TO THE END OF THE EARTH
Rounding Cape Horn is a thrill on this intrepid voyage, says Sarah Gordon
JOINING the most exclusive club in the world requires derring do. But once in, members can keep their hats on to greet royalty and even put their feet on the dinner table in front of heads of state.
To qualify, you must navigate the treacherous waters of the Drake Passage under sail to ‘round the Horn’, passing Cape Horn, the most southerly inhabited place on earth before Antarctica. Those brave captains who make it become Cape Horners.
Luckily for the rest of us, there is another way to reach this extraordinary outpost, at the bottom of Chile’s tail flick of land, 500 miles from the Antarctic. It’s rather more comfortable, too. Australis Cruises plies the waters of Patagonia, sailing between the port city of Punta Arenas in Chile, and Ushuaia, the capital of the island of Tierra del Fuego, in Argentina.
Its four and eight-night sailings traverse the waterways named after legendary voyages: the Magellan Strait, discovered by Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, and the Beagle Channel, explored by Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle with Captain Robert FitzRoy in the 19th century.
This year you can sail on a brandnew, 100-berth vessel, Ventus, which is small enough to navigate the islands and glaciers, but large enough to offer everything that a 21st- century adventurer requires. My four-night voyage from Punta Arenas takes in penguin colonies, the dramatic channel nicknamed Glacier Alley, a former Christian ministry where Darwin made landfall, and the legendary Cape Horn, where two great oceans — the Pacific and Atlantic — meet and where 10,000 sailors lost their lives.
We are an international group: Americans, Brits, G e rma n s , French and a few Latinos. Forget bunks, this ship comes with spacious cabins, grand picture windows, three lounges with panoramic views, a gourmet restaurant and bar serving bottomless pisco sours.
The great explorers of the 16th century saw colonies of penguins as an easy meal, while we are thrilled to snap them diving in and out of the water. A few playful dolphins even leap around our Zodiac landing boats.
Where navigators once came across curious tribes on the coast, paddling their canoes stark naked and slathered in seal blubber, we can only imagine the indigenous groups who once lived here.
THe Yamana eked out a nomadic existence until european visitors all but wiped them out with disease, punishing them for sheep rustling and hunting the whales and seals on which they relied for food.
Only one 88-year-old pure Yamana remains, living in the town of Port Williams on the Chilean island of Navarino and teaching her almost-extinct language to her grandchildren.
For a route so packed with human stories, we don’t see another person for the entire journey. It feels as if we’re sailing into the unknown. And nowhere is that sense more present than as we approach Cape Horn. As the ship breaks for open sea at 6am, we gather in the main lounge, lifejackets on, waiting for the captain to say if it’s safe to disembark into Zodiacs for shore.
At 7am the call comes. We have clear skies, but the wind is whistling past the ship. It isn’t safe to land the Zodiacs on the beach and we are among the 19 per cent of passengers who don’t make landfall on their cruise. The one Chilean naval family who guard the island will go another week without visitors.
To counter our disappointment, the captain goes fully ‘round the Horn’, nosing the ship into the Drake Passage and giving us a 360-degree tour of the island.
As the ship bucks and sways, Cape Horn is bathed in light, the albatrossshaped memorial to the 10,000 lost at sea, glinting in the sunshine. White knuckles grip the ship’s rails as we pose for photos and gaze in awe at the spiked peaks of the legendary island. At least we can content ourselves with being among the minority to have sailed the Drake Passage, knowing there is nothing further south than Antarctica and a few icy research stations. All that remains is to visit Wulaia Bay, on Navarino, where Darwin stopped on his Beagle voyage in 1833 and is said to have started contemplating the origin of species.
AHIke for sea views and a visit to the Australis-run visitor centre reveals less noble events that have occurred on this bay. A Yamana boy named Jemmy Button was among four locals taken to england by Captain FitzRoy aboard the Beagle in 1830. He was introduced to royalty as an exotic exhibit and ‘civilised’ before being dropped back on the island a year later.
An attack in 1859, in which Christian missionaries were massacred, was later blamed on Button and his family.
From Wulaia Bay it’s a short hop to Ushuaia, which is a bit of a shock to the system. I may not be a Cape Horner, but I will never forget rounding the Horn.