Rallied hope and chiding wonder
Shout to thee their stern farewell.
Wednesday, Feb. 18. Our northwest wind, which we feared would fail us before we had made sufficient westing, began to awaken this afternoon apprehensions of a very different character. It suddenly rose into a gale of terrific energy. It seemed to pin the men to the shrouds as they tried to draw themselves up into the tops. Such was its roar through the rigging, you could hardly hear a man at the top of his voice six feet off. It rivalled in force the hurricane which we experienced off Tortugas, in 1831, and the sea it raised ran much higher. Our quarter-boats were in danger of being rolled under.
3 o’clock, P. M. We have had to sail under close-reefed main-top, and fore and mizen storm try-sails. It seemed almost impossible for a ship to live in such a sea as now roared and heaved around us. Each comber in its towering height, seemed to bring with it the plunging force of a Niagara. It was as if the steep side of a mountain, with torrents foaming down its crags, were thrown against you by the earthquake. Had it struck us full on the broadside it would have dashed us into fragments. But our ship, with buoyant energy, rose up steadily over it, and descended again into the abyss, to encounter another just like it. This continued till near sunset, when the gale gradually subsided, and now, at midnight, is scarcely sufficient to give us steerage way.
Thursday, Feb. 19. The sun came up clear, over a calm, cold sea. We waited impatiently for the wind; it came at length in broken gusts from the north, and so continued through the day. At sunset we had a dash of hail from a group of passing clouds. The troubled twilight died away into a dark, cheerless night.
In doubling Cape Horn from the Atlantic, experienced navigators, who differ in almost every other suggestion, agree in this—the expediency of keeping near the land, and especially so if the passage is made with the sun south of the equator. In this period of the year westerly winds prevail. They often rise in the northwest, yet in their sweep around the Isles of Diego Ramirez, take a westerly direction. Near the land you are within their circle, and can take advantage of every eddy to make westing, but further south you get their full force, and directly in your teeth.
Besides, there is very little danger of being driven on the cape. It is a weatherly shore. The heave of the sea is counteracted, close in, by the strength of the current, which sets with great force to the east. This current will carry a vessel off towards the Falkland Islands with the wind from the southwest and even south. And should it veer into the southeast, the reacting force of the current, close in, renders the position of your vessel comparatively safe, even when she is bound into the Atlantic. This provision of nature against being driven on the cape, is one of the few alleviations which she has thrown into the hardships of the mariner’s lot.
In rounding the cape from the Pacific the summer months are the best, for then you have short nights and westerly winds. In rounding it from the Atlantic you have a choice of evils in the different seasons. In the winter you have long nights and icebergs, but favorable winds. In the summer you have head winds, but short nights and no ice. Captain King, of the British navy, who has spent several years in the vicinity of the cape, prefers the winter months. But Basil Hall, as the result of his experience, recommends the summer season. My own opinion is, that any man who has a log-hut on land, with a corn cake at the fire, and who will consent to leave them to double Cape Horn for any purpose whatever, is a proper subject for a lunatic asylum.
Friday, Feb. 20. Lat. 59° 51′ S., long. 80° 12′ W. The wind having veered this morning into the southwest, we tacked ship and stood north. The weather through the day has had all the extremes incident to high latitudes; an hour of bright sunshine, and then a squall. We have not had at any time since we came off the cape, a smooth sea and a steady wind. We have now the long, sweeping waves of the Pacific. They image, in their majesty, the grandeur of the ocean over which they roll. Nature never impairs the sublimity of her works by blending the trivial with the vast. The shout of her torrents fills with solemn echoes the old ancestral wood. The many-voiced waves of her oceans shake the green isles with their stately anthems.
But nature has, in this portion of her mighty domain, sources of the beautiful and sublime in the constellations which light her heavens. Each star burns out from the blue vault with the brilliancy and force of an independent sun. It has a breadth of circle and an intensity of light which opens on you like the flame from the eye of the volcano. And then there is the Southern Cross, a constellation hanging serene and beautiful over the troubled night of the grave. To it not only the Christian pilgrim turns in his path to heaven, but the weary traveller of earth seeks his late repose by its inclined beam.