No one beats the Cape

The eighteen and nineteenth centuries were ages of discovery and innovation. There’s no doubt about the key importance of all these previous inventions as a support base for the evolution we’ve witnessed throughout the 20th century and the peek we’ve had so far from the 21st. Back then, when the most part of the world was still unexplored and unknown, a few courageous and intrepid men eager for knowledge, fame and richness -each of them in their own and particular way and order of priority- embarked into the unknown routs and waters of the planet. The nineteenth century ended with a great flow of people moving from the old continent towards the new America, land of opportunities for the self made man.

The basic and only means of transportation across the Ocean were nothing else but ships, steam or wind power, or even both, brought daily thousands of thousands of individuals to this blossoming continent. No doubt about it, the East coast was always the most suitable location to the newcomers who have spent several months sailing, and did not want to risk their lives in a cross country journey into unknown territories not yet paced. This wasn’t a big deal until during the late1800s years, when the information of gold mines in San Francisco encouraged the newly arrived to travel all the way to the west.

In this context, a second sea trip was the best and most preferable option. The journey began in New York, and the ship sailed south up till Sandy Point at the most southern extreme of the world in Argentina and Chile’s borderline, and begin to turn up once again now sailing the chilled Pacific waters towards San Francisco. The clippers crossed waters either through Magellan straight or Cape Horn. This last alternative was the fastest and most popular one for those embarked on the 100-200 day sea journey in search of golden opportunities.

Cape Horn connects the southern Atlantic and the southern Pacific at a 50° latitude. The geographical location would be in Argentina at Santa Cruz River and in Chile at the southern extreme of Wellington Island, Torres del Paine.

The extension of the journey depended mainly on weather and climate conditions, and of course on the expertise of the captain and the crew in charge. The flow of ships was amazing all through the late years of 1800. Just to picture it, to Sandy Point -Punta Arenas- between two or three ships arrived daily to it’s port until 1914 when the Panama canal’s opening redirected most of the fluvial traffic to the Caribbean route. But back in the 1890s the flow went south and that’s our topic. The long months overseas were not always calm and peaceful. The general knowledge of the American continent’s coastline was not at all homogeneous, there were areas much better known than others. For example, the traditional trade areas such as Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro and Santiago de Cuba and La Habana were extremely well known and it was rare for a shipwreck to occur in nearby areas. On the other hand, Sandy Point, Wellington Island and the most southern extreme of the continent was not so well known, neither were it’s currents and tides. Plus, the complicated climate conditions made sailing through those waters even more complicated than it actually was.

The Cape Horn and Magellan Straight area was -as we said at the beginning- very well known for the numerous shipwrecks and strands. That’s why the proliferation of Salvation companies did not raised any brows. It was a necessity and a very good business. According to the information we read on Payró and Vairo books on the matter, there were four salvation companies in Sandy Point: Braun & Blanchard, Kurtz & Wahlen, Menendez and Sociedad Anónima. Their main task was to aid ships facing casualties that had risk contracts. This means that the Salvation Companies would profit on a very high percentage of the total net products rescued from the damaged craft. However, these weren’t corsairs or pirates, so their first task was to rescue with life the damaged ship’s crew.

Such was the importance of this economic, and why not social, activity that a new word was invented to refer to this kind of work in Spanish. The word, which is still being used to our days in the Spanish language, is raqueo, a spanishation of the English word Wreck.

Within the Cape Horn area, there were hundreds of shipwrecks. Most of them had their causes in the poor cartographic knowledge of the area as well as the terrible and harsh storms that flooded the ships.

Tradition calls upon our attention as we overhear a local fisherman talk about a very interesting and famous shipwreck case. During the late 19th century there were twelve merchant ships that left all together from Chile towards the Atlantic. After a few days cruise, they had to face a terrible storm. The interesting fact is that all 12 ships wrecked under the same storm, on the same day and there were no survivors found on any of them. the fisherman then said: No one beats the Cape.