Cape Horn

And then the other alternative is if you don't want to risk life and limb in the West, you take a boat, a ship.

and you sail around cape horn you get you know and the problem is you've got to go all the way around south america and then you have to go all the way up it's a 13 000 mile voyage that can take six months to a year and um and it's not it's not without its risks

that's not fun either yeah it's

not like no that's not fun i mean what and so um the other alternative if you have some money is take a steamboat to the western coast of the Isthmus of Panama.

And being out at sea, it takes a really, really long time to get there, right? Most whale ships are out to sea between like two and five years at this point, going from big ports like New Bedford or Nantucket.

around Cape Horn and into the Pacific.

So there are a lot of different distinctions, whether in port or out at sea, that would be able to give away that a vessel was the whale ship.

It was a whaler, yeah.

Some marks told a story of where a man had been.

A fully rigged ship meant he had sailed around Cape Horn, one of the most treacherous passages on Earth.

A dragon on the skin meant he had sailed to China.

A golden earring, though not a tattoo but worn in similar spirit, marked a man who had crossed the equator.

The full-riggered ship.

Of all the tattoos that circulated among pirates and sailors in the Golden Age, the full-rigged ship may have carried the most specific and verifiable meaning of any of them.

A full-rigged ship, rendered in careful, often remarkably detailed ink across the chest or back, was the mark of a man who had rounded Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America, one of the most dangerous passages in the history of human navigation.

Cape Horn is not merely difficult.

And the reason Portugal was the first European country to colonize in Africa was because of the availability for the trade winds.

Then the best way to get to the Americas, north or south, all around Cape Horn, was through Cape Verde Islands.

That's where the fair trade winds came.

That's why...

The Western Union Telegraph Company took up the challenge The obstacles were daunting.

Wire, insulators, and other materials for the line's western portion would have to be shipped around Cape Horn to San Francisco.

Supplies would have to be pulled by an oxen team over the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains.

Vast stretches of plains contained not a stick of timber in sight.

During the whole time I was on board this ship, Nearly eight months, I never missed taking my trick at the wheel, or going aloft to reef.

I well remember laying out on the fore-yard arm, off Cape Horn, for two hours, while we got a close reef tide.

We had to take up belaying pins to knock the frozen snow and ice off the sail before we could do anything, and the ship was laboring so heavily in the seaway that our task was most difficult.

In navigation I became so proficient that I could work out lunars with ease, and after the passage home of one hundred and ten days without seeing land, I placed the position of the ship within three miles of her true position, near the Wolf Rock, land's end, the old captain being ten to twelve miles out in his longitude.