Rounding the Horn into the Pacific Ocean – Part I

One of our readers commented recently that “My great great great grandmother was on a ship in 1820 which was restocked at Valparaiso. It was an American ship.” This was made as a result to our post “More Interesting Facts About 30º South Latitude—The Chilean Coast,” which suggested that the currents reaching the Chilean coast and the seaports there were almost unknown in New England, America, in 1829 when Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon.

To better understand this lack of American involvement in the Pacific until the late 1840s, perhaps we should recognize the events leading up to that date.

In the early days of sailing, the Dutch United East India Company held a legal monopoly on trading in the East Indies as well as passage through the Magellan Straits. The Dutch merchant, Isaac Le Maire, who had developed a competitive dislike for the East India Company, felt optimistic that there was passage south of the Strait of Magellan between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, which would not use the disallowed Strait of Magellan. He hired a competent navigator, Willem Schouten who had already made three trips to the South Seas islands, and together they developed a plan for their new company, known as the Goldseekers, which was to travel in search of the South Pacific gold riches prominently mentioned by the Portugues-Spanish sailor and explorer, Pedro Fernández de Quiros.

Rounding Cape Horn from east to west was always a dangerous event because of opposing gale winds, opposing currents, and sometimes ice floes

Le Maire, Schouten, and Schouten's son (Jacob) joined with the city leaders of the town of Hoorn and raised money for two ships, which were outfitted for the passage—the larger being the Eendracht (Concord, from the Dutch motto Concordia res parvae crescent, meaning “Unity Makes Strength”), a wooden-hulled sailing ship, and the smaller Hoorn, and with recruited sailors who were not told the details of the voyage. In addition, it was not made known to the public where these ships were to go. The company sailed from England in May 1615, crossing the Atlantic and reaching the South America east coast, which was not done without mishap, but both ships survived the problems. With relief, the sailors properly beached the ships on the shore of Patagonia in order to clean them before continuing on to the Pacific.

As was the custom during those centuries during the Age of Sail, companies and even countries did not divulge where they went, how they got there, or what they found there. Sailing routes were highly guarded secrets. But the point is, during the early days of sail, from the 1500s to 1795, the vast majority, almost its entirety, of ships rounding the Horn were bent on sailing to Asia. As an example, of the trade around the Horn between 1602 and 1796 the Dutch sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods; and the rest of Europe combined sent 882,412 people from 1500 to 1795, with the British East India Company, who was the nearest competitor to the Dutch, and a distant second to its total traffic with 2,690 ships and a mere one-fifth the tonnage of goods. The Dutch, of course, enjoyed huge profits from its spice monopoly through most of this time.

It was not until the mid-nineteenth century before America became interested in the Pacific Ocean, with the settlement of the northwestern boundary (1846-1848), which gave the United States possession of Oregon, and then the war with Mexico, which added California to the Union in 1848. Now though the accession of these territories was of the highest importance in a national point of view at the time, their distance rendered them almost inaccessible to the class of emigrants who usually settle new domains, as well as inconvenient to the proper administration of law and government.

Ten years after Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon, John Sutter, a Swiss immigrant, arrived in California with a dream of building an agricultural empire. When he needed lumber in early 1848, he had James Marshall build a sawmill on the South Fork of the American river, about 40 miles from Sutter's home. Once gold was discovered at the mill, the gold rush was on, with 300,000 people arriving in California, half of which came by sea around Cape Horn. This was the beginning of America’s involvement in the Pacific, as 150,000 people came around the Horn by Sea, making stops along the way, mostly at Valparaso in Chile, the first good port after the rounding to set in for repairs and a change of canvas.

The gold discovery created a stampede of traffic from the New England ports to California. Dr. John Lyman, an eminent American Maritime Historian, claims that in 1849 alone, 777 ships departed from Atlantic ports for San Francisco, all via the Cape Horn route. In effect this migration from the Eastern States to California was one of the largest migrations in modern history. It is also estimated that some 10,000 ships rounded Cape Horn bound for San Francisco from 1850 to 1920.

This trip was hazardous, with strong currents and unpredictable winds in the Strait of Magellan or the storms and unfavorable winds of rounding Cape Horn. Steam navigation through the Strait of Magellan began in 1840, with a treaty in 1881 opening the straits to all nations. Following the Civil War shipbuilding in New England and the Canadian Maritimes became a major industry, and because of the rigors of rounding the cape on coast-to-coast voyages, American shipbuilders were compelled to produce fast, weatherly, and immensely strong vessels capable of doubling Cape Horn in either direction. Famous Cape Horn ships of this period include the Andrew Jackson, which shared the record of eighty-nine days from New York to San Francisco, and the James Baines, which logged twenty-one knots, the fastest speed ever recorded under sail.

It might be noted that records show that the route around Cape Horn of American ships were only freight ships, and after 1914 and the opening of the Panama Canal, declined rapidly with the last American sailing ship to round Cape Horn being the schooner Wanderbird in 1936. Since that time, travel around the cape has mostly been limited to daring crews or individual sailors participating in races around the world.

When the person who wrote in said that his ancestor sailed into Valparaiso in 1820, it should be noted that the first cargo dock was constructed about that time and by 1831, a series of wharves were built in response to growing international trade, which was consolidated in 1832, when the first duty-free warehouses to receive cargo from Europe and Asia were built. By 1855, according to a report in the New York Daily-Times of January 11 of that year, that the infrastructure turned the port into a thriving commercial emporium for the South Pacific. During much of the Nineteenth Century, shipping was so intense that eventually three duty-free warehouse companies were active in Valparaiso. During that time, building out into the sea expanded the port and ships sailing from America's Eastern Seaboard and from Europe made Valparaiso a regular stopping site for re-provisioning.

The Chilean Squadron of the Chilean Navy, which was founded in 1817, sailing out of Valparaiso around 1820 under the command of the former British commander Lord Cochrane, during the Chile-Peru war

It would have been an oddity for an American ship to have docked in Valpairso in 1820 for reprovisioning, since the port was closed to anyone other than the Spanish until Chile won its independence in 1818, though the fighting continued on until 1821, and not even recognized by Spain until 1844. From 1818 to 1820, the port of Valparaiso was home solely to the Chilean navy, and not opened to international ships until around 1820, but even then Chile’s war with Peru was going on and did not end until 1824, which was followed by the War of Confederation, the Chincha  Islands War, and the War of the Pacific. In addition, from 1819 to 1821, Chile waged a Guerra a muerte, a “war until death,” which was an irregular, no-quarter war during their struggle for independence from Spain.

It is very unlikely that any American ship would have set into Valparaiso during this time, but if one did, it certainly would have been a freight/trade carrying vessel and not a passenger ship. What his great great great grandmother was doing on a freight ship in 1820, I cannot guess. It is known that the U.S. had a warship, the frigate St. Lawrence in the port of Valparaiso, along with two British war vessels, in 1856 when a huge fire broke out. According to the Daily Alta California newspaper, the first passenger wharf among the Valparaiso docks was not built until 1884 behind the “Heroes of Iquique Monument,” and named the Muelle Prat after war hero and martyr Arturo Prat, which translates to Prat Dock, but really is a wharf. My own great grandfather sailed from Sidney, Australia, in 1851, where he had completed a five-year tour as missionary and Mission President, but his passenger ship did not set in at any South American port, but landed in Long Beach (what is now San Pedro), California.

(See the next post, “Rounding the Horn into the Pacific Ocean – Part II,” for more information on the American interest in the Pacific Ocean prior to the time Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon, and how that interest came about--all to show that the west coast of South America was basically unknown in New England during Joseph's time)