Voyages

Before crossing the Atlantic with all sail on, the ships were towed to England to load up with coal for Chile. Then the long seven-month voyage started, one of whose greatest dangers was the journey round legendary Cape Horn. In instructions to their ships’ captains, Bordes wrote ‘the weather round Cape Horn is almost always very bad, even in summer. The wind is almost always from the west. In winter the intense cold, the shortness of the days, the fog and the snow, make the crossing very uncomfortable.’