Way of Cape Horn: Four Months in A Yankee Clipper
Paul Eve Stevenson
9781465593108
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It would have been reasonable to suppose that, having made one long voyage in a sailing ship, my wife and I would have been content to stop ashore for the rest of our lives, or at least to limit the length of our voyages to the distance which separates the United States and Europe. For a while, indeed, after our return to America from India, we were contented enough on land, and were kept busy answering the innumerable questions of interested relatives and friends concerning the voyage just ended. But restlessness presently attacked us again; and it was not hard to perceive by the avidity with which my wife searched the Herald’s ship-news columns every morning for tidings of deep-water vessels that no persuasion on my part would be necessary in the event of our undertaking another voyage. Therefore, when two years had passed away, we began to discuss the advisability of once more tempting the elements in another sea-journey to far-distant lands. Japan loomed up before us in a particularly rosy light as a destination for this voyage; but there was one great objection to it: a voyage to Yokohama would have taken us around the Cape of Good Hope a second time, and it was our cherished desire to double Cape Horn, and thus overcome the two most celebrated and tempestuous promontories on the globe. Indeed, as far back as I can remember, I have always wanted to accomplish the westerly passage around the southernmost extremity of the earth’s continents. The very name of Cape Horn is enough to fire the imagination of a true lover of the sea, and fills the mind with pictures of ships battling with gales of wind and giant seas and visions of bleak, iron-bound shores wrapped in the gloom which enshrouds that desolate region. After much discussion, then, we decided on the voyage from New York to San Francisco. It was January when we first broached the matter, and, after arguing the pros and cons of the subject, concluded to try and get away in May, as that would take us to the Horn in July, the middle of the antarctic winter. At this our friends stood aghast. “It is quite bad enough,” they said, “to tempt Providence at all on so foolhardy an excursion, but to double Cape Horn in midwinter is going beyond the limits of reason.” But we stood our ground in spite of the hurricane of objections (and it required some moral courage to do it), and forthwith commenced systematic preparations for the journey. We were making the voyage to a great extent for the purpose of experiencing the weather and seas off Cape Horn, and as the latter would, no doubt, be larger and grander in winter than in summer, I don’t think that our idea was so very preposterous after all. Naturally, our first thought was of the vessel in which we were to sail, and we looked forward with much interest to a voyage in an American ship, having all our lives heard that our ships were run in a splendid manner, that the discipline on board was perfect, etc.; and it would also be interesting to compare this vessel with those of another nation, as our first voyage was made in the British ship “Mandalore.” Now, it happened that all of our largest deep-watermen were away from New York, and we were at a loss what to do, for, as a general rule, the larger the vessel the more comfortable she is in bad weather. There are many who will, no doubt, take exception to this, as being by no means true; yet it would be absurd to argue that the “Germanic,” for instance, is as easy in heavy weather as the “Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse,” or a twelve-hundred-ton sailing ship as the “Potosi.” At length, one morning appeared the announcement in the marine news that the ship “Hosea Higgins,” Abner Scruggs, master, had arrived from San Francisco. She was not as large as the “Roanoke” by a thousand tons or more; but she was well known to us by name, and we went over to Brooklyn one day, where she was discharging a cargo of wine, canned salmon, and whale-oil, and introduced ourselves to the captain.
