mountainous sea that ship through the dancame near sinking the gerous maneuver of ship herself. The men coming around head to were worked ruthwind in cresting seas. less ly. There was no He bitterly regretted other way to do it, to that he had brought his make the passage. crew of youngsters to There was no power this comer of the world. available but the power He wondered if the little you brought aboard in ship would live. yo ur two hands, a "You bastard sea!" power used to the limit he exulted when the to work the ship ' s sails ship had been brought and harness the power round and was lying-to of the winds. safely, as the first hissTo me, the most ing greybeard slid "I am not in distress as long as I have one mast to sail with," said the master amazing realization is harmlessly by. But he of the Champigny, dismasted off Cape Horn in 1927. He refused any offer that this way of life on knew, none better, that of a tow as he sailed his crippled ship into safe harbor in the F al kl ands . the Cape Hom road was there is no permanent victory in what he called "the war with Cape Hom." in full flower in our own times, in the lifetimes of people still The artist Anton Otto Fischer making his passage round the among us. Hom in the early 1900s, referred to "the watery hell of Cape To Be a Cape Horner Hom," and remembered with horror the two "nightmarish" Rounding Cape Hom became the defining act that marked months it took his ship to get around the Hom and clear into ships and men as a breed apart. A ship making that passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific world is called a Cape Homer. the Pacific. The trip had its moments, however. One that Fischer recalled with passionate fidelity more And her people are called Cape Homers. Historically, the than forty years later was a view of the wild scene that he rounding of Cape Hom was the turning point in the voyaging shared with a wandering albatross. It happened after a tough, impulse that began some 5,000 years ago, an impulse that exhausting session stowing a royal that had broken out of its finally opened the whole world to trade and to the interchange gaskets while the ship careened through heavy seas. "I was of peoples and ideas just a few hundred years ago. A defining tossed on a wide arc from one side to the other and had to hold development, we may agree, in the story of mankind . Of the ships that made this passage, a few survive, due to on desperately to keep from being pitched into space," he the strong faith and exertion of a surprisingly small number of remembered. He then continues: I made the sail snug, tightened each gasket as well as I devoted souls (Norma Stanford and I call them "the ship cou ld under the conditions and then got off the yard, savers"). Among them is Alan Villiers's Joseph Conrad stopping on the gallant cross tree to stop the pounding of which lies afloat at Mystic Seaport on the Mystic River in my heart. I had a bird 's-eye view of the whole scene and Connecticut. Irving Johnson' s great big wagon Peking has it was a beautiful sight, awe-inspiring in its grandeur. found safe harbor at South Street Seaport Museum in New The skies had cleared somewhat and there were patches York. Across the slip from her lies the older full-rigged ship of blue amongst the driven clouds. The ship seemed to Wavertree. Dismasted off Cape Hom in 1910, she was towed be wallowing in a sea of greenish milk; ranks of huge into Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands on Christmas Eve that waves bore down on the ship from windward, breaking year after she had found her own way back from the Horn, with a thunderous roar. Spume and spindrift blotted out rolling down the bitter seas with broken masts and yards on the horizon, merging sea and sky in a gray vapor. An deck and men with broken arms and legs. Battered but albatross appeared hovering around the ship and gliding unvanquished, she survived , was discovered in an Argentine quite close. He was motionless except for his head and backwater by Karl Kortum (the ringleader of the ship savers), eyes, and almost insulting in his indifference to the and brought back to New York in 1970. Around this dismasted howling gale. The whole scene was so breathtaking that hulk, challenged and inspired by its presence, the South Street for the time being I was unaware of all the dangers and Seaport Museum took shape on the East River waterfront the hardships, lost in the overpowering display of the close to the Brooklyn Bridge. With the help of the ship savers of the National Maritime Historical Society, the great ship elements unchained. 1 The conditions under which sailors met these unchained may be rerigged to make her most important voyage yet-to elements changed little in the essentials in the five battering educate coming generations in how men learned to build such ,t centuries of men coming this way in their sailing ships. The ships and take them to sea on the Cape Hom road. ships, except for a few at the very end of the tale, had no radio, and indeed no electricity. Bunks were washed out again and Future installments of Mr. Stanford's story of the Cape Horn again by seas smashing their way into the accommodations. trade will go into how deepwatervoyaging began, what were the Men fell into the sea from aloft, weakened by cold and impulses oftrade and desire that led mankind to take longer and exhaustion. That was how Barker lost three of his five men longer leaps across watery distances, and the impact of the experikilled in that horrendous passage in 1905, one other being ences on societies ashore. Reader comment and criticism is invited. stunned and drowned by boarding seas on deck, and the last 1 Anton Otto Fischer, F ocs' le Days (1946 & 1987) pp. 34-35 grabbed from the top of a deckhouse and swept away by a 14
SEA HISTORY 70, SUMMER 1994