Dead Reckoning

© 2019 All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute or repurpose this work without written permission from the copyright holder(s). Printed from https://www.damninteresting.com/dead-reckoning/ Listen to Podcast This story is assembled from contemporaneous first-person accounts. As such, quotations contain some antiquated spellings, grammar, and phrasing. In the Earth’s extreme southern latitudes, where the Pacific and Atlantic oceans meet, there is a rocky gap of sea between Antarctica and South America known as the Drake Passage. Among 18th century seafarers, this corridor was also known by a more ghoulish nickname: The sailors’ graveyard. In the so-called Age of Exploration, the Drake Passage was the least impractical route for large European ships to travel around South America to access its west coast. The passage hooks far south⁠—almost to the Antarctic Circle⁠—to navigate around Cape Horn on the extreme southern tip of the continent. Sensible sailors avoided the corridor except i ... Read full article.