Clippers once had to round Chile’s storm gate to reach Asia
Cape Horn on Chile’s Hornos Island is Tierra del Fuego’s iconic southern headland—not South America’s absolute tip, which is Águila Islet—yet it remains the seafarer’s great milestone above Drake Passage. Dutchmen Schouten and Le Maire rounded and named it Kaap Hoorn in 1616 after their hometown.
Cape Horn sits on little Hornos Island in the Hermite group at the far southern end of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. The cape bounds the Drake Passage on its northern side, where the gap between South America and Antarctica joins the Atlantic to the Pacific. The cape lies in Chilean waters inside Cabo de Hornos National Park, the core of a biosphere reserve. The Chilean Navy keeps a small station on the island with a residence, chapel and lighthouse, and nearby stands José Balcells's albatross sculpture, raised in 1992 by the Chilean branch of the Cape Horn Captains Brotherhood to honour sailors lost rounding the Horn. The wind knocked it down in 2014. A 2019 expedition found the world's southernmost tree here, a Magellan's beech bent almost flat against a slope.
For decades clipper ships carrying global trade had to pass it, braving fierce winds, huge waves, strong currents and icebergs. The Panama Canal, opened in August 1914, removed most of that need. Rounding the Horn is still a landmark feat in yachting: races such as the Vendée Globe, Golden Globe and Volvo Ocean Race go this way, and round-the-world speed records follow the route. Most cruising sailors take the channels north of the cape and wait at anchor for a weather window to visit or circle Horn Island.
The weather justifies the reputation. No station operates in the island group, but a survey in 1882 and 1883 measured 1,357 millimetres of rain a year, an average temperature of 5.2 °C and mean winds of about 30 kilometres per hour, with squalls over 100 kilometres per hour in every season. Another count gives 278 rainy days a year, 70 of them with snow. Cloud cover averages between five and six-and-a-half eighths of the sky. On the Diego Ramírez Islands, 109 kilometres south-west, March is wettest at about 137 millimetres and October driest at about 94.
Gales blow up to 5 percent of the time in summer, usually with decent visibility, but in winter up to 30 percent of the time, often in murk.
Source: Cape Horn
