The War on Cape Horn

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The group enters the waters around Cape Horn. They're battling these unfounded large waves, waves that are dwarfing their mass. And yet they are also sealing on the wager and on the other ships partially blind because they do not know their longitude. Captain Chief decides he's going to try to get to a point off the coast of Chile that Anson had told them they should rendezvous if they were ever separated. He manages to guide them around the horn, but it turns out that their longitude is not only wrong, it was wrong by hundreds of miles.

There’s an old sailors’ saying about the ocean at the southernmost part of the world — “below 40 degrees latitude, there is no law; below 50 degrees, there is no God.”

David Grann brings us the story of what happened when five British warships set off on a secret mission to steal a ship filled with treasure. They’d have to sail around the very bottom of South America — at 56 degrees south.

David Grann’s book is The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.

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Artwork by Julienne Alexander.

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