virgin world. Sunk and erased from the maps is the lost island of Francis Drake, once lying far in the ocean to the south and west of Cape Horn. Few remember or have ever known the motives that led to the discovery of the Cape and its rounding by the Dutch. Behind Cape Horn lies the rugged archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, Magellan’s Land of Fire, with its tragic story of the extermination of an unspoiled stone-age people, who were first met, not with understanding, but with prejudice.

Cape Horn stands out from a group of steep-sided, snowcapped islands, ribbed with glaciers, clothed with thick beech below the snow line. Its map looks like the cracked surface of a fragment of gigantic crockery, split and eroded by the storms. The high Cordilleras have there capitulated to the grind of ice and the wear of mountainous waves.

The Horn, in its man-made history, has seen the rise and fall of the mightiest tides of sea power, the making and the breaking-up of empires. A Portuguese, in the service of Spain, discovered its Strait;¹ and British fighting ships from the time of Elizabeth to George II, used this distant passage to attack the Dons. The Dutch sailed that way to join with the English in their struggle against Spain. Ships that have rounded Cape Horn, and the resolute men who sailed them, have been indicative of a changing world to the north, and to the east and the west.

When men cut through the thin-linked hemisphere of America, the Land of Fire—of puny fires once built by aborigines—sank again into its distant solitude. But in a shrinking world the oceans become mere ponds, and the open waters of Drake Sea have again assumed enormous international significance.

While Cape Horn reaches closest to the South Pole, it is also separated from its southern continental neighbours by thousands of leagues of open sea lying to the east and west. It forms a rock-ribbed baffle jutting into a wild, storm-swept ocean ringing the glacier barrier about the world. Ice islands, fifty and more miles across, lifting a thousand feet high, the mightiest moving masses of this earth, drift by the Cape.

We who have seen the Horn, beating around it under square sail, or running to the east past the Isles of Ramirez, low decks awash, shrouds swiftered in, rope and canvas frozen hard, screaming fulmars soaring about our swaying mastheads—we of that age of sail, old and rheumatic and salted blue, salute the Horn, our old Cape Stiff.

Heroic legends cling about the Horn. Its fame began with man’s awakening to the size of the earth, to the existence and the vast distances across a great South Sea. Then, for centuries following the primary voyages of Magellan, Drake and Schouten, Cape Horn was the ultimate south on long cruises. It became the fulcrum of discovery, of conquest and sea trade into the Pacific and to the West.

Because of its extreme weather, the ice and boisterous seas, Cape Horn takes precedence over other great capes as the headland of hazard. Seamen talk of it along the water fronts of the world. Not to have sailed around the Horn is equivalent to not being a sailor. Seldom does the Horn fail to live up to its evil reputation.

John Reed, singing of drowned sailors, wrote the lines:

Deep they lie in every sea,

Land’s End to the Horn.

And this legend of distance and strife has been its glory.

The story of Cape Horn begins when a handful of adventurers, men who trailed the discoveries of Columbus, struggled across the Isthmus of Darien to look upon the great South Sea. The one to do this first, a swashbuckling roisterer and swordsman, was Vasco Núñez de Balboa. A native of Xeres, he had enlisted in the later voyages to the New World. He was of prodigal habits, having few if any of the desirable qualities most people wish for their sons. His small estate, or farm, had involved him in debt, and to escape his creditors he had himself placed in a cask, marked victuals for the voyage, and was so transferred from Hispaniola to the American mainland. As soon as the ship was out of sight of land, Vasco, the world’s most illustrious stowaway, presented himself to the captain, declaring, God has reserved me for great things.

In the course of two years Balboa acquired authority over a tract of Darien, and, being tall and handsome—a well-made man—he found favour with and married a beautiful daughter of the Cacique of Coyba. He led the cacique’s warriors against neighbouring chiefs, from whom four thousand ounces of gold and golden dishes were taken. Vasco ordered one fifth of the booty set aside for himself, the rest to be shared by his followers. While the Spaniards were arguing over the division, an Indian from whom they had taken the gold remarked, Why should you dispute over such a trifle? If gold is to you so precious that you abandon your homes for it and invade the peaceful lands of others, I will tell you of a region so rich you may gratify your wishes to the utmost. Beyond those lofty mountains—he pointed to the south—lies a mighty sea, which from their summits may be easily discerned.

And so this Indian, a prince, was baptized by Balboa, as a reward for the information. But it took time to get together the expedition required for a march and conquest across that dangerous range of Darien. Balboa sent to Hispaniola for aid, but the ship of his emissary was wrecked. He wrote to Don Diego Columbus, Governor of Santo Domingo, telling of the reported ocean bordered with shores of gold. He forwarded fifteen thousand crowns to be transmitted to greedy King Ferdinand, as his royal fifth of treasure already collected, and many of his followers sent back sums to their creditors in Spain. At last Balboa started with the royal sanction, taking a hundred and ninety of his most able men and his dog, Leóncico, one of the numerous progeny of the famous warrior-dog of Ponce de León. Leóncico was already a veteran, being covered with scars of his innumerable fights with the natives. In these raids Leóncico received the same share of booty as did an able-bodied man, and Vasco saved it for him. The expedition was also accompanied by a number of bloodhounds.

In a battle on the way with the followers of a cacique named Quaragua, Balboa’s party slew six hundred men. Some were transfixed with lances, others put to the sword, and many were torn by the bloodhounds. It was a desperate expedition, this, for when they arrived at the base of the mountains from which the great sea might be seen only sixty-seven men remained to make the final ascent.

On the twenty-sixth day of September, 1513, Balboa, ordering his company to wait, scaled the final height, and the sight of the South Sea burst upon him. He beckoned his men, and they, too, looked out over the misty distance of a magnificent ocean glimmering like gold in the rays of the descending sun.

The South Sea, beyond the Indies of Columbus, was a fact, and this discovery led to the greatest voyage of all time, that of Ferdinand Magellan.

¹ Martin Behaim’s globe is sometimes cited as evidence of a previous discovery of Magellan Strait. As the earliest cartographers drew their maps largely from imagination, many guesses might be mistaken for discoveries.

II

Magellan

MAGELLAN’S DISCOVERY OF THE THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY miles of tortuous strait between Tierra del Fuego and the tip of South America was the high point in his epic voyage. Historians have dwelt at length on circumstances surrounding the inception and the start of this enterprise, the greatest voyage ever performed by man. The state of Europe, the rivalry of princes, the worthless character of agreements are part of it. Magellan lived at the beginning of the grand partitioning of the world, whole oceans and continents were then transferred at the stroke of a pen. White men assumed their divine right to take and own the lands of alien people.

Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese, having returned to Lisbon after seven years in the East, in India and the Moluccas, presented his plan for a voyage around the world, to the south, through some way to be discovered, into the South Sea, and then westward to the Islands of Spice and homeward around the Cape of Good Hope. Don Manuel, listening to his close advisers, repulsed Magellan. So this determined seaman took himself to Spain, became a Spanish subject, married a Spanish woman, and entered the service of King Charles I, who had listened to and approved his plan. This, in brief, leaving out the tedious repetitions of court and European politics, brings his plan to the point of achievement—the fitting out, and starting on his voyage of discovery.

Many details of Magellan’s discovery and circumnavigation came from one original source, the journal kept with diligence during three years, 1519 to 1522—through hardship, storm, mutiny, utter suffering and disaster—by an Italian scholar, Antonio Pigafetta, Knight of Rhodes, formerly assistant to His Excellency the Roman Ambassador to the Court of King Charles I of Spain.

Pigafetta, an observant man, was fired by the vision of Magellan, the powerful sea commander who had won the attention of the young king’s advisers. The Court of Seville attended when Ruy Faleiro, Magellan’s associate, the peppery astrologer-astronomer, explained the bewildering question of longitude. This excitable man demonstrated astrolabes, especially the huge wooden sea instrument of Martin Behaim, and tried to explain the mysterious tables of declinations computed by Regiomontanus. The sun and moon, and their eclipses, and the strange position of the North Star—all these things, together with hour-and minute-glasses and the huge new loadstone needles of the ship compasses, made the not-too-understanding ministers wrinkle their foreheads and nod in a non-committal way. Pigafetta had heard, and so had Magellan, of the globe of the world made by the same Martin Behaim before the voyage of Columbus. On it there was no continent between Europe and the East. There were islands, strange islands with imaginative names.

The charts spread before the court were lined with latitudes and spiderlike lines of radiating directions. None but a master navigator could understand them. Sea monsters spouted from their parchment deeps, and winds were blown from the puffed cheeks of Boreas, Auster, Eurus and Favonius; there were winds, often great, punishing storms, and they must come from somewhere. These portolanos showed where they came from. And the charts of the Armada about to sail were made by the learned cartographer, Núño Garcia. These newest maps were in some sort of loose agreement with those of Behaim of Nuremberg and Toscanelli, the Italian cosmographer.

Spain was then astir, wavering between cupidity and the reluctance to spend money that might better be used at home to enrich the nobles, the officeholders of those times. Ships, after all, sometimes went sailing never to return. On the other hand, Columbus had died only thirteen years before, and treasures were beginning to come from the lands in the West. Balboa had seen a vast ocean lying beyond the lands found by Columbus on his later voyages. The Cabots had sailed westward and to the north, to a huge mainland. Vasco da Gama had sailed around Africa, to the East. The Portuguese had taken Goa, Magellan being with their great Albuquerque in that enterprise; and Ponce de León had discovered Florida. In the brilliant and sometimes tawdry city of Seville, sparkling under the hot sun of Andalusia, stood the strong Tower of Gold built to hold treasures taken from the new lands. Those early charts which Pigafetta saw were like glorified treasure maps spread before the greedy eyes of the owners of the world.

Disputes between the Catholic sea powers, Portugal and Spain, had begun soon after the return of Columbus, and were based on conflict over the Western discoveries of the Genoese navigator and the Eastern discoveries of Diaz and Da Gama, the latter to the Cape of Good Hope and around it to India. His Holiness Pope Alexander VI, thinking to do justice to both parties, issued his famous Bull of Demarcation on May 4, 1493, by which all discoveries westward of a meridian line 100 leagues west of the Azores belonged to Spain, and all east of it to Portugal. As Columbus had returned to Palos on the fifteenth of March, of that same year, the urgency must have been great to bring such prompt action.

But this line was not to the liking of Portugal and it was agreed to shift the line farther west. By the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed on June 7, 1494, the line of demarcation was moved to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.

The moves on the chessboard of the world were fast, for it was on September 25, 1493—six months and ten days after his return—that Columbus again left, sailing from Cádiz on his second voyage, with a fleet of seventeen ships; five hundred sailors, soldiers, and supernumeraries; plus a thousand colonists, one third of whom had smuggled themselves on board the ships.

When Magellan set sail—almost twenty-six years after Columbus’s second voyage—for a far greater reach into the unknown, past distant lands to the south, another wide slice was to be carved out of the virgin world.

The Bull of Demarcation worked very well at its line of origin. Because of it, Spaniards had to sail beyond the Portuguese outposts in the Azores, the Madeiras, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde Islands before coming into their own part of the world; besides, the eastward trend of South America threw a wholesome lot of land into the realm of Portugal, and as the distance in longitude grew greater, east and west, no one knew just where the other end of the separation lay. Cipango and the Moluccas were too far off at that time to be bothered about; also, the English and the Dutch had not been taken into the game of world division. They were to cut off their slices later, with boarding pike and carronade.

But woe to these heretics when caught in forbidden waters or on the shores thereof. For a century, by and large, the powerful armed ships of Spain and Portugal swept the seas, and galleons laden with the loot of centuries, the treasures of ancient peoples, wallowed across wide oceans bound for Spain. Venice, then in its decline, had never seen such glory; never in the time of the world had there been so magnificent a partitioning among the faithful. Grandees, princes, knights, and moneylenders were busy about the Casa de Contratación, the India House of Seville.

In the midst of the boiling cauldron of a world to be served by its greatest voyage, Pigafetta petitioned Magellan that he be attached to his ship and allowed to accompany him on his adventure. He expressed himself as desirous of seeing the wonderful things of the ocean.

Had Magellan failed to take him, there would be little known of the great voyage besides its meagre outline of navigation remaining in the log of Francesco Albo, a surviving pilot of the Armada, who completed the circumnavigation in the Vittoria under Sebastián del Cano.

As events turned out, the scholar Knight of Rhodes had courage second only to that of his commander. He survived soul-breaking hardships and great dangers that reduced a company of two hundred and forty adventurers to a mere eighteen, among them a ship’s boy. Four natives of the Moluccas, last remnant of thirteen stolen people of the East, were also carried to Spain by the stout little Vittoria, first ship to circumnavigate the world.

Meticulously careful in his recordings, Pigafetta was carried away at times by his fervent observations. He mistook huge insects, the locusts, for living leaves. He declared the sea petrel had no feet, could not alight, and laid her eggs on the back of the cock, there hatching them.

Let us see this Armada. We have a record of its adventures written by an honest man who set down everything. And we have an account of its equipment. The picture is readily interpreted when looked upon with appreciation of the routine of sailing ships, almost a ritual, a process that remained constant from the times of Pytheas to the days of Dewey. The few sailing craft, school ships, and deep-sea cruising yachts still carry on much as did the ships of Magellan.

The month before the start in the late summer, when Andalusia drowses, the river front of Seville at the Royal Quays was in a stir of final preparation for the sailing of the Armada. Five ships were ready, having been hove down, caulked, and tarred. Rigging had been set up, and sails were being bent. Great confusion prevailed, as is always the way when a cargo so large as to total four hundred tons is being assembled and stowed, together with armament, equipment, and trade goods. Enough was provided to carry the ships around the Indies of Columbus and on to the Spice Islands; that is, if Magellan was right in his calculations of longitude, and if the South Sea was no wider than that shown on the charts.

The king, fearing the obstruction tactics of Portugal, urged Magellan to sail as soon as possible. Criers beat drums and read the Royal Proclamation. For service to the Spice Islands! A pleasant voyage! Rich rewards! A royal Armada; powerful, safe!

But few engaged from Seville. The King’s Proclamation was read in the ports of Málaga, Cádiz, and Huelva. Men came to Seville and saw the ships, heard tales in the bodegas and bagnios, on the streets, and in the market places. Seventeen, only, signed from Seville—the boldest or men who had reason to get away from Spain, from the world. Many who signed deserted later.

Recruiting officers, Magellan’s men—a few veterans of the East, of India and Africa, mariners like Juan de Serrano—knew sailors. The stewing out was trying them before the start. At San Lúcar, port of Seville, down the Guadalquivir, more men were obtained. Thirty Portuguese seamen were selected by Magellan. Spaniards, Basques, and Frenchmen were lured by four months’ pay in advance. Flemings, Germans, Greeks, Neapolitans, Genoese, and Corfiotes; men from the Islands of Dogs, the Canaries, and Teneriffe were shipped. Negroes from across the strait at Gibraltar; Malays brought back from the East and adrift on the water fronts—all these were signed. One Englishman, Master Andrew of Bristol, engaged himself as gunner of the flagship; a stout seaman was Andrew, who perished of scurvy years later, a remnant of the battered Armada that crossed the wide South Sea.

Magellan was a driver. Few of the rabble knew of his quality; a Portuguese adventurer, they whispered, calling himself knight, who had gained the ear of the boyish king. But those who saw him at the heaving down, inspecting each operation, watching the stress on the capstans, the caulking, the nailing of leaden strips along the underwater seams to hold the oakum; who heard his commands and knew his insistence that the pitch not be applied to the careened hulls until they had dried at least four hours in the hot sun—these recognized a sailor. No detail of hull or rigging was unknown to him; his ships’ decks were always wet down, kept sound and tight. He gave confidence to the experienced; his knowledge was lost on those who were landsmen.

Never before, and seldom in the Age of Discovery, was an expedition so ably prepared; nor have such valuable records of any other voyage been left. In addition to the journal of Pigafetta and the Log of Albo, there is an account of outfitting cost, to the last maravedi, given by Navarrete in A Relation of the Costs of the Armada. The king, India House, and the rich merchants who underwrote the venture saw to it that strict records were kept. Christopher Haro of Seville supplied 4,000 ducats, one fifth of the total cost. Luis de Mendoza, who ended in Port St Julian as a mutineer—being stabbed in the neck, quartered, and his parts impaled upon stakes—was King’s Treasurer at 60,000 maravedis a year. This coin, later a mark of contempt because of its slight worth, was then still good. At one time a maravedi had weighed sixty grains of virgin gold, but it was worth less in 1519.

As more than four hundred tons of equipment, supplies, and food stores had to be taken, distributed between the ships in just order of their burthen, and stowed against heavy rolling—for easy accessibility and preservation of perishables—with special care of combustibles in the magazines, the ablest of Magellan’s pilots and masters were close to the work, always under the eye of the Captain General.

Some historians have written that the Armada was ill found in equipment and supplies. The late Captain Whall, one of the world’s great modern sailors, after a rigorous study, declared that the fleet was well fitted out; the records gathered by Navarrete confirm this statement. There is a summary of the lading, the equipment, of greater interest than ever because we are at last coming to a more just estimate of the magnificent adventure of Magellan.

The tallymen missed nothing. The voyage into the unknown, into the spicery, might take years and years. The total tonnage of the fleet was 480 and, at the last, after desertions and the cutting off of some forty supernumeraries by the king’s orders, 240 people—commanders, officers, and men—went to sea; that is, a man for each two tons burthen. So the flagship would carry 55 people; the San Antonio, 60.

Pigafetta, stowing his things in the little cabin aft of the main deck under the poop, opposite the cabin of the pilot, hung about the ship listening to the talk of sailors, the bitter comment of the clerks. He noted two spies from the office of Sebastián Alvarez, a Portuguese, who would transmit news of the outfitting, the progress, to his master Don Manuel, couriers going back and forth each week between Lisbon and Seville. But the time would soon come when this was past. Don Manuel’s agents were trying to buy off Magellan, to get him back to the service of Portugal.

Let us look at the ships of Magellan through the eyes of a sailor. The lading of the Armada is about completed and Magellan has ordered his ships to anchor in the stream. Their sides have been painted yellow, trimmed with black at the wales, and gilded on the figureheads and stern castles. The great lantern on the poop of the flagship is picked out in yellow, red, and gold. The masts have been scraped and glisten with oil, as do the yards; the rigging is freshly black with tar; the sails, furled to their yards, are yellowish, and the tops, small tubs at the mastheads, are brightly coloured.

Small boats, belonging to the ships, ride at the quarter pendants, or await at the gangway ladders. Shore boats hover about and run between the fleet and the quays. All this makes a brave show. Now let us find out more about the fleet—five ships lying in the Guadalquivir on the eve of departing upon the most imporant sea voyage of all time.

All we have of them in the contemporary, and the later, stories are the names and the tonnage, or burthen—the latter often misinterpreted.

So we get our total carrying capacity of the fleet as 480 tons of approximately 2,000 pounds each.

Ship tonnage (burthen) gives us a good idea of size. Early ships were rated by their burthen, which we now call cargo tonnage. Then it referred to the number of tuns of wine a ship could stow, these weighing approximately 2,240 pounds each. From this, so the deduction goes, came the ton. What is more natural than to rate a round ship, a nef, a caravel, or a carrack by her carrying capacity? Our present tonnages, especially registered tonnages, are arbitrary rules of cubic measurement, 100 cubic feet to the ton; hence the confusion. Naval ships are rated by their displacement; that is, the actual weight of water they displace, or their total weight.

A ship like Magellan’s Trinidada—taking her as our example—with a carrying capacity of 110 tons, would have a loaded displacement equal to the weight of the hull and the equipment and her cargo. These ships were heavily built of huge hand-hewn timbers; the keel, ribs, keelson, knees, stem and stern pieces, breast hooks and stern hooks—all were massive. Planking was heavy, especially on the bends, and the decking was thick. Deadwood, forward and aft, was considerable.

A characteristic of the ships then being built was the lengthwise strengthening timbers we call wales, really extra-thick planks. On larger ships there might be a main wale at the bends, the thickest planking; a middle wale; even a channel wale, where the channels, or rigging extensions, set out from the hull. To-day all we have left of this is an occasional rubbing wale, or the gunwale, or gunnel, of small boats.

These outside ribs were also supplemented by upright outside filling pieces, familiar in pictures of the Santa Maria, Columbus’s flagship. Ships of the Columbian-Magellanic era were iron-fastened. They were protected underwater by strips of lead nailed over seams and butts. No protection against marine borers or barnacles was provided other than pitch, and this called for frequent heaving down, or careening, as dry docks had not yet been built. So, to get back to size of ship, on this voyage, we are preparing for, the Trinidada’s displacement, loaded, would work out to at least 200 tons; that is, the ship’s hull would weigh almost as much as her cargo.

This outside figure of 200 tons displacement is possibly a mean estimate, erring on the side of conservatism, for these ships were the result of at least two centuries of coastal voyaging and the work of the best builders. They were ships capable of living through the heaviest weather without benefit of much knowledge of storms or the use of oil (forgotten since Biblical times). They were also large; at least, the two principal ships were great ships.

Even three centuries later Richard Dana sailed around Cape Horn in the Alert, still of only 398 tons burthen. Many long voyages have been made in smaller ships. Captain Warwick Tompkins’s famous schooner Wander Bird, with a recent Cape Horn passage to her credit, measures 76 feet on the water line, with a loaded displacement of 138 tons. These figures should be kept in mind as we read the dimensions of the Trinidada. Her general description is as follows:

A stout ship, heavily built for her day, of 110 tons burthen, 200 tons displacement, 78 feet on the water line, 22·5 foot beam on water line, with a mean draft, loaded, of 8 feet.

She had a pronounced tumble home, so her breadth at the waist bulwarks was probably about 20 feet. She was high-charged; that is, she had a high or topgallant forecastle and a high narrow poop, terminating on top in a steeply forward-tilted deck.

This little ship, or carrack, was soundly designed and if given a modern rig could sail very well, even on a wind. But her rigging, her masts, yards, and gear were of the time, capable when going large, lasking or rooming as it was called, and not much good with the