THE CAPE HORN ROAD: ENVOY
A Message to the Future about What These Cape Hom Sailors Did and the Echoing Consequences of Their Sailing by Peter Stanford n an old form of poem called a ballade it was customary to call upon a Prince to think about what the poet had said, in a concluding address called an envoy. But an envoy in its first and older meaning was the act of sending something forth, pursuing a mission. As we end this voyage, the mission continues. We have perhaps come to see this mission as one of mankind discovering its world and something of its purposes in that world-naming its parts, sounding its seas, and developing the music of its meanings. Aren't those the kind of things that, in the end, all this long voyaging was about? Not that a sailor would sign onto such articles at the ti me for any given voyage, but there are glimpses of these things one catches in the record, like distant patches of sunlight on a storm-wracked sea. One such would be the joy the Minoan artists took in playful dolphins and giddy octopuses 3,500 years ago; another surely is Francis Drake's calling on the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariner-moments when the qualities needed to make the voyage were emblematic of ends greater than the occasion. Still another, surely, were the achievements of African Americans who found opportunity at sea or in maritime trades in our polyglot seaport cities, like William Lloyd Garrison, who mastered the skilled trade of caulker in Baltimore, and went on to buy his own freedom and help achieve freedom for others.
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Toward an Unknown Shore In 1970 the seaman-author Alan Villiers, whom we met in our last, visited Captain Robert Miethe on his farm near Valparaiso on the coast of C hile. The 93-year-old Miethe had sailed as master in the big German barks that fought their way from Hamburg around Cape Horn to Chile for nitrate to make fertilizer for German farms and explosives for the booming munitions industry. Villiers walked out with the stocky, four-square captain along pathways lined with grape clusters ripening under the Chilean sun. They did the morning rounds, looking after things about the well-ordered farm, with Miethe greeting the ducks by name as he did all the animals except the rabbits-they bred too fast to keep proper track-straightening out the young mechanic working on a well pump, and the like. "Every now and again ," notes Villiers, "the old man burst into a fragment of sea so ng, always in English , the sort that used to be sung in limejuice ships years ago when sailors made their own dogwatch recreation." Villiers had met Miethe two years earlier at a gathering of the Cape Horn Master Mariners in Hamburg. He could talk with these captains, because he was one of them. So Villiers went to Chile to have a proper yarn with the erect, keen-eyed German, and after their morning walk Miethe gave him a full accounting of his career at sea, including wonderful passages in the Scots-built Pitlochry, which under his command outsailed the mighty fivemasted Preussen. "She listened to the wind better than any ship I ever had, " said Miethe. And Villiers learned the problems of the big five-masters , which Miethe was reluctant to dwell on, but
SEA HISTORY 92, SPRING 2000
which he said asked too much of God and man. In his work to record a vanishing way of life, Villiers was interested in the ships, yes-but primarily it was the captains who drove the great ships in the Cape Horn trade and the men who served in them whose stories he sought out. In revisiting what it took to drive a ship through a storm, Captain Miethe spoke of going aloft himself to help the hands stow a foresail that was getting away from them-they were inexperienced, only two days out. "When you take that on you have to win," he said. "I don't know how long it took. There are lulls. Up on the yard the wet heap of the great sail finally came ... the work was done, the sail saved. Down and aloft again to the next sail!" As the two men parted, Miethe said that the captains rarely thought of their job as a way to make a living. "To us it was living, a profession of tremendous satisfactions comparable to none." Flying back to England, Villiers saw below him the anchorages once crowded with sailing ships that had fought their way to get there by way of Cape Horn, now empty of any mast or sail, and he thought of the ship's people and ship masters he had known, who, he said, "had defeated every force and twist of stormy treachery that headland could bring against them, and, in the long battle, had enriched the quiet nobility of worki ng man." As Villiers more than once pointed our, the sailing ship voyage was never from, say, Cardiff to San Francisco, it was "toward, " not "to," that ultimate goal. T his was never an excuse for not making the destined port. It was a recognition, rather, of uncertainty, of the realities of wind and wave for the sailing ship, which had to make her way on the interface between the ocean of water she sailed through, and the ocean of air that gave her her motive power. So our own long voyage, from the warm muddy waters of the Euphrates and Nile rivers five-thousand-odd years ago to the icy seas off Cape Horn, did not change much in its essential challenge. But meeting that challenge changed mankind. The polyglot cultures of the world's seaports, from our earliest awareness onward, served as seedbeds for new ideas, new ways of doing things and of seeing the world-even of human purpose. So in that great voyage, the subject of this "Cape Horn Road" series, surely the word "toward" is a good word to use, as Jawaharl al Nehru used it in writing his autobiography Toward Freedom. A Common Language Builds a Community We've noted earlier that Nehru's passionately reasoned book on his long quest for India's freedom from English rule was written in English. He knew that the best hope for Indian independence lay in making the case for independence in the English -speaking community. And he believed that independence could be achieved without war or vio lent revolution, fo llowing the non-violent philosophy of the spiritual leader of the cause, Mahatma Gandhi. When Nehru's dedicated work for independence began in the early 1900s, the British Empire was at its height, enfolding something like a quarter of the world's population. Nehru went to school in England at Harrow and, despite some annoyance at the
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