Cape Horn

CAPE HORN

CAPE HORN is at the southernmost tip of South America, on Horn Island, one of Chile's Wollaston Islands, which are part of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. Storms, strong currents, and icebergs make passage of the cape extremely dangerous. The Dutch navigators Jakob Le Maire and Willem Schouten were the first to sail through Cape Horn, in 1616. Schouten named the point "Cape Hoorn" after the town of Hoorn in Holland, where he was born.

The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, California, in 1848, stimulated the use of the cape as a passageway from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. Because of the rigors of Cape Horn on coast-to-coast voyages, American shipbuilders

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were compelled to produce fast, weatherly, and immensely strong vessels. The rapid growth of California trade stimulated production of American square-rigged ships. Famous Cape Horn ships of this period include the Andrew Jackson, which shared the record of eighty-nine days from New York to San Francisco, and the James Baines, which logged twenty-one knots, the fastest speed ever recorded under sail.

By the early 1900s, the rigors of the Horn passage, the growth of intercontinental trade, the greater development of the U.S. Navy, and the difficulty of adequately protecting the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts focused U.S. attention on the building of the Panama Canal, which opened in 1914. From that time, the importance of the route around Cape Horn, used previously only by freight ships, rapidly declined. The last American sailing ship to round Cape Horn was probably the schooner Wanderbird in 1936. Since that time, travel around the cape has mostly been limited to daring crews or individual sailors participating in races around the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Knox-Johnston, Robin. Cape Horn: A Maritime History. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994.

Rydell, Raymond A. Cape Horn to the Pacific: The Rise and Decline of an Ocean Highway. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952.

Alan Villiers / h. s.

See also Chile, Relations with ; Panama Canal ; Schooner .