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The winds began to howl and the seas started to churn as we sailed out of protected waters south of Ushuaia to begin our transit around Cape Horn.

We were about to enter one of the most hazardous shipping routes in the world, where fierce winds can blow around the world almost unimpeded by land, ocean currents are dangerously strong, and furious waves can attain heights of up to 30 metres (100 feet) as they funnel through the shallow water south of the Horn.  At least we didn’t have to worry about icebergs, which in winter can create an additional hazard! 

Cape Horn is a tiny island located at the most southerly point in South America, just 650 km (400 miles) from Antarctica. It’s also the northern boundary for Drake Passage, which is the main waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for ships too large or unable to navigate the narrower Strait of Magellan and the Beagle Channel.  

Sir Francis Drake discovered the passage in 1578 after his ships were caught in a storm and blown south of the Strait of Magellan to the south of Tierra del Fuego. However, the passage was never explored until Dutch navigators, seeking an alternative route between the seas, sailed through it in 1616, and named the southernmost point of land “Kapp Hoorn” in honour of their native city of Hoorn in Holland. 

From the 1700s until the Panama Canal opened in 1914, Drake Passage was one of the world’s most important trade routes for clipper ships carrying cargo around the Horn between Europe and the Far East, South Pacific and Australia. However, the almost continuous state of nasty weather in the area, particularly for ships sailing from east to west against the wind, could make it impossible for them to cross the Horn for weeks at a time. Or worse, end up wrecked on the rocks. The challenge of making it ‘round the Horn’ has been recorded in the logs of many famous captains, including Captain Bligh during his fateful voyage to Tahiti aboard the HMAV Bounty. 

As our 90,000-ton, gas-turbine powered cruise ship inched closer to the southwest tip of the Horn and started to turn east, we began to understand how difficult it must have been for the crew of small, wooden sailing vessels to cope with these unpredictable conditions.  

By now, the winds had grown to near hurricane force, and were gusting at between 50 to 60 knots. Our bow was crashing through 10 to 15-foot seas in a light mist. A piercing rain mixed with a light hail was needling down on us. Passengers on the outside decks were holding on to rails and stanchions for support. And a small glass window was ripped from the roof of the Solarium Pool and came crashing down on the promenade deck. And we were crossing the easy way from west to east – with the wind and current at our stern! 

At this point, the cruise ship behind us, the Norwegian Sun, decided to turn tail and head north of the Cape in a slightly more protected strait. Sissies! But we pressed forward, with passengers grinning into the howling wind, snapping photos like crazy, and loving every minute of our historic passage across the Cape and into the annals of sailing history as seamen who have successfully sailed around the Horn.  

According to our captain, this entitled us to a number of special privileges, including the right to dine with one foot on the table, sport a tattoo of a full-rigged ship, and wear a gold loop earring in our left ear.  And if we ever make it around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa, we can add the right to place two feet on the table! 

Just a few miles north of Cape Horn, the bad weather disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, and we sailed into gentle seas, light winds and beautiful sunshine along the southwestern coast of Argentina. We had spent several hours in the rough seas around the Cape, and were certainly grateful for the positive change in weather. However, I wouldn’t have traded one minute of it for our fantastic adventure sailing around the Horn. And equally important, I would never have missed the opportunity to wear an improvised earring to dinner that night. However, I will leave Gail to deal with the tattoo!

The snow-capped peaks and mighty glaciers of Tierra del Fuego basked in the elusive Patagonian sunshine as our ship sailed along the beautiful Beagle Channel on its way to the remote Argentine port city of Ushuaia.

The 150-mile waterway is named after the British ship HMS Beagle, which twice sailed through the channel on her voyages of discovery in the first half of the 19^th century. On her second voyage in 1832, Charles Darwin joined the crew of Captain Robert Fitzroy as the ship’s naturalist, and found 30 unique species in these pristine, frigid waters.

The first European to visit Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego was actually Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan who had been sent by Spain’s King Charles V in 1520 to find a route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. As he sailed in to the straits that separate mainland Chile from the island of Tierra del Fuego and would later bear his name, he was amazed by the many fires lit at night along the southern shore by the indigenous Indians.  

As a result, Magellan named the island “Tierra del Fuego” (Land of Fire) and decided to land on the continental side of the strait safely away from the very tall and strange-looking Indians that he derisively called “des patagonies.” The word eventually morphed into the official name for the most southern and remote region of Chile and Argentina – the Patagonia.

While their voyages were three hundred years apart, both Magellan and Darwin were astounded by the primitive nature of the Selknam and Yaganes people who inhabited “the end of the world.”  After Darwin’s reports, the Anglican Church of England’s Patagonia Missionary Society established a mission outpost on the bank of the Beagle Channel in an area the Yaganes called Ushuaia.

Lucas Bridges, the son of the first missionary, grew up among the Yaganes, learnt their language and admired their culture so much that in 1948 he published the definitive book on their life in Tierra del Fuego called “Uttermost Part of the Earth.”  Tragically, the tribes of Tierra del Fuego, who had survived for 12,000 years in one of the world’s most unforgiving areas, were eventually driven into extinction by western diseases brought to their shores by Europeans.

Today, visitors from around the world come to Ushuaia to see the rugged beauty and natural wonders of Tierra del Fuego, and to begin their cruises to nearby Antarctica. In fact, the day we were in port there were two small expedition ships tied up at the pier getting ready to begin a cruise to Antarctica – the Prince Albert II, and the National Geographic Explorer.

The Martial Glacier lies just 7 km north of Ushuaia, and can easily be reached by taxi. It has a chairlift that takes visitors to the top, where there are fabulous views of the surrounding countryside. The nearby Tierra del Fuego National Park is a 63,000-hectare reserve that features majestic peaks, pristine rivers, and the beautiful Lapataia Bay, as well as walking paths that wind through emerald forests and the rocky bays and inlets of the Beagle Channel. The park can be reached by taking the “End of the World” train (Tren del Fin del Mundo), the southern-most railway in the world that slowly winds its way through stunningly beautiful scenery.

Like much of Ushuaia, the railway was built by convicts sent to the region following the Argentine government’s decision in 1844 to set up a prison here for serious criminals, much like France’s Devil’s Island or Alcatraz in the United States. Today, the prison houses two museums – the Prison Museum, which shows the harsh environment that criminals endured; and the Maritime Museum, which tells the story of Ushuaia and its relationship to the surrounding islands and the sea.

We decided to discover part of that sea-going relationship by taking a catamaran cruise along the beautiful Beagle Channel. Our catamaran picked us up at the dock and took us past the Isla de los Pajaros (Bird Island), where we saw hundreds of cormorants, including some nesting in the nooks and crannies of a nearby rock. We also cruised alongside Sea Wolves Island, where there’s a colony of sea lions that we found basking in the pale sunshine on the edges of the rocky outcrop. The sea lions can climb the steep face of the rock because they are able to both sets of flippers, something seals cannot do.

After watching the sea lions, our catamaran sailed past Faro Isla Eclaireurs, which is locally known as the “Lighthouse at the End of the World.” We would be passing by this lighthouse in a few hours on our way out of the Beagle Channel and further south to Cape Horn, but for the time being we were content to admire the spectacular scenery, fauna and wildlife just as Charles Darwin had done nearly 200 years before us.

Surrounded by walls of tall, craggy rocks and snow-capped peaks, the Radiance of the Seas slowly made her way along Chile’s Pacific coast through the majestic fjords of southern Patagonia and into the historic Strait of Magellan.

We were now sailing in the path of Ferdinand Magellan, the great Portuguese captain who discovered this narrow and wind-swept route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on behalf of Spain in 1520. The 350-mile long Strait of Magellan was an important discovery because it provided ships with a safe inland passage protected from the frequent storms around the waters near Cape Horn some 200 miles to the south.  And until the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, the Strait and its port city of Punta Arenas bustled with commercial activity.

The Strait of Magellan is far less busy today, but it still provides safe passage for ships too big to fit through the Canal, and to a handful of cruise ships that bring tourists to Punta Arenas to see the amazing diversity of Patagonian wildlife, including the charming Magellanic penguins.

There are two colonies of penguins near Punta Arenas at Otway Bay and Isla Magdalena, and both allow visitors to get surprisingly close to the birds and their nests. There’s also plenty of wildlife on the windswept pampas outside of the city; we saw condors (the second largest bird in the world at 15 kilos and a wing-span of 3.2 metres), grey foxes, falcons, geese and an ostrich-like bird called a “Nandu.”

We took the ship’s excursion to the Pecket Harbour Reserve in Otway Sound, where there’s a colony of some 10,000 Magellanic penguins who arrive from the southern coast of Brazil and the Falkland Islands every September. The penguins prepare their nests in small burrows, mate, lay their eggs, and then brood the eggs until the chicks are born from mid-November to mid-December. After the chicks have moulted their baby feathers and learned to swim, the penguins begin returning in late March to their winter feeding grounds on the coast of Brazil and the south Atlantic islands.

Penguins live 25-30 years, and always come back to the place they were born for the mating season, and always with the same mate. Penguins usually lay one or two eggs, and males and females take turns sitting on the nest and then feeding the young with regurgitated fish.  Adult male Magellanic penguins weigh between 4.7 to 5.2 kilograms, and stand about two feet tall.

The reserve has a roped-off boardwalk that leads around the colony to the beach, where there’s a viewing porch to watch the penguins slide into Otway Sound in search of food for their off-spring. There are also stopping points along the path where visitors can watch penguins waddle back and forth across the grass to their burrows just a few feet away.  While timid if people get too close, these beguiling penguins are not shy about poking their heads out of burrows, standing straight up, stretching their wings, and squawking a few arias just to let you know who’s in charge.  These amusing creatures really are as comical and cute in real life as they are in the Disney movies!

After spending an hour at the reserve, we returned to Punta Arenas where we did a quick tour of the city. Located on the gusty north shore of the Strait of Magellan and settled in 1843, Punta Arenas is the capital of Chile’s Magellanic and Antarctic Region XII. It’s also the southern-most city in the world of its size (150,000 people) where the winds sometimes get so strong that officials have to put ropes in the large Plaza de Armas for people to hold as they walk through the square. In fact, the weather is so inhospitable that two previous attempts by the Spanish to create settlements here failed miserably.

There are several points of interest in and around the Plaza de Armas, including a bronze statue of Ferdinand Magellan with a Fueguian native Indian sitting at the base with a leg dangling over the side. Tradition holds that sailors who kiss the big toe of the native will have a successful crossing of the strait, although almost every visitor now touches the foot for good luck. Just up Avenida 21 de Mayo there’s also the newly renovated Teatro Municipal, which is modeled after the beautiful Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.

By this time we were getting hungry, so popped into a marvelous restaurant called Puerto Viejo on O’Higgans street right across from the local headquarters of the Armada de Chile near the waterfront. The restaurant serves marvelous local seafood and barbecued meats cooked on a parrilla (open fire grill), and has a wonderful selection of Chilean wines. We ordered the grilled meat plate, and had a delicious assortment of pork, beef, chicken and three types of local sausage accompanied by creamed spinach and chunky fries, all washed down with a delightful bottle of Montes Reserva red wine.

After all that food, we must have looked like penguins as we waddled back to the ship!