Le Maire and Schouten Round Cape Horn (1616): A New Route

On 29 January 1616 the Dutch ship Eendracht, under Jacob Le Maire and Willem Cornelisz Schouten, rounded the southernmost headland of the Americas and named it Kaap Hoorn, Cape Horn, after the town of Hoorn in Holland. The voyage proved that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans met in open sea south of Tierra del Fuego, giving ships an alternative to the narrow Strait of Magellan. Cape Horn later became one of the most famous and feared landmarks in the history of sailing.

Background: breaking a monopoly

When the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was founded in 1602, it received a monopoly over Dutch trade in Asia. Other Dutch merchants were forbidden to sail to the East either around the Cape of Good Hope or through the Strait of Magellan, the passage discovered during the Magellan-Elcano expedition in 1520.

Isaac Le Maire, a wealthy Amsterdam merchant and one of the VOC’s original investors, had fallen out with the company. He believed there might be another passage south of the Strait of Magellan, which the monopoly did not cover. Many geographers also thought that Tierra del Fuego was the edge of a great southern continent, Terra Australis, which might hold riches of its own.

In 1614 Le Maire founded the Australische Compagnie (Southern Company), with support from merchants in the port of Hoorn. He placed his son Jacob in charge of trade and appointed Willem Cornelisz Schouten, an experienced navigator from Hoorn, as captain.

The voyage south

Two ships, the larger Eendracht and the smaller Hoorn, left the island of Texel on 14 June 1615 with roughly 87 men in total. The crews were not told where they were going until the ships were at sea.

In December 1615 the expedition stopped at Port Desire (Puerto Deseado) in Patagonia to clean the ships’ hulls. While the Hoorn was beached and its hull was being cleaned with fire to burn off weed and shipworm, the flames spread to the ship, and it was destroyed. Its crew and stores were moved to the Eendracht.

Through the strait and round the Horn

Sailing south past the entrance to the Strait of Magellan, the Eendracht found a channel between the eastern tip of Tierra del Fuego and a mountainous land to the east. The expedition passed through on 24-25 January 1616 and named it the Le Maire Strait. The land to the east was named Staten Landt in honour of the States General, in the belief that it might be part of the southern continent. It is now known to be an island, Isla de los Estados.

On 29 January 1616 the ship passed a high, dark headland at the southern end of a group of islands. The explorers named it Kaap Hoorn after their home town and their lost ship. Beyond it lay open sea, and the Eendracht turned north-west into the Pacific Ocean.

The waters off Cape Horn

Cape Horn itself stands on Hornos Island, part of an archipelago south of Tierra del Fuego, in present-day Chile. It lies at about 56 degrees south, where the continents leave a gap of roughly 800 km of open water before Antarctica. Strong westerly winds blow almost without interruption around the globe at these latitudes, and when they meet the shallower water over the continental shelf they raise steep, dangerous seas.

Le Maire and Schouten were fortunate. They passed in the southern summer and their account records no disaster at the cape itself. Later sailors, especially those trying to sail westward against the wind, often spent weeks fighting their way around, and hundreds of ships were wrecked in the region during the age of sail.

Across the Pacific

The expedition crossed the Pacific on a more southerly track than earlier Spanish voyages. It sighted several atolls in the Tuamotu Archipelago, visited the northern islands of Tonga, and spent time at Futuna and Alofi, which the Dutch called the Hoorn Islands. The crew traded and sometimes fought with Pacific islanders, and their journals give some of the earliest European descriptions of these communities.

The Eendracht then sailed along the coasts of New Ireland and northern New Guinea, where a group of islands is still named after Schouten. It reached the Moluccas and arrived at Jakarta (Jacatra) on Java in late October 1616.

Confiscation at Java

The VOC authorities on Java, among them Jan Pieterszoon Coen, did not believe the Dutchmen had found a new route. They concluded that the expedition must have used the Strait of Magellan, in breach of the company’s monopoly, and seized the Eendracht and its cargo. Le Maire, Schouten and part of the crew were sent home on a VOC fleet under Joris van Spilbergen.

Jacob Le Maire died at sea in December 1616, aged about 30. Schouten reached the Netherlands in 1617. Isaac Le Maire took the VOC to court and eventually won, recovering the ship and costs, and the expedition’s journals were published, making the discovery widely known.

Key people

• Jacob Le Maire (c. 1585-1616): merchant and leader of the expedition, after whom the Le Maire Strait is named.
• Willem Cornelisz Schouten (c. 1567-1625): navigator from Hoorn and captain of the Eendracht.
• Isaac Le Maire (c. 1558-1624): Amsterdam merchant who founded the Australische Compagnie and financed the voyage.
• Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587-1629): VOC official at Java who seized the ship, later the company’s governor-general.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Cape Horn is named after its horn-like shape. The name comes from the Dutch town of Hoorn.
• Myth: Drake discovered Cape Horn. In 1578, during his circumnavigation, Francis Drake was driven south by storms and realised there was open sea beyond Tierra del Fuego, which is why the passage is called the Drake Passage. He did not round or name the cape.
• Fact: Staten Landt was assumed to be part of a continent. In 1643 the Dutch navigator Hendrik Brouwer showed that it was an island.

Legacy

A Spanish expedition under the brothers Bartolomé and Gonzalo García de Nodal confirmed the new route in 1619. In later centuries, as ships grew larger, the open waters off Cape Horn became the main route between the Atlantic and Pacific for sailing ships, despite fierce westerly winds, huge waves and icebergs. “Rounding the Horn” became a byword for seamanship until the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.

The voyage also added islands across the South Pacific to European maps and encouraged further Dutch exploration, including Abel Tasman’s voyage of 1642.

Timeline

• 1614: Isaac Le Maire founds the Australische Compagnie.
• 1615, 14 June: The Eendracht and Hoorn leave Texel.
• 1615, December: The Hoorn is destroyed by fire at Port Desire, Patagonia.
• 1616, 24-25 January: The Eendracht passes through the Le Maire Strait.
• 1616, 29 January: The expedition rounds and names Cape Horn.
• 1616, April-July: The ship crosses the Pacific via the Tuamotus, Tonga and the Hoorn Islands.
• 1616, late October: Arrival at Jakarta; the VOC confiscates the Eendracht.
• 1616, December: Jacob Le Maire dies on the voyage home.
• 1619: The Spanish García de Nodal expedition confirms the route.

Why it matters

By finding a passage south of Tierra del Fuego, Le Maire and Schouten showed that South America ended in open ocean and that the southern continent, if it existed, lay further south. Cape Horn became one of the great sea routes of the age of sail, and the voyage remains a classic example of explorers driven by a commercial dispute.