We settled on a three-week January visit -- midsummer in the Southern Hemisphere -- including a five-day foray to the Horn on a small, modern Chilean cruiser. It wasn't a square-rigger, but it would have to do if we were going to go together. With fair winds, we would see Cape Horn from its relatively protected eastern side, and with extra luck we might get to set foot on the island itself. Actually rounding the Horn? The cruise line's map showed a dash back up the eastern flank to the safety of the Beagle Channel. That, too, would have to do.
Weather records showed temperatures in the low 40s and high 30s and three to six inches of rain per month as normal for summer in Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago of about 74,000 square miles of mountainous islands at the continent's tip. We bought thermal underwear.
Cold rain greeted our arrival in Ushuaia, the capital of southern Argentina's Tierra del Fuego, where we were to pick up our little cruiser. E. Lucas Bridges, a son of the earliest settlers, called the place "The Uttermost Part of the Earth" in his fabulous 1947 book of that name, but this was just our jumping-off point. Cinder-block houses and gable-roofed buildings of corrugated metal marched up the green-gray mountain flanks to vanish in the mist above the sheltered harbor. At my first visit in 1977, a century after Bridges's father, Thomas, and other missionaries founded the place, it was still a gritty setting for about 2,000 hardy souls who would have been right at home on "Survivor." Tourists were so rare that my souvenir coasters all spelled the town's name wrong.
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