Real Reason Ships Don't Pass Under South America (It's Not the Distance)

Most understand that the construction of the Panama Canal was necessary in order to significantly reduce the travel time of going around the tip of South America. While that is true, there are also much more treacherous and nefarious reasons why navigators wanted to explore the long way round. Today we’ll learn more about one of the most dangerous and infamous straits that exists in the world, a rite of passage for some of the most renowned explorers, adventurers, and scientists humanity has produced, and a region ordinary mariners and commercial ships avoid at all costs: The Drke Passage.

First thing’s first: where is the Drke Passage? And if it’s so dangerous, why would anyone go there? The Drke Passage is the name for the body of water that spans the 620 mile gap between Cape Horn, Chile and Antarctica, the same distance separating London and Berlin, or the distance of the Bering Land Bridge that connected Asia to North America 35,000 years ago just before the last Glacial Maximum.

The Drke Passage is the point of convergence of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans--the two biggest bodies of water in the world--as well as the Southern Ocean. The average depth of the strait is 3,400 meters, or 11,150 feet deep, though at its southern and northernmost ends the depths can reach up to 4,800 meters, 15,700 feet deep, equal to the height of the Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in the Alps. As for the name, Drke’s Passage, how did that come about?

The story is wrapped up in the first wave of colonization, and the struggles between the Spanish and early British empires to conquer land, dominate peoples, extract resources, and map the globe on their terms. The strait’s name comes from Francis Drke, perhaps the most well-known seaman of the Elizabethan Age, who played a huge role in the changing of the imperial guard between the Spanish Empire and the growing British one. Born in England between 1540 and 1543 (the exact date is not known) and raised in Plymouth, Drke spent his whole life around boats, under the tutelage of the infamous Hawkins family.

By the time he was 18, Drke was already well on his way to becoming what came to be known as a “sea dog”: a pirate sanctioned by the British crown, looting and plundering villages, bringing slaves to the New World and waging war against any Spanish ships he ran into; from the coast of West Africa all the way up to the French coast. Many times in these early years, Drke was involved in monumental disasters in the early fight for power between the British and Spanish Empires, several times barely escaping death. By his 30s, Drke’s resume, violent and ghastly though it was, fit the bill for British interests in south America, and he was chosen as the leader of an expedition, backed by the Queen herself, aiming to pass around South America via the extremely dangerous Strait of Magellan, which passes over Tierra del Fuego.

This was in 1577, and to be clear: this mission had nothing friendly about it. The aim was nothing less than to carve a path for British interests in the region, wiping out any opposition--by natives or the Spanish--they were to come across. And of course, nothing stood in Drke’s way from looting as much gold and silver as he wanted, and he was well known for this desire.

The Queen even told him, when they met face-to-face, that she “would gladly be revenged on the King of Spain for divers injuries that I have received. ” Drke set sail in December of that year with five small ships manned by about 200 men, and by the next spring had arrived at the Argentinian coast. He had only barely arrived there when he decided to try a group of supposedly unreliable officers, and execute their leader Thomas Doughty on charges of treason and witchcraft.

He then packed two ships worth of supplies onto the remaining three, and set off again, entering the Strait of Magellan on August 21, 1578. The journey took 16 days, after which he saw the Pacific Ocean for only the second time in his life. But luck, which until then had kept him miraculously safe, suddenly turned on him.

In his own words: “God by a contrary wind and intolerable tempest seemed to set himself against us. ” A storm of gale-force winds seized the expedition of ships, separating them all. One of them, presuming Drke to be lost and dead, returned to England; another was lost altogether, probably into the Drke Passage itself!

It was around this time that Drke supposed there might be, just below the Strait of Magellan, a meeting point of the world’s great oceans beneath the tip of South America. Though the Passage is named after him, he never himself went about crossing it. Instead, he roved up the coast of South America, looting and attacking Spanish ships and settlements, who didn’t have any experience of violent encounters in that area since they colonized the Mayan and Aztec civilizations.

He was looking for a passage back across to the Atlantic, which he never found, and finally ended his journey near what is now San Francisco, christening the land there “New Albion” after the old Graeco-Roman name for the British Isles. But bear in mind, it was in 1526, decades earlier, that the Drke Passage was first spotted by the Spanish colonist and explorer Francisco de Hoces, though it’s unclear whether he did or didn’t brave the passage at the time. Still today in the Latin American world, the sea is also referred to as the Mar de Hoces, in memory of this first sighting.

The first person in recorded history to actually cross the Drke Passage was 40 years after Drke’s chaotic expedition, by Dutch explorer Willem Schouten. The first person to successfully navigate the tip of South America, Schouten christened the land he sailed around “Cape Horn,” and thus established the most reliable and common sea route around South America for the centuries to come, until the Panama Canal was built in 1914. At this point you might be wondering, “but why is the Drke Passage so dangerous?

What is it about this meeting point of oceans that makes it so unpredictable, so notorious for mariners, explorers and scientists? ” As the convergence point of the colder, northern flowing Antarctic waters, and the warmer, southern flowing waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific, an enormous amount of water flows through the Drke Passage, about 125 to 200 million cubic yards per second, or 600 times that of the Amazon river. To put this into perspective, the Amazon river is itself the most powerful river in the world, having 5 times the rate of flow as the next most powerful river, and moving more water than the Mississippi, the Nile and the Yangtze combined.

There is no doubt whatsoever: the waters in the Drke Passage flow as the most voluminous current in the world, called the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (or ACC), which mostly flows east to northeast, with a small portion branching off northwest into the South Atlantic, called the Falklands current. In the ACC, the three major oceans exchange--with more than a little fuss--heat, salinity and nutrients from the far reaches of the globe. This makes the ACC a key player in the regulation of both the flow and temperature of what is called the global conveyor belt.

But this is not all: according to the mythology of the Drke Passage, the waters have two states, called respectively the “Drke Lake” and the “Drke Shake”: the first refers to times in which the waters are very calm and placid, resembling a lake almost without any waves; the second, and much more common state, occurs when the waves lift themselves to heights of up to 60 feet, or 18 meters high: that’s almost 4 stories! The mean annual air temperatures across the Drke Passage range from 41 degrees Fahrenheit in the north to 27 degrees in the south, or 5 to -3 degrees Celsius, with the water temperatures ranging also from 43 degrees in the north to 30 degrees Farenheit in the south, or 6 to 4 degrees Celsius. This transition is by no means smooth.

At the latitude of 60 degrees south, the temperatures alter sharply at what’s called the Antarctic Convergence Zone: the area where cold Antarctic waters meet the warmer waters of the world’s oceans, thus sinking and flowing north, creating what’s called a major meridional circulation system. Not only is this a major biological boundary between Antarctic and Subantarctic marine wildlife: the convergence of ocean currents and temperatures here makes the waters extraordinarily lively, and cyclones that form in the warmer Pacific regularly rush into the passage just below Tierra del Fuego and sweep across it from east to west. Even when these aren’t observed (a rare enough stroke of luck) the winds are almost always present, very strong, and predominantly westerly.

Today, the Drke passage is pretty much the only way to reach Antarctica by boat. To make the crossing from Ushuaia--the southernmost city in the world--takes 36 to 48 hours. Before we move on to the spectacular achievements, awe-inspiring feats and tragic defeats that have taken place in the Drke Passage, it’s worth going over at least a number of the factors that make this region such an inhospitable, lethal strait.

First off, the Drke Passage is one of the most remote locations on Earth. With no nearby land masses to seek for shelter, or people to be found who might assist you, an emergency in the Drke Passage must necessarily be dealt with alone, with whatever you happen to have with you. A ship crossing the passage must be well-equipped, relatively self-sufficient, and prepared for any contingencies--although such preparation is, in light of the extreme variability of conditions, always to a degree an act of faith.

The next thing to take into account, as noted before, are the extremely cold temperatures faced there. The waters are absolutely frigid, some of the coldest unfrozen water in the world, given the proximity of the Antarctic and the presence of its Circumpolar Current. To fall overboard or have your ship capsize here would be the end of any regular human: it wouldn’t take very long at all for hypothermia to set in.

In fact, the only vertebrate family without red blood cells is a family of fish that dwell in the Antarctic called “icefish. ” They produce no hemoglobin, and have no red blood cells: therefore their blood is translucent, their hearts are white, and their blood courses with anti-freeze proteins, since the water they swim in is well-below freezing, and they obtain their oxygen straight through their smooth skin and enlarged gills from the surrounding seawater, and from there it diffuses into their blood plasma. So no, these waters are not at all adapted for humans, much less any other vertebrates with hemoglobin pigments in their blood.

Then there is the famous convergence of currents: that is, the meeting point of the cold Antarctic Circumpolar Current which flows west, with the warmer, eastward flowing currents of the South Pacific and South Atlantic Oceans. The collision of these currents, combined with their differential temperatures, salinities, and oxygen contents, as well as carbon dioxide, chemical and other biological matter, makes for extremely turbulent, and practically unpredictable conditions at sea. These include strong eddies, and whirlpools even, making navigation through the region a major challenge.

There’s also the winds in the region to take into account. These winds are strong and persistent, so strong in fact that they are named for the latitudes in which they’re present. They’re respectively known as the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, and Screaming Sixties, since they’re found between the latitudes of 40 and 60 degrees south.

Generally taking a westerly direction, these winds make for extraordinarily high waves, choppy seas, and make navigation across the Passage gut-wrenching and terrifying. You might be able to tell that these sure aren’t the lightest of breezes. What’s more, these winds are coming from warmer regions further north.

The circulation of hot air into the colder Antarctic system makes for extremely variable weather conditions, capable of changing in an instant. Storms and low-pressure systems sweep into the passage, bringing heavy precipitation, gale-force winds, turbulent seas, and drastically reduce visibility at times. As you can probably imagine, crossing, or even attempting to skirt the Drke Passage, is not for the faint of heart.

But of course, there have been plenty who have tried. Part II: Disasters and Heroism in the Drke Passage Long before anyone with a camera or journal set eyes on Antarctica, the continent was believed by many to exist. The Ancient Greeks believed in what they called a Terra Australis Incognita, an Unknown southern land, because they thought that the Earth must have a symmetry of landmass between the northern and southern hemispheres.

In 1772, Captain Cook, a famous British explorer who just the year before had completed his own first circumnavigation of the globe, went in search of Antarctica. For the next three years, he tried, without any luck, to land on the southern continent, as it was called back then. While he did manage to make the first crossing of the Antarctic Circle, and reached the most southern point ever in the recorded history of navigation, he never saw Antarctica.

In his journal, he wrote that, “The risk one runs in exploring a coast in these unknown and Icy Seas is so very great, that I can be bold to say that no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may be South will never be explored. ” And that was it for Captain Cook. As one of the most committed explorers the world had yet seen, you might expect things to have slowed down after he gave up on his fourth attempt at a landing, saying simply that it just wasn’t worth it.

But things went quite differently, as it turns out. He gave the best warning he could of the thick fogs, snow storms, intense cold in the region he described as “doomed by nature never once to feel the warmth of the Sun’s rays, but to lie forever buried under everlasting snow and ice. ” But instead of dissuading explorers, Cook may have accidentally given rise to some of the most incredible feats of human endurance and strength.

Without meaning to, he inspired an entire generation of explorers, scientists, hunters and daredevils. Indeed, he’d noted the astonishing biodiversity of the Arctic seas, including the massive abundance of whale and seal populations in the area. In the next century, an ever increasing frequency of sealing activity arose in the Arctic seas over the next fifty years.

It was in 1821 that the seal hunter John Davies, who’d started out from Connecticut, was driven off course by a violent storm, and became arguably the first man, by accident, to land on Antarctica. But by the mid 19th century, the seal populations were waning, and with it the interest in passing through the southernmost seas. It was only in the late 1800s that a frenzy of whale hunting activity in the southern ocean rekindled interest in the era, and inaugurated what was to become the analog to the “space race” in the early 20th century, which has delivered to us some of the most formidable characters, feats, and tragedies in the history of our species.

Suddenly, everyone wanted to be the first to reach the South Pole. In 1902, Robert Falcon Scott, a British explorer, brought a team to within 460 miles, or 740 km, of the south pole. In 1908, another British explorer, Ernest Shackleton, a rival of Scott, came within 97 miles, or 156 km before he was forced to turn back.

In 1910, Robert Falcon Scott tried again, in the now infamous Terra Nova Expedition, to accomplish the impossible. He attempted it at the same time as the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and his team. Amundsen was the first to arrive at the South Pole on December 14, 1911, and just a month later, Scott and five members of his team arrived too, greeted by the defeating sight of a Norwegian flag.

But the real defeat was still to come. The weather took a turn for the worst on Scott’s return to ship, their food ran out, storms and accidents impeded their movements and slowly withered them down. None of the five members who attempted the South Pole returned from the trip.

And though the Pole attempt went rather sourly, the expedition, in the end without their captain, did succeed in bringing back over 200 fossils of plants and animals that were entirely new to science, further increasing interest and awareness in the region’s thriving biodiversity and curiously ample biological past. In 1914, Ernest Shackleton tried again to reach the South Pole, this time planning to traverse the entire continent by dogsled. But the Antarctic Seas had other plans for him.

Before he even reached the land, his ship, The Endurance, got pinned in pack ice and slowly began to get crushed, and the crew had no choice but to abandon it and get onto the ice. Shackleton left a large part of his team to weather the terrible conditions on the coastal ice, while he himself and five men of his crew took a tiny lifeboat out into the Drke Passage--called by his biographer, Alfred Lansing, “the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe”--looking for help, or if they couldn’t find any, land, over 700 miles, or 1127 km away. They rode the boat through some of the worst conditions in maritime history, crossing choppy seas and 100-foot waves of icy water which flooded and froze over the 20 foot boat, and were described by Shackleton himself as the tallest waves he’d seen in his 26 year long career as a seaman.

The five went on like this for roughly a month, until landing finally at the Stromness whaling station on South Georgia Island. Afterwards, with the Antarctic winter bearing down fast, it took 4 rescue attempts over 3 months to get the rest of the crew still stranded on Elephant Island. By some miracle, all the members of the expedition survived.

And the Endurance, their abandoned ship, was found by research scientists just over a year ago. This is the never-ending story of the Antarctic Circle and its seas, its stormy straights and treacherous ice-fields, and how it tempts the hardiest of human wills before scarring them terribly, if not outright annihilating them. The courage and madness required to desire and take on such a quest was well summed up in Shackleton’s phrase, “Antarctica is the last great journey left to Man.

” But don’t think stories of brave voyages only happened centuries ago, these valiant tales are still happening in modern times. On April 7th, 2012, a yacht owned by Brazilian journalist and businessman João Lara Mesquita, called Mar Sem Fim, or Endless Sea, was traveling through the Drke Passage with four people on board who were busy filming a documentary of the Antarctic coast, when winds of up to 62 miles per hour, or 100 kph, caught the boat and pinned it into an ice bank. In the freezing cold, the researchers on board radioed into Chile calling for a rescue.

The weather was so bad, it took over four days for the Chilean navy rescue team to reach them in the tall waves and abominable winds. One of the Endless Sea’s crew members, after being rescued, said “Our evacuation was extremely risky. Waves of nearly two meters and 40-knot winds made operations really arduous.

” Luckily, all four of the crew members were able to jump to the Chilean navy boat safely. But the Endless Sea’s luck was not the same: the frigid Antarctic waters penetrated the ship, pooled up in the hull, and froze, expanding and cracking the hull open, and ultimately, leading to the ship’s new docking 10 meters, or 33 feet, below the water surface, at the bottom of the shallow bay. A year later, João Mesquita returned with a team of divers to attach buoys to the boat and bring it back up to the surface, but the ship was already a ghost of what it had been before.

With only 700,000 dollars in insurance coverage for the wreck, Joao had to let the yacht go. In the last 10 years, there have been several instances of abandoned boats trailing into the Drke Passage, such as the SS Orlova in 2013. And almost a hundred years after the marooning of Shackleton’s Endurance on the Antarctic ice, the exact same thing happened to the crew of the Magdalena Oldendorff in 2002, who thankfully were all rescued.

This has led to intensified efforts to promote awareness of the drastically important biodiversity and biodynamics of the region, and the especially pernicious consequences of pollution and human debris in the region, such as abandoned ships. And while it may sound like everyone who attempts to traverse this passage ends in failure, that is not true. RECENT ACHIEVEMENTS: RECORD ROW, RECORD SWIM In December 2019, Colin O’Brady, a famous British explorer and adventurer with 5 of some of the best rowers in the world, attempted the first human-powered passage across the most dangerous stretch of open ocean in the world: the 600 mile Drke Passage.

They set off with a special rowboat designed to deal with the intense and trying conditions of the crossing, and on Christmas day, December 25, 2019, after 12 brutal days on the open ocean, they became the first team in history to make the crossing. And of course, they did not turn around and row it all over again to get back. Their hands and feet were terribly frostbitten, and during those 12 days they rowed in shifts of 90 minutes--90 on, 90 off--all day and all night.

According to a crew member, when rowing the Drke Passage, 10 days feels like a month. In February of 2022, Bárbara Hernández Huerta, nicknamed the “Ice Mermaid” for her notorious life of extreme open water swims and regular presence in international ice swimming competitions, broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest ocean mile swim, completing it in a time of 15 minutes and 3 seconds, at a pace of about 4 miles per hour. Her location of choice?

You guessed it: The Drke Passage. This resulted in her being named the 2022 World Open Water Swimming Woman of the Year, and just this year, at only 37 years old, Huerta has been inducted in the ice swimming hall of fame. Huerta isn’t just pushing herself to the limit for the sake of her sense of possibility.

Another reason she takes on such enormous swims is to raise awareness about the cleanliness of the Southern ocean, and to renew and reinforce a consensus around the protection of the polar oceans, which are in a very real sense a significant life-source for our planet. Conclusion: Incapacitating fears, unhealthy optimism, respectful caution The Drke Passage, from its contested moments of discovery up until today, has never ceased to inspire fear and temptation, to draw ardent human souls in and spit them just as harshly out, to teach us when we lend an ear and to make us understand when our arrogance has surpassed us. Today, the Drke Passage is still an important locus of scientific work and investigation.

As a crucial component of the global ocean conveyor belt, the Drke Passage is massively important to the planetary climate stability, just as its opening tens of millions of years ago is known to have been a highly dramatic shock to the climate system. Simply put, without the Drke Passage, life on the planet today would not be what it is. Time and again, the passage to Antarctica has drawn in humans from all nationalities, walks of life, and motivations, and it will most certainly continue to do so, just as it will continue to inspire mortal fear in many.

Rightly so. But today, we are also discovering that those of us furthest away from the Drke Passage might also have a reason to fear it. The Antarctic is not immune to the effects of anthropogenic climate change; and importantly, a collapse of the dynamic Antarctic system could change the climate on Earth forever, as it once did, 17 to 49 million years ago, when biological productivity was revolutionized, and carbon dioxide began to be sucked out of the atmosphere at a much higher rate.

Today, scientists are heading to the Drke Passage not to take big risks, but to confirm the consequences of centuries of risky behavior. It is at the Drke Passage, among a few key places, that the most pessimistic climate scenarios, if they turn out to be true, will be confirmed. Indeed, Drke Passage, and the whole Antarctic Circle, are not nearly as well known to us as we’d like to imagine.

The area remains impassive, indifferent, with seas that remain some of the most fear- and awe-inspiring in the world. And though such important advances in technology have improved the feasibility of marine travel through the area, there are many ways in which these improvements are little more than faith-boosters, insurance policies for the chronically unsure. However much we may take pride and indulge ourselves in our technological advancements, we are just as small as before, in comparison with the great forces of nature, and for all the minuteness and complexity of our technology, we may always get wiped out in an instant, along with all our precious knowledge and equipment--no insurance policy is final, and nature will never reveal the limits to its own power of retaliation.

At least not to us. There will always be a place for a human reckoning, always the open route--but by no means the straightest--for human courage, and human madness.