Moreover, a sudden shallowing of the seabed in the region—it goes from thirteen hundred feet deep to barely three hundred—combines with the other brute forces to generate waves of frightening magnitude. These “Cape Horn rollers” can dwarf a ninety-foot mast. Floating on some of these waves are lethal bergs cleaved from pack ice. And the collision of cold fronts from the Antarctic and warm fronts from near the equator produce an endless cycle of rain and fog, sleet and snow, thunder and lightning.

  When a British expedition discovered these waters in the sixteenth century, it turned back after battling what a chaplain onboard described as “the most mad seas.” Even those ships that completed the journey around the Horn lost countless lives, and so many expeditions ended in annihilation—shipwreck, sinking, disappearing—that most Europeans abandoned the route altogether. Spain preferred to sail cargo to one coast of Panama and then haul it more than fifty miles across the sweltering, disease-ridden jungle to ships waiting on the opposite coast. Anything to avoid tempting the Horn.

  Herman Melville, who made the passage, compared it, in White-Jacket, to the descent into hell in Dante’s Inferno. “At those ends of the earth are no chronicles,” Melville wrote, except for the ruins of spars and hulls that hint of dark endings—“of ships that have sailed from their ports, and never more have been heard of.” He went on, “Impracticable Cape! You may approach it from this direction or that—in any way you please—from the east or from the west; with the wind astern, or abeam, or on the quarter; and still Cape Horn is Cape Horn….Heaven help the sailors, their wives and their little ones.”

  Over the years, seamen have strained to find a fitting name for this watery graveyard at the ends of the earth. Some call it the “Terrible,” others “Dead Men’s Road.” Rudyard Kipling dubbed it the “blind Horn’s hate.”

  * * *

  Cheap pored over his sketchy charts. The names of other places in the region were equally unnerving: The Island of Desolation. The Port of Famine. Deceit Rocks. The Bay of the Severing of Friends.

  Like the other captains in the squadron, Cheap was approaching this vortex partially blind. To determine his location, he needed to calculate his degrees of latitude and longitude, relying on those imaginary lines drawn onto the globe by cartographers. Latitudinal lines, which run parallel to one another, indicate how far north or south one is from the equator. Cheap could ascertain his latitude relatively easily, by determining his ship’s position in relation to the stars. But, as Dava Sobel documents in Longitude, calculating that east-west position was a conundrum that baffled scientists and seamen for ages. During Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition—the first to circumnavigate the globe, in 1522—a scribe onboard wrote that the pilots “will not speak of the longitude.”

  Longitudinal lines, which run perpendicular to the parallels of latitude, have no fixed reference point, like the equator. And so navigators must establish their own demarcation—their home port or some other arbitrary line—from which to gauge how far east or west they are. (Today, Greenwich, England, is designated the prime meridian, marking zero degrees longitude.) Because longitude represents a distance in the direction of the earth’s daily rotation, measuring it is further complicated by time. Each hour of the day corresponds to fifteen degrees of longitude. If a seaman compares the exact time on his ship to that of his selected reference point, he can calculate his longitude. But eighteenth-century timepieces weren’t reliable, especially at sea. As Isaac Newton wrote, “By reason of the motion of the ship, the variation of heat and cold, wet and dry, and the difference of gravity in different latitudes, such a watch hath not yet been made.” Cheap carried with him a gold pocket watch, which, despite his debts, he had held on to, guarding it closely. But it was too imprecise to be of help.

  How many ships, with precious lives and cargo, had wrecked because mariners hadn’t known precisely where they were? A lee shore—a shore lying in the direction that a ship was being blown—might suddenly emerge before them in the darkness or a dense fog. In 1707, four British men-of-war smashed into a rocky isle just off the southwestern tip of England—their own homeland. More than thirteen hundred people perished. As the deaths caused by wayward navigation mounted over the years, some of the greatest scientific minds tried to crack the mystery of longitude. Galileo and Newton thought that the clocklike stars held the key to the riddle, whereas others came up with cockamamie plans involving everything from the “yelps of wounded dogs” to the “cannon blasts of signal ships.” In 1714, the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, offering a prize of twenty thousand pounds—the equivalent today of some three and a half million dollars—for a “Practicable and Useful” solution.

  Cheap’s former vessel the Centurion had played a role in testing a potentially revolutionary new method. Four years before this voyage, it had carried onboard a forty-three-year-old inventor named John Harrison, whom the First Lord of the Admiralty, Charles Wager, had recommended as a “very ingenious and sober man.” Harrison was given free rein of the ship to conduct a trial of his latest contraption—a timepiece about two feet high, with ball weights and oscillating arms. The clock was in its developmental stages, but when Harrison used it to gauge the Centurion’s longitude, he correctly announced that the ship was off course by…sixty miles! Harrison continued to hone his timekeeper until, in 1773, at the age of eighty, he garnered the prize.

  But Cheap and his colleagues had no such miraculous device. They were forced instead to rely on “dead reckoning”—a process using a sandglass to estimate time, and a knotted line dropped in the sea to approximate the ship’s speed. The method, which also incorporated intuition about the effects of winds and currents, amounted to informed guesswork and a leap of faith. Too often for a commander, as Sobel put it, “the technique of dead reckoning marked him for a dead man.”

  Cheap was heartened, at least, by the calendar. It was February, which meant that the squadron would reach the seas around Cape Horn in March, before the austral winter descended. Against all odds, the party had done it. But what Cheap did not know—what none of the men knew—was that summer was not actually the safest time to round the Horn from east to west. Though in May and the winter months of June and July, the air temperature is colder and there is less light, the winds are tempered and sometimes blow from the east, making it easier to sail toward the Pacific. During the rest of the year, the conditions are more brutal. In fact, in the equinoctial month of March, when the sun is directly above the equator, the westerly winds and waves tend to be at their violent peak. And so Cheap was heading into the “blind Horn’s hate” not only by dead reckoning but at the most dangerous time.

  * * *

  Cheap guided the Wager southward, along the coast of what is now Argentina. He hugged the squadron’s other six ships and kept the decks cleared for battle, in case the Spanish armada appeared, and he had the sails reefed and the hatches battened down. “We had here uncertain boisterous weather, with…so much wind and sea, as made us ride very hard,” Schoolmaster Thomas wrote.

  The Trial still had a snapped mast, and in order to repair it the squadron paused for several days at St. Julian, a harbor along the coast. Previous explorers had recounted seeing inhabitants in the region, but it now appeared forsaken. “The only things we met with remarkable here are the armadillos, or what the seamen call hogs in armour,” the Trial’s purser, Millechamp, wrote. “They are about the size of a large cat, their nose like a hog’s, with a thick shell…hard enough to resist a strong blow with a hammer.”

  St. Julian was not just a place of desolation; it also stood, in the eyes of Cheap and his men, as a grisly memorial to the toll that a long, claustrophobic voyage could wreak upon a ship’s company. When Magellan anchored there, on Easter Day in 1520, several of his increasingly resentful men tried to overthrow him, and he had to quash a mutiny. On a tiny island in the harbor, he ordered one of the rebels beheaded—his body quartered and hung from a gibbet for everyone to see.

  Fifty-eight years later, when Francis Drake paused at St. Julian during his round-the-world voyage, he also suspected a simmering plot, and accused one of his men, Thomas Doughty, of treason. (The charge was likely false.) Doughty pleaded to be brought back to England for a proper trial, but Drake responded that he had no need for “crafty lawyers,” adding, “Neither care I for the laws.” At the same execution site that Magellan had used, Doughty was decapitated with an axe. Drake ordered that the head, still pouring blood, be held up before his men, and cried out, “Lo! This is the end of traitors!”

  While Cheap and Anson’s other captains were waiting for the Trial’s mast to be fixed, an officer identified the spot where the executions had taken place. The area, Lieutenant Saumarez fretted, seemed to be the “seat of infernal spirits.” And, on February 27, Cheap and the rest of the men were relieved to leave behind what Drake had named the Island of True Justice and Judgment—or what his crew had called the Island of Blood.

  * * *

  The currents pulled these pilgrims on to the world’s end. The air became colder, rawer; snow sometimes dusted the planks. Cheap stood exposed on the quarterdeck, bundled in his self-styled captain’s uniform. He remained vigilant, peering at times through his spyglass. There were penguins, which Millechamp described as “half fish, half fowl,” and there were southern right whales and humpbacks, blowing their spouts. The impressionable Byron later wrote of these southern seas, “It is incredible the number of whales that are here, it makes it dangerous for a ship, we were very near striking upon one, and another blew the water in upon the quarterdeck and they are of the largest kind we ever have seen.” Then there was the sea lion, which he considered “rather a dangerous animal,” noting: “I was attacked by one when I least expected it, and had much ado to get clear of him; they are of a monstrous size and when angered make a dreadful roaring.”

  The men sailed on. As the squadron traced the South American coastline, Cheap beheld the Andes mountain range, which extended the length of the continent, the snow-blown peaks rising, in places, more than twenty thousand feet. Soon a mist wafted over the sea, like a ghostly presence. It gave everything, Millechamp wrote, “a pleasing dreadful effect.” Objects seemed to mutate. “The land sometimes would appear of a prodigious height with huge broken mountains,” Millechamp wrote, before magically stretching and bending and flattening. “The ships underwent the same transformation, sometimes appearing like huge ruinous castles, sometimes in their proper shapes, and sometimes like large logs of timber floating on the water.” He concluded, “We really seemed to be in the midst of enchantments.”

  As Cheap and his men headed farther south, they went past the mouth of an alternate route to the Pacific, the Strait of Magellan, which Anson decided to avoid because it was so narrow and twisting in places. They went past the Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins and the Cape of the Holy Ghost. They slipped beyond the continental mainland, unmoored. Their only signpost was an island to the west, which spanned nearly twenty thousand square miles and featured more Andean peaks. Schoolmaster Thomas complained that the frozen slopes contained not “one cheerful green through all the dismal scene.”

  The island was the largest of the archipelago Tierra del Fuego—that Land of Fire where Magellan and his company had reported seeing the flames from native camps. The conquistadores had claimed that the inhabitants of these bottomlands were a race of giants. According to Magellan’s scribe, one was “so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his waist.” Magellan called the region Patagonia. The name may have derived from the inhabitants’ feet—pata means “paw” in Spanish—which, as legend has it, were mammoth; or perhaps the name was borrowed from a medieval saga that featured a monstrous figure known as “the Great Patagon.” There was a sinister design to these fictions. By portraying the natives as both magnificent and less than human, Europeans tried to pretend that their brutal mission of conquest was somehow righteous and heroic.

  * * *

  By the night of March 6, the squadron was off Tierra del Fuego’s eastern extremity. For Cheap and the men, the supreme test of seamanship had arrived. Anson ordered the crews to wait till the morning light. Let them, if nothing else, see. The Wager drifted alongside the other ships, bow toward the wind, rocking back and forth, as if keeping beat to some metronome. The sky above them seemed as vast and black as the sea. The stays and shrouds vibrated in the wind.

  Cheap ordered his men to make final preparations. They replaced the worn sails with fresh ones and secured the guns and anything else that might become a lethal projectile in rough seas. The bells counted down each half hour. Few men slept. Despite Anson’s abhorrence of paperwork, he’d carefully written out instructions for Cheap and the other captains, who were told to destroy these plans, along with any other confidential documents, if their ships were about to fall into enemy hands. During the passage, Anson stressed, the captains needed to do everything possible to avoid being separated from the squadron—or “you will answer the contrary at your utmost peril.” If they were forced apart, they were to proceed around the Horn and rendezvous on the Chilean side of Patagonia, where they were to wait for Anson for fifty-six days. “If not joined by me in that time, you are to conclude some accident has befallen me,” Anson wrote. One point he made especially clear: should he perish, they must continue the mission and adhere to the chain of command, putting themselves under the control of the new senior officer.

  At the first crack of light, Anson fired the Centurion’s guns and the seven ships set off into the dawn. The Trial and the Pearl led the way, their lookouts perched in the crosstrees in order to scour, as one officer put it, “for islands of ice” and to “make timely signals of danger.” The Anna and the Wager, the slowest and least sturdy ships, drew up the rear. By ten a.m., the squadron had approached the Strait of Le Maire, a roughly fifteen-mile-wide opening between Tierra del Fuego and Isla de los Estados, or Staten Island—the gateway to Cape Horn. As the ships entered the strait, they bore close to Staten Island. The sight unnerved the men. “Though Tierra del Fuego had an aspect extremely barren and desolate,” Reverend Walter noted, this island “far surpasses it, in the wildness and horror of its appearance.” It consisted of nothing but rocks cloven by lightning and earthquakes, and stacked precariously on top of one another, rising three thousand feet in pinnacles of icy solitude. Melville wrote that these mountains “loomed up, like the border of some other world. Flashing walls and crystal battlements, like the diamond watch-towers along heaven’s furthest frontier.” In his journal, Millechamp described the island as the most horrid thing he had ever seen—“a proper nursery for desperation.”

  Occasionally, a white-bellied albatross soared through the air, flaunting its enormous wingspan, the largest of any bird—as much as eleven feet. On a previous British expedition, an officer had spotted an albatross by Staten Island and, fearing that it was a bad omen, shot it, and the ship later wrecked on an island. The incident inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the poem, the killing of the albatross brings a curse upon the seaman, causing his companions to die of thirst:

  Instead of the cross, the Albatross

  About my neck was hung.

  Anson’s men hunted these birds nonetheless. “I remember one caught with a hook and line…baited with a piece of salt pork,” Millechamp wrote. Though the albatross weighed about thirty pounds, he added, “the captain, lieutenant, surgeon and myself eat him all up for dinner.”

  Cheap and his companions seemed to have escaped any curse. Despite a few close calls, they’d avoided Pizarro’s ships, and the sky was now bright blue and the seas stunningly serene. “The morning of this day, in its brilliancy and mildness,” Reverend Walter reported, was more pleasing than any “we had seen since our departure from England.” The ships were being swept easily, peacefully, toward the Pacific. It was “a prodigious fine passage,” one thrilled captain wrote in his logbook. Convinced that Captain Kidd’s dying prophecy had been wrong, the men began boasting of their prowess and planning what they would do with their eventual treasure. “We could not help persuading ourselves that the greatest difficulty of our voyage was now at an end, and that our most sanguine dreams were upon the point of being realized,” Reverend Walter noted.

  And then the clouds blackened, blotting out the sun. The winds began to wail, and angry waves emerged from nowhere, exploding against the hulls. The ships’ prows, including the Centurion’s red-painted lion, plunged into the deep hollows, before rearing upward pleadingly toward the heavens. The sails convulsed and the ropes whipped and the hulls creaked as if they might splinter. Although the other ships gradually made headway, the Wager, loaded down with cargo, was caught in the furious currents and was being driven eastward, as if by some magnetic force, toward Staten Island. She was on the verge of being dashed to pieces.