The Way of a Ship - Couverture souple

Them was the days, sonnies,
Them was the men,
Them was the ships
As we’ll never see again.
C. Fox Smith, “What the Old Man Said”

Prologue
To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time,
a passing phase of life . . .
Joseph Conrad, preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”

There never was a sailor’s tale that wasn’t a damn lie.
Kenneth Roberts, Captain Caution
Baltazar is anchored in a small bay on the east side of Isla Herschel, on the Paso al Mar del Sur, almost exactly seven miles north-northeast of Cape Horn. We’re recording a sustained wind of more than sixty knots at deck level and gusts of close to eighty -- although they’re as much as 30 per cent stronger at the masthead. The anchor is dug into the sand bottom, good holding, with two hundred feet of chain out and two nylon snubbing lines to absorb the shock of the waves.

Before the front crossed over, the wind was out of the northeast. We were almost wide open in that direction, out into the Bahia Arquistade and beyond it, to the great Southern Ocean itself. For twelve hours, we pitched into seas eight to ten feet high before the wind backed first to the northwest and then west, rising to near-hurricane strength as it clocked round. By then, the low, grassy hills astern and on our sides gave us the protection we had counted on.

Apart from the anchor, we have three lines out to shore, two secured to wind-carved dwarf trees one hundred feet off our stern and one running off our port side, shackled to a cable we have wrapped around a large rock. The lines are fouled with hundreds of pounds of cleaving kelp, broken away from its beds by the storm. The weight adds strain to the lines but also dampens down their surges as the wind slams into the hull and rigging of our fifty-foot steel boat.

Two of us dragged the lines ashore in the rubber dinghy, paddling in frantic haste like commandos storming a beach. Baltazar was difficult to control in the rising and gusty wind, and we had to get the stabilizing lines secured in a hurry. Our skipper, Bertrand, worked the engine to keep the boat off the close, encirling rocks. Twice, I scaled the low cliff behind the beach and tied off two lines. Such exertion was unusual for me in my sedentary life, and afterwards, I slumped on the rocks gasping, heart thumping much too fast. I wondered if it was my destiny to die on this stony shore.

Weatherfax maps limned the growth of the unfolding storm. Twenty-four hours earlier, it had been an unremarkable, loose-structured low-pressure system. We would keep an eye on it as we rounded the Horn, but we wouldn’t worry too much about it, maybe even using it to make a fast run across the Bahia Nassau and back to the Beagle Channel and shelter in this corner of inhospitable Tierra del Fuego. Then the barometer began to drop fast, going down at a sixty-degree angle until its line disappeared off the graph. The next weatherfax disclosed that the system had tightened up, its isobars bunching together until they almost merged, air pressure down to a frightening 950 millibars at the centre. The Chilean navy broadcast a securité, warning all vessels to get to shelter immediately. We began to see the cirrus and cirrocumulus clouds that signalled the depression -- the “mares’ tail and mackerel sky” that makes any sailor apprehensive. After clearing the eastern tip of Isla Hornos, we ran hard for a haven.

Bertrand is a fifteen-year veteran of these waters, and of many voyages across Drake Passage to Antarctica. He’s never seen a storm that looks like this one, he tells us. And when the worst of the wind hits us, it is the strongest he’s ever experienced. That’s when the barometer begins to rise again, its tracing line reappearing on the graph and shooting up almost vertically. I didn’t know a barometer could do that.

Fast rise after low foretells a stronger blow. With anxious fascination, we watch the wind lay our boat over on its side as if it was sailing close-hauled into a strong headwind.

The Horn has lived up to its reputation again. In twelve hours, its malign influences have transformed an innocuous summer low coming in out of the Southern Ocean into the most dangerous of storms: what the old square-rigger sailors used to call a Cape Horn snorter.

On deck for ten minutes to check shore lines for chafe and take photographs, dressed in my modern warm and impermeable foul-weather gear, I can, nevertheless, feel the windchill, fifteen or twenty, or more, below zero. The weight of wind is like a soft yet powerful, unyielding wall moulding itself to my body. It’s impossible to keep my eyes open looking to windward; raindrops are tiny, blinding missiles. I must concentrate on not getting flipped off the deck and into the sea. Later, from our snug, dry cabin, I look out at the horizontal rain and hail, the fog of sea water as the wind lashes the sea’s surface into the air.

I often think of the nineteenth-century square-rigger men during the two days we wait out the storm in our little bay of refuge. I say to Bertrand: “How could they have done it?”

It’s the question I’ve been asking myself since the storm began. It’s the question I have come to Cape Horn to try to answer.

Day after day, week after week, summer or winter, wind-ship sailors endured just the sort of battering wind and deluge we were comfortably observing. They went aloft a hundred feet or more on icy ratlines and footropes, up masts that could whip to and fro through ninety degrees of arc in a few seconds, to grapple with homicidal sails, certain death just one small mistake, a slip, away. In leaky oilskins, always soaked, no heat or light in their squalid fo’c’s’les, malnourished, scurvy -- the sailor’s ancient bane -- still a possibility even at the end of the nineteenth century.

One writer, a square-rigger sailor himself, coined the phrase “the Cape Horn breed” to describe the men who worked the beautiful, widow-making deep-sea sailing ships in their dying days. It felt apt to me. Those seamen’s work was fraught with so much danger, their plane of discomfort such true suffering, that the men who matter-of-factly did it seemed remote and alien, like shadowy warriors in old and vanished wars.

I had a personal interest in these sailors. Some of my ancestors had been Cape Horn seamen. One of them was my great-great-uncle Benjamin Lundy, at sea in the 1880s. I had some of his letters and I knew what he looked like; I had met his descendants and become friends with them. I wanted to write about his voyage around the Horn. In that way, I thought I would come to better understand the men who sailed the last square-riggers, and what the experience had been like for them. Maybe I could answer the questions that had bubbled up with such urgency in our Cape Horn refuge.

South from our storm anchorage, past the low sheltering headland, lay the Horn, and beyond it, the Southern Ocean. That’s where the wind ships would have been a century ago: fifty or a hundred miles out, or several hundred, close to the Antarctic drift ice, beating endlessly into contrary and hostile wind and seas, mothering their cargoes -- the only reason they were there at all -- struggling to make their westing before they could finally turn north, clear of the continent’s lethal lee shore, towards benign seas, warmth and harbour.