Cape Horn, the mythical cape marking the passage between the Pacific and the Atlantic, is the number of shipwrecks off this southernmost point in the Americas.
If Ferdinand de Magellan will remain as the one who led the first Europeans to cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean around the American continent, it was the Englishman Francis Drake who passed for the first time to the South of this continent and who saw, without naming it, this cliff of the southernmost island of the Americas in 1578.
In February 1616, the Dutchman Willem Schouten, cruising in the Drake Canal, named the southernmost cape he had just crossed after his hometown of his sponsor, the Australian Company, based at Hoorn, and after the second ship of the expedition, the Hoorn commanded by the heir of the trading company, Jacob Le Maire, who had died in a fire on his ship a few days earlier.
The kaap Hoorn will become cabo de Hornos, Cape Horn, or more commonly Horn.
The prevailing winds blow from west to east, we are between the 40th roaring and the 50th howling. Until the opening of the Panama Canal in 1910, it was an obligatory passage for all cargo ships and vessels wanting to pass between the two oceans, Atlantic and Pacific. Now, when you look at the maritime traffic in this area, apart from local vessels and fishermen, its density is not comparable with other areas of the world.
That would almost make me want to reread Francisco Coloane's "The Wake of the Whale", as it seems to me that we wouldn't be really surprised to come across Captain Julio Albarran's whaling ship, the Léviatàn, in these waters and to see the young assistant cook, Pedro Nauto, on deck. A "Moby Dick" with rhythm in his writing. In any case, he's part of the boats in my library .
There are two lighthouses at Cape Horn, the one you can visit, the monumental lighthouse on the island of Horn shown here, and a small 4-metre-high turret located not far away and a little further down, the Cape Horn lighthouse.
