Kees Bouten in ‘Sailingsteps’ to Cape Horn.
Jacob Bouten writes when he was appointed to go on his voyage of 1849:
“I don’t know why they chose me for this job (to sail to Valparaiso), because I was the youngest captain of the fleet and it is a voyage, not been sailed that many times before yet.”
About sailing around the Cape he did not write much either.
About the first time in 1849 he wrote (in Dutch):
“Sailing around Cape Horn we had quite some storms and we passed several ‘ijsbergen’ (I suppose this was drifting ice, coming from the Southpole) with flogs of wales around those.”
About the second voyage in 1852 he wrote (in Dutch again):
“While sailing around Cape Horn we experienced havy storms during many days and due to this we came between the Ice-islands, where we had lots of problems with all the wales there.”
Coming from Ancud on Chiloé, I flew on the 10th of April 2010 from Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas where I boarded the ship “Mare Australis” from Cruceros Australis, the cruise company. The only possibility I could find to get to Cape Horn, was with a 5-day cruise from Punta Arenas in Chile to Ushuaia in Argentina and because I did not like the idea of a cruise, I was not very enthusiastic about it. But now, after I have been on the cruise I can recommend it to everybody!
As soon as we were on board we were introduced to the crew, i.e.:
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