Cape Horn

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Cape Horn
CapeHorn.jpg
Cape Horn seen from the sea
Geographical location
Cape Horn (Chile)
Cape Horn
Coordinates 55 ° 58 ′ 48 ″  S , 67 ° 17 ′ 21 ″  W Coordinates: 55 ° 58 ′ 48 ″  S , 67 ° 17 ′ 21 ″  W
Waters 1 Pacific
Waters 2 Drake Street , Lake Scotia , Atlantic
Cape Horn.png
The islands around Cape Horn.
The island of Hoorn (I. Hornos) is marked in red.

Cape Horn ( Spanish Cabo de Hornos , English Cape Horn , Danish Cape Horn , French cap Horn , Dutch Kaap Horn ) is a headland on the Chilean rocky island of Isla Hornos . Cape Horn is, apart from the remote, even more southerly Diego Ramírez Islands and without taking into account the South Sandwich Islands , which are sometimes also included in South America , the southernmost point of South America .

Cape Horn was first described by the Dutch navigator Willem Cornelisz Schouten on January 29, 1616 during an expedition of the Hoorner Austraalse Compagnie and named in honor of the town council of Capo Hoorn . The claim that the Englishman Francis Drake had already sighted Cape Horn as Cape Elizabeth earlier in October 1578 was only made after 1618, although the records of Francis Drake, who had been dead for more than twenty years at that time, and the statements of his crew do not match the actual circumstances covered at the cape.

Until the opening of the Panama Canal in August 1914, the route around Cape Horn was an important shipping route. Along with the Strait of Magellan, which runs a little further north, it was the shortest navigable route from Europe to the west coast of America. B. to Chile or to California - to get.

In German, the spelling Cape Horn is also used, which corresponds to the English and Spanish spelling and can be justified by folk etymology : Horn as a name for a headland or a mountain (such as the Horn of Africa or Matterhorn ) and horno , Spanish for '(Back -) Oven ', as supposed sources of the legendary fire on Tierra del Fuego ; therefore Hornos is also in the plural: Cabo de Hornos 'Cape of Ovens'.

location

Cape Horn is located at 55 ° 59 'south latitude and 67 ° 17' west longitude. The headland is located on the Isla Hornos (German: Horn Island , not to be confused with the Horn Islands in Micronesia, also discovered by Schoutens ), a rocky island in Chile, and is the southernmost point in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago . The southernmost point of the American mainland is Cape Froward on the Brunswick Peninsula , about 260 km to the north. The southernmost islands geographically belonging to South America are the Diego Ramírez Islands, about 100 km further south-west, which also belong to Chile .

In 1945 Cape Horn and the surrounding islands were declared a National Park Cape Horn .

climate

Like the southernmost 2,000 km in South America, Cape Horn lies in the cold Antarctic circumpolar current . Unlike South Africa, which is twenty latitudes further north with the warm Agulhas Current , Tierra del Fuego is never reached by an Atlantic warm current ( Brazil Current ). Rather, the polar cold current ( Falkland Current ) extends in the southern summer to the Río de la Plata , in winter to southern Brazil, so that Cape Horn is largely under subpolar influence all year round .

The air temperature at Cape Horn is year-round - day and night - almost identical to the water temperature, which is 8 ° C in January and 5 ° C in July. During the day it rarely gets warmer than 12–13 ° C. Frost only occurs occasionally in winter, and almost never snowfall , although it rains more than 280 days a year.

The wind blows all year round with a few exceptions from the western half of the wind rose, eastern winds are very rare. However, the wind strength in the sea area around the cape is rather lower than, for example, in the adjacent south-east Pacific and off the Chilean coast near the Strait of Magellan, where there is consistently one wind strength more and twice as high a storm probability. Nevertheless, the wind blows almost constantly in the summer (January) with at least five Beaufort , but only once a month with more than seven Beaufort, west of it once a week. In July there are at least seven Beaufort and one storm per week every third day, while to the west there are two storms per week.

discovery

The cape was circumnavigated for the first time by an expedition of the Dutch sailors Willem Cornelisz Schouten and Jakob Le Maire on January 29, 1616. They drove on behalf of the Australian company , led by Jakob Le Maire's father Isaac Le Maire after an internal dispute with the Dutch East Indies -Companie (VOC) was founded together with other Hoorner business people. Since Dutch ships were only allowed to use the Strait of Magellan at the time if they belonged to the VOC, Isaac Le Maire looked for a passage to the Pacific, untouched by the rights of the VOC, to trade with the East Indian Spice Islands .

The mission of the expedition was to explore a new route to "East India". It was considered fulfilled when a passage opened up between Tierra del Fuego (in the language of the Spanish owner Tierra del Fuego ) and the hypothetical huge southern continent Terra Australis . It was named in Latin Fretum le Maire (literally Le Maire Strait) in honor of the initiator and most important financier Isaac Le Maire , and the "peninsula" in the east belonging to Terra Australis was named Staatlandt in honor of the newly constituted Dutch parliament . The rededication in favor of the son Jakob Le Maire took place after his tragic death at the instigation of the father. The island character of the state land , which is only sixty kilometers long , could not be recognized as one can rarely see further than forty kilometers even at sea. Not seeing the connection between the State Island and the gigantic Terra Australis only proved that you couldn't see further than twenty nautical miles - and you already knew that.

According to the published records of the "shipwrecked passenger" Jacob le Maires (his expedition ship, the Hoorn , burned during cleaning work in Patagonia ), he and Captain Schouten were of the opinion that Tierra del Fuego is a rugged, rocky, but contiguous island, the supposed southern tip of which is Schouten responsible for this was named Capo Hoorn in honor of the second major financier, the Council of the City of Hoorn, according to scientific custom . The Le Maire Strait, the easy and short passage between America and Terra Australis near the State Island or State Landt , was the important discovery, Cape Horn was already a clear 180 km in the Pacific. Isaac le Maire, supported by a "silent" Schouten, had the discovery of this passage attributed to his son by court order, with the father as heir. The associated and desired management rights for the strait were, however, immediately expropriated and given the monopoly of the East India Company. The last trials for this were lost in 1648.

With the realization that the state land is not connected to Terra Australis either and that Cape Horn is the decisive landmark, neither the Strait of Magellan nor the Strait of Le Maire could be permanently farmed with tariffs. Due to the factually and historically incorrect, business-motivated court ruling that Jacob le Maire found his way to the Pacific with the Le Maire Road, he is just as incorrectly and, in short, attributed the discovery of Cape Horn. Usually, however, all discoveries on such a voyage are attributed to the captain, as the captain decides in which unknown waters his ship is going, he is responsible for it and also has to evaluate and interpret what he has seen. However, Schouten did not insist on public recognition of his discovery, presumably because of an "agreement" between himself and Isaac le Maire. In addition, the published documentation about the voyage came without a doubt from the representative of the shipping company Jacob le Maire, so that the impression of a discovery by the traveling merchant was already evident among contemporaries.

But according to the account of the German writer Wolf-Ulrich Cropp , the Englishman Francis Drake was the first European to sail around the Cape 40 years earlier on his circumnavigation of the world , after he got through the Strait of Magellan into the Pacific and then in search of the missing escort ships had driven southeast for a few days. However, this discovery was declared a state secret by Queen Elizabeth I. It was believed at the time that the only way to reach the Pacific from the Atlantic was through the Strait of Magellan, which was controlled by Spain, further north, and the English did not want other nations to know about the second route. A Drake's first discovery was only claimed after 1618 for political and economic reasons and could quickly be refuted by examining the records and travel reports as well as by questioning the passengers who were still alive. The English naming of the sea area in Drake Passage was not given until 1769 by James Cook when he was surveying the coast and is probably only an expression of a general admiration for the greatest English sea hero up to that point .

Indeed, Drake had no more escorts in the Pacific to miss; he had already lost that in the Atlantic or in the Strait of Magellan. In the event of a separation, a meeting point 2500 km north was agreed with the remaining Elisabeth ; a search for missing persons in the south was therefore not very promising. Rather, Drake sought protection between the islands west of the Strait of Magellan in an alleged "50-day storm" and was not interested in drifting further and further south-east, where it would inevitably crash into the expected Terra Australis in the storm . In any case, he gave himself a lot of time to "conquer" the inhospitable islands of the archipelago one by one. Furthermore, the navigation documents show that it was never more south than 55 ° south, which, in view of an otherwise perfect latitude determination on the entire world trip, rules out that it came closer to Cape Horn than approx. 300 km. No way he was south of the Cape, which has Drake and the Le Maire Strait or Falkland Road passed through to the Atlantic entrance to the Strait of Magellan, to make a statement about the passableness. The ambitious Drake would have taken the slightest chance to make and verify such a glorious discovery, for he was well aware of the economic, personal, political, and military benefits.

Similar legends were later spread about the Spanish captains Francisco de Hoces (1526) and Gabriel de Castilla (1603). In both cases, however, the sources and evidence are so poor and uncertain that one can at best assume that both of them sailed past the entrances to the Strait of Magellan for various reasons and then wandered south of it for a short time. In the case of de Hoces, the legend led to the same result as in the case of Drake: the sea area south of Tierra del Fuego, the Drake Road , is called Mar de Hoces in Spanish .

shipping

Lighthouse on Cape Horn
Memorial to the seamen who perished on Cape Horn
Memorial after a storm on November 10, 2014
Restored monument in October 2015

The circumnavigation of the cape was one of the most feared ship passages, as the founding of the Cape Hornier community testifies to. Commanding captains who conquered Cape Horn on a freighter without an auxiliary engine became honorary members of this international community.

Up until the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, circumnavigating the cape was the somewhat cheaper way of getting to the west coast of South America from the Atlantic. The Strait of Magellan and the Beagle Channel , which were also eligible for this and which had been sailed centuries earlier by ships of the Dutch East India Company and British research vessels, also presented difficult weather and current conditions for sailing ships.

At Cape Horn, the passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific was particularly dangerous and difficult against the westerly wind drift . It required the ships sailing in this direction to constantly cruise in the high seas and rain, cold, poor visibility and icebergs. The wrong Cape Horn caused additional difficulties in navigation due to the danger of confusion.

It is estimated that the sea off Cape Horn became the undoing of more than 800 ships and more than 10,000 people and the largest ship cemetery in the world. To commemorate these sailors, on December 5, 1992, a monument by the artist José Balcells was inaugurated on the Cape, depicting a stylized albatross. A poem by the Chilean poet Sara Vial for the drowned can be found on a nearby plaque:

I am the albatross who is waiting for you at the end of the world .
I am the forgotten soul of the dead sailors ,
who sailed to Cape Horn from all seas on earth .
But they have not died in the raging of the waves ,
because now they fly on my wings for all time into eternity ,
where the Antarctic storm howls at the deepest abyss .

The monument was designed to withstand storms of up to 200 km / h. Nevertheless, on November 10, 2014, the western half could not withstand the wind. In 2015 it was restored and on October 27th it could be viewed again for the first time.

Since the time of the gold rush in California, the times it took a ship to travel from the 50th parallel south around the Cape to 50 ° S have been compared. The record was set by the Windjammer Priwall , one of the Flying P-Liners famous for its speed , with 5 days and 14 hours . The full ship Susanna , on the other hand, took the longest, and it took 99 days to sail in 1905 in the southern winter. Other captains gave up and preferred to call at South America via Africa and Australia.

The last commercial sailing ship without an auxiliary engine to circumnavigate the Cape was the Finnish four-masted barque Pamir in 1949 . With the barque Alexander von Humboldt (Bremerhaven), which was equipped with an auxiliary engine , on January 13, 2006, a square-rigged ship flying the German flag circled the Cape for the first time since 1939 . This was followed by the Gorch Fock , the sailing training ship of the German Navy, which in January 2011 circumnavigated the Cape for the first time in its more than 50-year service.

literature

  • Francisco Coloane : Cape Horn. Translated from the Chilean Spanish by Willi Zurbrüggen . Unionsverlag Zurich, 1998, ISBN 3-293-00248-X .
  • Wolf-Ulrich Cropp: Gold Rush in the Caribbean - In the footsteps of Sir Francis Drake. Delius Klasing Verlag, Bielefeld 2000, ISBN 3-7688-1175-1 .
  • Wolfram Engelhard: Cap Horniers, The last sailors from Cape Horn. DSV-Verlag, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-88412-350-5 .
  • Eigel Wiese: men and ships off Cape Horn. Koehler Verlag, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-7822-0689-4 .
  • Fritz Brustat-Naval: The Cape Horn Saga. On sailing ships at the end of the world Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-548-20831-2 .
  • Hans Peter Jürgens, Stefan Krücken: Storm Cape, around Cape Horn and through the war - the incredible journey of Captain Jürgens. Ankerherz Verlag, Hollenstedt 2008, ISBN 978-3-940138-01-9 .
  • Ursula Feldkamp (Hrsg.): Around Cape Horn - With freighter to the west coast of America. Hauschild Verlag, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-89757-210-9 .
  • Osvaldo Escobar Torres: At the Cape Horn lighthouse. Sailing off Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. Delius Klasing Verlag, Bielefeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-7688-3324-0 .

Movie

  • Michael Schomers : "At the end of the world: Cape Horn", NDR / ARTE, 60 min, 2002 (book: Michael Schomers / Wolfram Engelhardt, production: Lighthouse Film, Cologne / Unkel)
  • “At the end of the world: Cape Horn” - ARTE theme evening “Cape Horn” (book: Michael Schomers and Wolfram Engelhard, director: Michael Schomers, ARTE / ZDF 2002, 60 min.). A report about the last Cap Horniers, the heyday of sailing ships, Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn, production: Lighthouse Film, Cologne / Unkel, Internet: www.Lighthouse-Film.de

Web links

Commons : Cape Horn  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Henry R. Wagner: Sir Francis Drake's Voyage Around the World: Its Aims and Achievements. Kessinger Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1-4286-2255-1 .
  2. ↑ Harry Kelsey: Sir Francis Drake; The Queen's Pirate. Yale University Press, New Haven 1998, ISBN 0-300-07182-5 .
  3. ↑ Wolf-Ulrich Cropp: Gold Rush in the Caribbean - In the footsteps of Sir Francis Drake. 2000, p. 131 ff.
  4. ^ The New Lexicon of Popular Errors. Piper, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-492-22797-X .
  5. ↑ website of the Chilean chapter Hoorniers : Frigate Susanna ( Memento of 14 November 2014 Internet Archive ) ( engl. ) Accessed 22 November 2006.