The Amicale Internationale des Capitaines au Long-Cours Cap Horniers – St. Malo (AICH), is a unique maritime organization. 
Captain Martin Lee tells their tale, and his own.
Published in the magazine At Sea in 1993.

The AMICALE – or International Association of Cape Horners AICH – was founded at St. Malo in 1937, by a group of French deep-sea sailing ship masters who had spent most of their lives in the nitrate trade from the west coast of South America. They had many times rounded the Horn, the southern tip of that continent, in both directions. With their German counterparts, the masters the F. Laiesz nitrate carriers from Hamburg, their experiences of the dreaded Cape were second to none.

From those beginnings over 55 years ago has sprung a unique club which, despite its obvious eventual demise, seems to go from strength to strength. Its formal objects are: “To promote and strengthen the ties of comradeship which bind together the unique body of men and women who enjoy the distinction of having voyaged round Cape Horn in merchant sailing ships and to keep alive, in various ways, memories of the stout ships that regularly sailed on a voyage of exceptional difficulty and peril and of the courage, endurance and skill of the sailors who manned them. In doing this the AICH hopes to foster the sea-conscious spirit and give inspiration to the young generation seeking an outlet for their adventurous impulses”.

Full members are the holders of a Master’s Foreign Going Certificate (Class I), who have sailed round Cape Horn on board a merchant sailing ship of any nationality and who are bona fide crew members as stated on the ship’s articles of agreement. Among them, those who have commanded a sailing ship round Cape Horn are dubbed “Albatrosses”, all other ordinary members being “Mollymawks”. Associate membership is open to all others called “Cape Pigeons” – who have rounded the Horn as above but who do not hold a Master’s Certificate. Yacht members are those who have rounded in a properly established yacht race, like the Whitbread or British Steel Challenge, or who have single handedly undertaken a Cape Horn passage. There are also honorary members and “Friends” and the membership in all categories world – wide is currently about 1100. The British Section was founded by Cdr. C.L.A. Woollard, owner and operator of the famous girl’s training ship ENGLISH ROSE, in 1958, and now boasts about 170 members, 25 of whom are “full” and 52 in the yacht category.

Cape Horn lies in Latitude 55º 58’ 28’’ South, Longitude 67º 17’ 20’’ West of Greenwich and marks the point where the Atlantic and Pacific meet. The Dutch navigator Schouten is said to have named it in 1616, either after his home town of Hoorn or after one of his ships. The Cape consists of steep black rocks rising to a height of 1390 feet, the cliffs looming up and stretching away to the north. It is now marked by a lighthouse and a monument to all Cape Horn sailors, placed there by the Chilean Section of the AICH in 1992.

These bald facts belie the inescapable truth that Cape Horn is synonymous with bad weather and tremendous seas of great and sometimes overpowering length. The east-going Atlantic Drift and the Cape Horn current, overcast skies and a constant series of depressions – not to mention the icebergs in summer time – make life under sail in these waters both uncomfortable and dangerous.

My own rounding was in 1948 on board the four-masted, 330 – foot barque PASSAT, now preserved in much altered state at Travemunde in Germany but then owned by Gustaf Erickson of Mariehamn, in the Finnish Aland Islands. I was at the latter end of my apprenticeship, having joined PASSAT in the Baltic in 1946, loading timber for South Africa. We were now on our way to Falmouth for orders from Port Victoria in South Australia, with a full cargo of 4.900 tons of wheat. Erickson, as well-recorded elsewhere, * was the last man to operate a commercial fleet of sailing ships until just after World War II and I take up the story from my records of the time:

“So we sailed from Port Victoria, May 17th 1948, wearily beating out of the Spencer Gulf, trying to clear the land that tried to grasp us if we came too close at the end of a reach. Tacking ship every four hours: a laborious business with a small crew and PASSAT’s heavy spars, needing all hands on deck and a great deal of violent persuasion from the mates. On May 19th we saw the last of Australia. Kangaroo Island slipped by on the port beam, we were free at last and now we could get down to the business of sailing.

Course was set for the Roaring Forties, where the westerly gales rage round the world, building up that long, heavy, Southern Ocean swell which has to be watched with such care by the sailor running before the wind. Three days later we spoke the British M.V. PORT CHALMERS homeward bound to London. She would be home before we reached Cape Horn and outward-bound again before we arrived in Falmouth but life on her would be dull and uninteresting. I almost felt sorry for them as we sailed by in the cool evening air. The flickering morse lights talking across the sea were that last contact we would have with other people for over three months”. (By a strange stroke of fate, my first ship as a newly qualified officer was that same PORT CHALMERS and life on board was far from uninteresting). “As the nights drew in PASSAT rolled and plunged south-eastwards, the weather became colder and more harsh, oilskins and seaboots were the order of the day. Twenty days out the weather worsened. It was overcast with occasional snow squalls. A bitter gale coming up from the ice howled and boomed in the rigging but the ship was going well, rolling and crashing her way through the seas, sending the spray flying over the catheads and shipping volumes of water over both rails into the well decks, which were untenable most of the time. We had been looking forward to this Cape Horn weather but life was very uncomfortable. We were wet and cold working on deck and turned-in still wet but not quite so cold. The fore and after decks were continually awash, the main braces had been led up onto the midship deck for safety and lifelines were rigged along the bulwarks.

The wind was not kind to us that year; it was not until we were within a few days of the Horn that it came away from the west and we reeled off the miles more steadily. PASSAT made no record runs; she had not been drydocked for over a year and was very sluggish, steering heavily, often taking two men at the wheel and needing never-ending vigilance when running before the wind.

On July 3rd we passed Cape Horn, leaving it 88 mile to the nor’d, seeing nothing of the land and wondering if the “dreaded Cape” would ever watch a tall ship pass that way again. It was doubtful, the modern world has no time for the windjammer. As if passing the Horn was the herald of better things, or perhaps just being kind to the last of the square-riggers, the weather became warm and favourable winds were the rule and not the exception. For the first time in fifty days we set the royals and other fine-weather sails, felt rather pleased with ourselves and sat back to enjoy the good weather. This complacency was soon shattered. We were in the region of the dreaded pampero, which set in on July 20th about 600 miles east of the river Plate. The pampero brings disaster to the unwary with its sudden arrival and the violent rain squalls and sudden shifts of wind which have been the cause of the loss of many fine sailing ships in the past”.

So much for the personal record of what it was like, running our easting down, round the Horn on a routine commercial voyage. There was, however, a lighter side to the Cape Horn story. In 19th –century Liverpool there was a famous sailors’ boarding house called Paddy West’s. The “packet rats” (landsmen and criminals on the run) who used this establishment were at some stage led into the tap room where they paraded round a bull’s horn mounted on the table. There was also a compass which they had to place in a nearby wooden box. They could then tell any hard-case mate who engaged them that they had “rounded the Horn three times and could box the compass”! West also provided a packet rat’s “kit” for the voyage-traditionally a top hat and a lantern to see him through the winter passage - with a collection of discharges, faked or stolen from a dead man, to say that he was a real “AB”. In return his advance pay note settled Paddy West’s bill! These paper sailors were a danger to themselves and to their ships, though cold Cape Horns weather is said to have had one advantage - it got rid of their bed bugs! I won’t comment on that but I do know that it had little effect on the armies of resident cockroaches.

I was fortunate enough to take part in the penultimate rounding of Cape Horn by commercial square – riggers, even though it was the easy way – “Eastwards ever eastward to the rising of the sun” as an old shanty has it. PASSAT and PAMIR brought round Erickson’s last grain cargoes in 1949. Now the great sailing ship’s Cape Horn road is no more but their traditions carry on in a new and different generation.

* Eric Newby’s The Last Grain Race (first pub., 1956), is a classic and entertaining account of his experience on a similar voyage to the writer, but on the MOSHULU ten years earlier. Basil Greenhill and George Kahre’s The Last Tall Ships (1978) is a equally interesting history of how Ericson operated. The company still flourishes.