THE FIRST KNOWN SAILING SHIP to round Cape Horn—that fearsome, storm-tossed tip of South America—was a Dutch merchant vessel in search of a new route to the Spice Islands in 1616. The last commercial sailing vessel rounded the Horn in 1949—333 years, or exactly a third of a millenium after the first—an act that brought down the final curtain on the Great Age of Sail. While the first Cape Horn ship was a small wooden vessel looking to fill its hold with a few tons of precious cloves, the last was an enormous steel four-masted Finnish barque that hauled 60,000 sacks of barley from Australia to England. Onboard was a lone twenty-two-year-old American sailor—my father—a member of the last crew in a centuries-long tradition of Cape Horn merchant sailors.
As someone who has experienced his own share of adventures in the wilds, and written about them, I stand in awe of what my father and the thousands of Cape Horn sailors in the previous centuries achieved, and what they endured. Hundreds did not survive the passage. Cape Horn represented for the windjammer sailor what Mount Everest represents for today’s climber—or perhaps better, the equivalent of Pakistan’s K2, the world’s second-highest yet far more difficult mountain that is known for its brutal technical climbing and killer storms.
The scale of the Cape Horn undertaking was almost beyond comprehension in today’s world of quick arrivals and immediate gratification. The ships themselves were the largest sailing vessels the world has ever known—longer than a football field. The Cape Horn sailor made a deep commitment to the ship, signing on for a voyage of unknown length that might last a year, or several, and girdle the entire globe. In the wild and remote Great Southern Ocean, he might not see land or another soul except his own crewmates for four months on end. The ships themselves had no electricity, no heating, no radio—no chance of rescue should some mishap befall her.
The climax of the voyage was the approach to and the rounding of the Horn itself. Enormous, frigid seas crashed over the decks and the sailors had to jump and cling for lifelines to prevent being swept overboard as they worked the winches. Aloft, desperately trying to bring in sail against the Antarctic gales screaming through the rigging, they clung to ice-glazed yardarms 150 feet above the deck while the ship heeled over in the black night.
To me, it seems an adventure beyond adventure, almost into the realm of incredulity. Not only do I stand in awe of the sailors, but especially of the Cape Horn captains—masters, as they were known—who maintained utter cool and confidence as they issued orders in these storms and threaded their giant ships between safety and death. I can’t think of any other undertaking in today’s world that compares to these rigors endured for months on end—even the roundings of Cape Horn by a few modern, smaller sailing vessels, which have been accomplished with the protective net of rescue radios and other modern safety equipment, and which haven’t demanded that the sailor spend much of the tumultuous rounding hanging ten or fifteen stories above the deck.
My father set forth in the long tradition of young men going to sea in sailing ships seeking adventure. For centuries, shipping out as a young cabin boy or deck hand had served as a rite of passage for a boy who wanted to see the world, who wanted to cast off the constraints of home and of land, who wished to leave behind the world of childhood or adolescence and be accepted in an adult world, no matter how rough or dangerous.
That there is a deep human need for adventure, and rites of passage of this sort, is obvious when one considers the myriad outdoor adventure programs designed with just this purpose, and the hundreds of “expeditions” combing the mountains, rivers, and seas of the globe contriving to establish new “firsts”—first to row a boat to Antarctica, first to sailboard across the Atlantic, first to ride a bicycle from Europe to Mount Everest and then climb it, first to climb it by this route or that, first to climb it without oxygen, without Sherpas, without legs.
The human spirit, especially the human spirit of the young, yearns for ways to push itself to the limits, to test itself. The Pamir tested my father’s limits every day. The things he learned about himself—not always things that he was pleased to know—form part of the fabric of the story that he tells in this book. I’m very pleased that he wrote so vividly and candidly of a voyage that will never be repeated, pleased that in his mid-seventies he decided to put it all down on paper. “This is my swan song,” he told me as he began. And it is. Like the Pamir and the other great Cape Horn windjammers, my father is gone now, too. He died a few weeks short of his seventy-sixth birthday, just after completing this manuscript.