The Cape Horn Road
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hen it comes on to rain some of my earliest memocats and dogs, as itdid ries are of pictures of the saillate the other night, I ing ships that once crowded find myself thinking of the the narrow waterway. Tall Wavertree. In my mind 's eye ships, whose skysail poles I can see the curtains of fallseemed indeed to scrape the ing water draw across the sky and whose crossed yards deserted, meaninglessly lit up and thicketed rigging were office buildings of Lower instilled with high purpose Manhattan, and then sweep out of another age than ours. across the ship. I hear the rain The East River came to drumming on the planking of seem a haunted place to me, a the decks and feel it stream by Peter Stanford stage where memorable chardown the ship 'scold iron sides acters had walked and unforinto the East River tide that gettable stories had had their swirls around the great hull in beginnings. The narrow city the darkness-a clucking, lanes winding down toward restless tide that tugs and caSouth Street, Dover Street, joles: Come away down into Beekman, Fletcher, Cuyler's the open water of the Upper Alley and the rest, seemed Bay, and out through the Nareach to echo a vanished presrows to the ocean, set out ence, a sailor just home from I again on the Cape Horn road! Hong Kong , a tall ship bound Have you ever noticed how in with heavy rope hawsers, rain on your roof overhead like a captive antlered deer, at can sound like the rising voice the end of the street. That of the wind over a wild ocean, haunting sense of a departed and how the rushing water promise led some ofus a quarseems to be made up of a ter century ago to bring the babble of many conversations Cape Horn sailing ship Waoverheard? Those unselfconvertree back to New York to scious voices are out of your fill out that picture-a ship at own life as you've lived it the end of the street. and perhaps out of scenes Idly turning the pages of before your time which have an old book some years ago, I caught you up in their own came upon one of those picreality. I hear sailors' cries, tures that had got into my and gulls' cries, and sometimes mind as it was learning to I seem to hear the cries of The Wavertree, dismastedof!Cape Horn in 1910, rests easy at South recognize things, a picture that ch ildren who play at seafar- Street Seaport, when she arrived in 1970. drew me into its reality and ing and dream of it, and under imprinted its message deep in it all I hear the crash and pounding of the seas and the baying my brain circuits. It was an etching of a tall arched ship's bow. of the winds that drive the great seas on ward-winds that blow Its bowsprit reached forward over a waterfront street, and on around Cape Horn and seas that roll on right around the world , it stood a figure like a boy, steadying himself with a hand on uninterrupted by land except where at the southernmost tip of the forestay, looking down on sma ll craft bobbing on the South America, the gaunt rock of the Horn itself stands out to shadowed water that bore up the great sailing ship. Over the meet them . boy 's head--0r was it a man' s?-the foremast and rigging Why dream of Cape Horn? I have not gone to Cape Horn as began their steady ascent toward the boundless sky. the old seafarers did, in conditions that tried the ship and her That gesture of aspiring outreach in a tall ship 's rig has people to their limits. I've been to that gaunt outpost in a cruise plucked many young men from waterfront streets to put them ship. It' s just not the same thing . But I went because of the on the watery path that leads down the harbor, out to sea and ships and their people who had gone before. Cape Horn haunts on the Cape Horn road right around the world! Don ' t let an the imagination because of what they achieved there, against out-of-place "realism" deceive you for one minute as to the such odds. pulling power of the rig of tall ships. It is very strong. It drew The Cape Horn trade in sail is over. A few dozen men who strong people to serve in the ships. Sailors in the last days of were in it survive and stay in touch through Cape Homers' the Cape Horn passage-and it's only toward the end of the clubs. The ships they sailed ended their runs while I was a boy. story that we get to know them well enough to speak with The East River, a tidal stream running under the bluffs of confidence of what they felt about it all- walked the extra Brooklyn Heights where I grew up, had been cleared of the mile to serve in ships with towering rigs. A ship with a skysail square riggers that once thronged the Manhattan shore across yard crossed above the royals would attract a crew faster than the way at South Street before I swam into consciousness, too her workaday lower-rigged sisters in port. John Masefield, late to see them . But memories hang on, stories are told, and poet laureate of England, scared and scarred on the Cape Horn
Part I: The Ships and Men That Made the World's Most Di,fficult Passage by Sea
I
SEA HISTORY 70, SUMMER 1994
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