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Cape Horn route

Type Object Region southern tip of South America Time 1616

The Cape Horn route is an Atlantic-Pacific passage opened in 1616 by Dutch navigators Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire to bypass the East India Com…

Timeline

  1. 1615Texel, Republic of the United Provinces · TexelIsaac Le Maire organized the Australasia Company, commissioning his son Jacob Le Maire and captain Willem Schouten to sail the Eendracht and Hoorn from Texel, intending to open a route to the Spice Islands south of the Strait of Magellan, thereby circumventing the East India Company's statutory monopoly on known eastern routes. The Hoorn was destroyed by fire off the Patagonian coast, and its crew joined the Eendracht to continue southward.
  2. 1616Cape Horn and Le Maire Strait · Cape HornOn January 24 the Eendracht passed through the new waterway between Tierra del Fuego and Staten Island, later called Le Maire Strait. Days later the fleet entered the open 'South Sea'; on January 29 they sighted high snowy peaks narrowing to a point, which they named Cape Horn in honor of their hometown of Hoorn and the wrecked Hoorn. The voyage proved the existence of an open-sea route to the Pacific south of the Strait of Magellan.
  3. 1616–1618Batavia, Dutch East Indies · BataviaThe fleet crossed the Pacific and arrived at Batavia in October 1616. The East India Company refused to recognize their discovery of a legitimate new route, impounded the Eendracht, and sent the crew home. Jacob Le Maire died on the return voyage; Schouten returned to the Netherlands in 1617 and published an account of the voyage the following year, whereupon the names Cape Horn and Le Maire Strait entered European charts, and the company subsequently extended its monopoly to this route.
  4. 1620Cape Horn sea lane (Drake Passage area) · Cape HornAfter the mid-17th century, European ships increasingly chose the open-sea rounding rather than the narrow Strait of Magellan. In the 19th century, tea, grain, and ore clippers made Cape Horn a milestone of global sailing routes. After the Panama Canal opened in 1914, regular merchant ships rerouted via Central America, and Cape Horn became a symbolic waypoint for high-risk yacht races, scientific research, and weather routing; the route itself did not disappear.

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