Rounding The Horn - A Book Review

The following post is a book review by Pete Trickett.

“The Perfect Storm” gets mentioned on the back cover of Dallas Murphy’s 2004 book Rounding the Horn. The back cover is a testimonial to Murphy’s exquisite exposure of one of the planet’s most extreme regions and is written by Nicholas Crane the author of the well read Mercator. The sense of doom and disaster which floods through The Perfect Storm is repeated time and time again in this book which recounts the history of exploration and attempted settlement of the desolate Beagle Channel coast.

The stories of Cape Horn passagemaking that Dallas Murphy gives us in his book provide details that bombard the reader with all the dangers of decks awash and people lost at sea.

The story of Indians Jemmy Button, York Minster, Boat Memory and Fuegia Basket who in 1829 were shipped from their Tierra Del Fuego homeland to London by Captain Robert Fitzroy aboard the Beagle is legendary.

Dallas Murphy gives a biography of each of these characters ( except for Boat Memory who died of small pox soon after arrival ) as they are detained by Fitzroy in England for a number of years before being returned to Tierra Fuego. The truths of Christianity were of little benefit to the Fuegians once they were returned to their lands and Dallas Murphy’s story does follow each Indian’s life and within them the follies of the missionaries as they attempt their deliverances of grace to the natives inhabiting the islands of the rugged coast.

The natives were of course excellent boat thieves and at one time Captain Fitzroy has two out of his three ships boats stolen out from under his own gunwhale. In fact Murphy’s writing of the fatal impact of the explorers and their incredible hardships is tinged with a sense of humor and pathos that is both easily digested and smile inducing..

Not so the tales of sailing in ice and beating for long periods against the most violent of storms unabating in fury. That was the lot for thousands of seaman before they ever got close to the horn. The terror of being aloft in a sailing ship being pressed too hard by a zealous and stressed captain is easy to imagine in the reading of Rounding the Horn. The book illustrates well the trust and faith of the sailors in their ships sailmakers, carpenters and captains and the subsequent collision with the commercial obligations to ship owners to make fast passage.

Best of all the tales of centuries of storms and huge waves and inevitable human demise is juxtaposed upon Dallas Murphy’s own voyage to the region. He is on board the fifty three foot steel sloop Pelagic owned by Skip Novak. The cruise of the Pelagic from Ushuaia to Cape Horn is bedeviled by the threat of the dreaded williwaw and the territorial prohibitions imposed by the Chilean and Argentine governments.

The oceanographic and meteorological discussion contained in Rounding the Horn is probably of good use to any person contemplating their own visit to Tierra del Feugo. The final chapter of this great read climaxes with the incredible survival tale of the young Viking Jarli. Jarli and his crew go to the deep south in their flimsy old 26 foot fibre glass production yacht and live to tell how their outboard gave up the ghost as they attempt to round Cape Horn. For some readers this book might spell an end to any romantic notions involving deep ocean sailing.

Rounding the Horn was first published by Orion Books in Great Britain in 2004 – Dallas Crane is a New York based sailor, writer and broadcaster – www.orionbooks.co.uk

Buy a copy here