Continuing with the last post on
the development of American interest in the Pacific Ocean and their expansion
into the use of the South Pacific prior to Joseph Smith translating the Book of
Mormon. Again, this purpose is to show that the knowledge of the Chilean coast,
and most importantly, the significance of the 30º South Latitude, was unknown
to Joseph Smith in 1829, and all of New England until about 1848 when the first
American ships began to sail around Cape Horn and up the west coast of South
America during the California Gold Rush.
As discussed in the last post,
for any American ship to have set in to Valparaiso, Chile, in
1820 through about 1848, it would have rounded the Cape Horn (Kaap Hoorn),
which is the southernmost headland of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago of
southern Chile, which marks the northern boundary of the Drake Passage.
However, after the Dutch rounded Cape Horn in 1616, those sometimes treacherous
seas filled gradually with merchantmen, whale ships and men-of-war until, by
1850, the Cape Horn road had become the principal route of commerce between
old-world seaports of the Atlantic and the "new" world along the
Pacific Rim. That inhospitable place, the Cabo
de Hornos of modern Chilean and Argentinian maps, the jagged punctuation
stopping South America, below which all is frozen, eventually earned the respectful
nickname "Cape Stiff" because of the extremely “stiff” winds
encountered there.
The old world seaports
of the Atlantic referred to were in Europe (Holland, England and Germany), and
those mariners from the early nineteenth-century onward well knew the way.
Their preparations began as their ships approached the Argentine coast coming
westward across the Atlantic, where their much-patched fair-weather sails were
replaced on the yards by stiff new ones made of "OO"-gauge canvas,
all the better to withstand the blow surely to come. Tarpaulins were stretched
over hatch covers as waterproofing, and some crews bolted massive timbers over
the hatches, to keep them from being stove-in when the great Cape Horn rollers
would crash onboard.
Steady gales from the
southwest thwarted their desire to reach the Pacific Ocean with their cargoes
and lives intact. These westerlies pinioned the sails against the masts,
threatening to back a vessel all the way to the Falkland Islands. Some
westbound crews never got around at all, but were compelled to run their
easting down, circumnavigating the Southern Hemisphere until they reached the
Pacific from the west. And any crew attempting Cape Horn had to thread
carefully between the dangerous lee shore of South America and the Antarctic
ice, particularly in June, July and August, at the height of the southern
winter.
Most captains under
sail avoided the narrow seaway in Magellan Strait: only steam power made that
route commercially viable. By 1900, the isolated city of Punta Arenas, near the
eastern end of the strait, became a major port, providing coal to steamships
bound west through the desolate canal. But sailing ships continued their
outside passages, even after 1914 when the Panama Canal was opened. Any paying
cargo would send a crew around the Horn, and so the shantymen sang, "We're bound for Yokohama with a load
of grand pianners!" The American ship Eric the Red, for example, cleared out for Japan in 1879 with a
cargo consisting of 49,750 cases of "case oil" (kerosene), coal, fire
brick, pitch, paint, printing ink, books, plaster, acids, stoveware, oars,
clocks, glassware, an organ, and two iron safes! Nor did these vessels come home empty, but chartered cargoes for return to
Europe and the eastern seaboard of North America--chrome ore from New
Caledonia, coal from Australia, nitrates (for fertilizer) from Chile and Peru,
grain from California, sugar and whale oil from Hawai'i, lumber and tinned
salmon from Washington and British Columbia.
Note that these ships
did not sail for ports on the west coast of South America, but sailed directly
across the Pacific, bound for Asia. Nor were these ships American—in fact, hundreds
of the ships that rounded the horn are on record being built in Scottish
shipyards during the 1870s-1890s, many from Russel & Co., Port Glasgow,
Scotland. Others were built by Burmeister & Wain, Copenhagen, Denmark;
Blohm & Voss, Hamburg, Germany; Ramsey shipyard, Isle of Man, Britain; and
Oswal, Mordaunt & Co., Southhampton, England—some of these ships had steel
hulls. Many other ships that rounded the Horn were built in the 1900s.
The cape is a rocky
headland 1400 feet high on Horn Island in Tierra del Fuego (left). Francis
Drake has long been credited with its discovery in 1577 on board the 100-ton Pelican (later renamed
The Golden Hind). However, the cape was not rounded until 1616 by the
Dutch seamen le Maire and Schouten, passing through the strait between Staten
Island (Isla de los Estrodos) and
Tierra del Fuego, which they named the Strait of Le Maire (Estrecho de la Maire), and round Cape Horn, which they named in
honour of Schouten's birthplace, the town of Hoorn in Holland, and where the
ship had been fitted out. The southern extremity of Tierra del Fuego is often
referred to as False Cape Horn, whereas the true Cape Hoorn is on Hoorn Island,
a little further south (Cape Horn in English and Cabo de Hornos [Cape of Ovens]
in Spanish).
While passing through
the Drake Passage from west to east with the Prevailing Westerlies at your back and riding the
West Wind Drift current is a seaman’s delight, broaching these winds and currents
in the opposite direction, however, is an mariner’s nightmare. As one ancient mariner put
it: “The Southern Ocean [through the straits] is a sailors' graveyard.
The old square-rigger seamen called it "Dead Men's Road," where ships
were constantly exposed to huge waves, constant high wind and gales, frigid
water, chaotic cross-seas, endless chains of low-pressure systems, occasional
but hard-to-spot icebergs called growlers
and complete remoteness." The roaring
forties where Cape Horn Lies is an area between latitudes 40 and 50 degrees north and south, and were given their name by the first sailors to enter (and
exit) the areas. These latitudes are characterized by strong, often gale force
westerlies throughout the year. The roaring forties are more pronounced and dangerous in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern because the high winds and strong currents
swirl around the southern ice cap and are entirely unrestricted and unbroken by
continental land masses. These unimaginable conditions turn the southern ocean
into a virtual washing machine and today make for the most intense sailing the
racing yachts have ever seen.
The Flying Cloud had already departed for Hong Kong nine days
earlier, bound for a cargo of tea to fill her hold with on her voyage home.
Though battered from a pompero (severe line squall), the Flying Cloud had won the race around the Horn in 1851 with a
record-breaking passage of 89 days, 21 hours, and beaten the Challenge by 19 days; the latter
limping into San Francisco Bay flying her distress flag upon completing the
108-day passage from New York
For the seamen in the Age of Sail, heading into this area against the winds
and currents was not only dangerous, but foolhardy and one of the reasons why
mariners never took that course to sail north along the South American coast
toward North America until the draw of gold made the risk worthwhile in 1848.
Of course, none of this would
have been known to Joseph Smith or those
of New England in 1829 when the plates were translated into the Book of Mormon.
Nonetheless, Joseph stated that Lehi landed on the 30º South Latitude of
Chile—an area which matches perfectly all the descriptions of Nephi’s writings
and those of Mormon.
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