Today (Friday, April 21st) and tomorrow were to be the days allocated to visit Isla Noir (Cape Noir in Commodore Anson’s day). It lies below the 73rd parallel and is a pretty desolate location by all accounts. It is also where Commodore Anson’s fleet were nearly wrecked, as they seriously miscalculated their location. At the beginning of April 1741 they headed north believing they were 300 miles west of land. But this was guesswork, as they used dead reckoning - calculating their position by the distance covered by knowing the ship’s speed and heading. However this did not take into account the strong westerly currents, and so on the night of 13-14 April, the crew of the Anna were alarmed to see the cliffs of Cape Noir just 2 miles away. The fleet were just able to claw their way back out to sea, and then set about the torturous task of beating further west against the currents and winds.
Already they had been at sea for months in the most horrible freezing weather. Captain Saumarez of the Pearl wrote in his log “really life is not worth pursuing at the expense of such hardships”. While fighting gale-force winds and huge seas with a crew weakened by typhus and dysentery, scurvy broke out. Hundreds of men died of disease in the weeks during and immediately after battling around Cape Horn.
As part of my trip to follow in Anson’s footsteps, Douglas and I were due to fly from Puerto Natales by airplane to Punta Arenas, and then fly in an Agusta Westland AW 119 Koala from Punta Arenas to Isla Noir. The helicopter flight time is about 90 minutes to the island, and we would have about 30 minutes on the ground (with the helicopter still running) before we would have to return to Punta Arenas. Sadly, the autumn weather has put paid to our plans. There were high winds and rain on the island today, and it is forecast the same for tomorrow. We always knew that some of these locations were going to be very difficult to reach, and so it has proved.