Off Cape Horn, Chile
Cape Horn ... Cabo de Hornos ... a small island at the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, and hence the southernmost point in South America. Cape Horn ... graveyard of wooden sailing vessels and the final resting place of many a mariner. Sailing ships rounding the Cape “the wrong way”, from east to west, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, had to beat against the strong westerly winds of the Southern Ocean, the “furious fifties”. Many were caught in a fierce storm and never completed the voyage. Atop Cape Horn is a monument made of three offset sheets of steel. When viewed from the north or south the sheets align to reveal a silhouette of a wandering albatross. Sailors believed that albatrosses carried the souls of mariners who were lost at sea, hence the bad luck that befell the ship of the Ancient Mariner who killed an albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous “Rhyme ...”. Etched into a marble slab near the monument is a poem in Spanish:
I am the albatross who awaits you
at the end of the earth.
I am the forgotten soul of the dead mariners
who rounded Cape Horn
from all the seas of the world.
But they did not perish
in the furious waves.
Today they fly on my wings
for all eternity
in the ultimate embrace
of the Antarctic winds.
Sara Vial--December,1992
Cape Horn ... Cabo de Hornos ... a small island at the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, and hence the southernmost point in South America. Cape Horn ... graveyard of wooden sailing vessels and the final resting place of many a mariner. Sailing ships rounding the Cape “the wrong way”, from east to west, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, had to beat against the strong westerly winds of the Southern Ocean, the “furious fifties”. Many were caught in a fierce storm and never completed the voyage. Atop Cape Horn is a monument made of three offset sheets of steel. When viewed from the north or south the sheets align to reveal a silhouette of a wandering albatross. Sailors believed that albatrosses carried the souls of mariners who were lost at sea, hence the bad luck that befell the ship of the Ancient Mariner who killed an albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous “Rhyme ...”. Etched into a marble slab near the monument is a poem in Spanish:
Sara Vial--December,1992
