Notas del episodio
Cape Horn, the southernmost headland of Chile's Tierra del Fuego archipelago on Hornos Island, sits where westerly winds circle the globe unbroken through the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, and Screaming Sixties before being squeezed into the Drake Passage. Deep swells shoal over the rising continental shelf into steep walls, with rogue waves reported up to 30 meters, and the area sees rain, sleet, or snow on about 278 days a year. In the sheltered channels, williwaws, katabatic winds falling off glaciers, could dismast a ship without warning, so sailors preferred the open sea room of the passage. Francis Drake glimpsed the open water after a storm blew him south in 1578, and in January 1616 Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire, backed by merchants from the Dutch city of Hoorn and hunting a way around the Dutch East India Company monopoly, rounded the cape and named it after their hometown.
The route became the clipper highway for Australian wool, grain, and gold, and German Flying P-Liners were built to survive it. Charles Darwin wrote of its coast from HMS Beagle in 1832, Richard Henry Dana Jr. described its fury in Two Years Before the Mast, and battered ships reaching the Falklands met such price gouging that some captains abandoned them at Port Stanley. The Panama Canal opened in August 1914, and the Pamir carried the last commercial cargo around the Horn in 1949, but the cape lived on as the Mount Everest of yachting for Joshua Slocum, Vito Dumas, 16-year-old Abby Sunderland, and racers in the Vendée Globe and Volvo Ocean Race.
- Winds blew over a steel albatross memorial at the cape in 2014.
- Antarctica, about 500 miles away, was not discovered until 1820.
- Doubling the Horn meant sailing from 50 degrees south in the Atlantic to 50 degrees south in the Pacific.
- Sailors who did it earned a gold earring in the left ear and the right to dine with one foot on the table.
- A 2019 expedition found the world's southernmost tree, a Magellan's beech, growing flat against the rock.