Eendracht off Cape Horn 1615

Watercolor 14" x 21"


The Horne
55 degrees 59 minutes South latitude, 67 degrees 16 minutes West longitude

In the first years of the 17th century the riches of the spice islands were monopolized mainly by the Dutch East India Company. This organization was formed by the government of the United Provinces in 1602 to combine the many enterprising independent Dutch traders into a permanent and powerful empire in the east. The company was granted the power to make treaties, appoint governors and justices, and license businesses. It was the defacto Dutch government abroad. With a growing fleet of armed merchant men they were the foremost power in the Pacific and effectively sealed the access to it by sea through the Straits of Magellan and past the Cape of Good Hope.

Isaac Le Maire was a disgruntled ex-officer of the company, who had withdrawn from his position after some of his grandiose schemes for expansion had been rejected. An aggressive and wealthy merchant, he was determined to find a way to the Indies not controlled by the Dutch East India Company.

Willem Schouten was an experienced navigator who had spent many years in the service of the company. The two men formed a competitive company and were granted a privilege to trade in the Indo-West Pacific. They fitted out two ships, the EENDRACHT and the HOORN and on June 14, 1615 they sailed from the Texel.

Normally they would have needed permission from the Dutch East India Company to enter the Pacific but Le Maire had plans to circumvent that requirement by not passing through the prohibited Magellan Straits. He may have heard of the open water south of the straits reported forty years earlier by Francis Drake. Whatever the source of the idea, December 1615 found the two ships being careened on the coast of Patagonia five hundred miles north of the straits. There the HOORNE was lost to fire caused by carelessness during graving. What could be salvaged was transferred to the EENDRACHT and she continued on alone.

They passed the entrance to the Strait of Magellan and pressed on with no sign of another opening to the west. On their port side a new land began to appear, and with it the fear that they were sailing into a dead end on the coast of the undiscovered southern continent.

Gradually the seas took on the blue of deep water and a heavy ocean swell could be felt running against them. The EENDRACHT was feeling the first effects of the great ocean to the west, and on January 24,1616, the strait they named Le Maire opened before them. At sunset on January 29, the land to starboard ended abruptly in a barren, rocky point. Only the vast southern ocean lay beyond. Accompanied by albatross and bucking the constant wind from the west, the little ship sailed past the point they named Cape Hoorn, and out into the Pacific.

This uneventful passage was the first of what was to become the most traveled route into the Pacific Ocean until the opening of the Panama Canal 298 years later.