Cape Horn & Beagle Channel
For many early mariners, the view of Cape Horn signaled the end of the known world, beyond which may have existed the realms of fantastic mythological beasts and lost civilizations, or as easily, a mist-shrouded expanse of endless unnavigable and bottomless sea. They clung to the ragged shore in their ships despite the fact that impaling them on the sheer rocks was a danger more real than whatever their imaginations could conjure beyond them.
It’s difficult to fault those who survived the harrowing Transatlantic journey in worm-eaten ships for keeping one eye toward the safety of solid earth, but it is also true that we so often venture beyond what we know only with great trepidation. But the rewards for doing so are great, as this journey to Antarctica has proven once again. We have charted new and unfamiliar territory, and for many, the experience will be transformative.
And among the artifacts we have returned with…the scent of the rookeries in our pockets, the pixels stored in our hard drives, the browned skin of sunny days on snow…are a few bits of information, a head count of penguins that will serve to advance our understanding of changes underway on the Peninsula as the global climate changes.
I work for Oceanites, a US-based nonprofit that has been supported by Lindblad Expeditions since 1991, and whose scientists now work from the platform of the National Geographic Explorer to get to penguin and seabird breeding grounds in Antarctica. It has been a successful first trip of the season for us, accumulating data on the numbers of nesting birds. And we couldn’t get there to accomplish this without the support of Lindblad and the crew and staff of the National Geographic Explorer, as Lindblad does for so many other conservation organizations around the world.
So together we went into the unknown, and each in our own way filled in the coastline of the blank map of our understanding of the world. And now, the memory of cell phones, streets and cars that was banished on our first sight of the blue bands of ice off Barrientos Island seemingly a lifetime ago is slowly returning as we round the turn into the Beagle Channel on the last leg of this voyage.
