THE DRAKE

The Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe, is where nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone. The results are impressive.

“The winds were such as if the bowels of the earth had set all at liberty,” wrote Francis Fletcher, a priest aboard Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, “or as if the clouds under heaven had been called together, to lay their force on that one place.” The five hundred miles that separate Cape Horn from the South Shetland Islands became known as the Drake Passage. Another sixty-five miles – the Bransfield Strait – lie between those islands and the Antarctic Peninsula, or Graham Land, the continent’s outstretched finger.