This article was written by William Caverlee

Photo by Jon D. Patton 2nd Photo by Travelling Light

Author, blue-water sailor, mountaineer, and photographer, Hal Roth once almost got himself killed, along with his wife and two other passengers when he ran his small sailboat aground during a storm in the Chilean archipelago. They were just north of Cape Horn at the southernmost tip of South America. This was in the 1970s, before GPS and satellite phones, and Roth didn't have a radio transmitter onboard to call for help.

The castaways survived. After nine days of bivouac, they spotted a Chilean naval boat on patrol; the navy promptly sent over a launch and saved the day. Even the sailboat Whisper was ferried into port and repaired. A few months later, Roth and his wife Margaret- minus their two passengers, who understandably had had enough - were able to attain their goal of rounding the Horn in a small sailboat. The account of that journey, Two Against Cape Horn (1978), is, for many readers, Hal Roth's best book. And, for me, it is one of the best travel books of any writer.

In 1978, Roth - who died in 2008 at age eighty-one - had already written two other sailing books, Two on a Big Ocean and After 50,000 Miles, as well as a mountaineering guide to the John Muir Trail, Pathways in the Sky. He would go on to publish a dozen books and countless magazine articles. Most of these are illustrated with his own photographs. (He studied with Edward Weston and Ansel Adams and had an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art.) In addition, Two Against Cape Horn contains a number of beautiful pen-and-ink maps by Sam F. Manning, which offer bird's-eye views and ingenious close-ups of the long, narrow line of inlets, fjords, islands, channels, and gulfs that Roth wove his way through along Chile's southern spine. Just to get to Chile, Roth and his wife had to sail for a couple of months, from San Diego to the Galapagos to Peru - a journey, Roth notes wryly, that took them 2,640 miles east, in addition to thousands of miles south.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the time of Two Against Cape Horn, the Roths lived aboard the thirty-five-foot sloop Whisper for great stretches of the year. In a previous voyage (Two on a Big Ocean), they had circumnavigated the Pacific Ocean, traveling over 18,000 miles in a great loop from San Francisco to Tahiti, then the Marianas, Japan, the Aleutians, and back home. Two on a Big Ocean can also be read as an "origin" story, for it contains the story of the Canadian-built Whisper's design, construction and first launch. Whisper is the love of Roth and Margaret's life, their home, companion, best friend, and valiant refuge in storm and sea. Here is Roth in the opening chapter of Two Against Cape Horn:
 
Over the years we had made dozens of improvements to Whisper, generally to strengthen her and to simplify the gear and to make the vessel more suitable for short-handed ocean cruising and living aboard. We had a windlass, four anchors, and lots of stout chain and lines. A self-steering device guided the yacht at sea and a powerful diesel stove warmed the cabin below. We had shelves of books, plenty of stores, and a radio to bring us music and time signals. Whisper's cabin was comfortable, airy, and pleasant. Her only bad point was that she was burdened with perhaps four thousand pounds of cruising gear which put her low in the water. We fought a constant battle to take weight off the vessel.
 
That's fine, clear, cadenced American prose - as good as any. Travel-book readers will usually forgive an author's clumsiness of style if the narrative is sufficiently engrossing. Yet Roth is both an accomplished seaman and an accomplished writer - although he didn't aspire to be a novelist/travel-writer like Paul Theroux, a humorist/travel-writer like Mark Twain, a historian like Jan Morris, a genial raconteur like Bill Bryson or a belletrist like Pico Iyer. Before anything, Roth is a journalist, navigator, and sailor. And a voracious reader. He appears to have collected every book written on Cape Horn, Chile, Patagonia, early sea lanes, Magellan, Joshua Slocum, Darwin, etc. Two Against Cape Horn is interspersed with accounts of solo-voyagers, Spanish expeditions, and missionaries; log entries; descriptions of hair-raising southern windstorms called williwaws; stories of the disastrous encounters between Europeans and Chile's indigenous peoples (and the near-eradication of the latter). Roth was a freelance magazine writer for many years and, by the time of Two Against, he had developed the acute eyesight and perpetual curiosity of a near-continual traveler.
 
At this point, I must confess to a small bias: The literature of small-craft sailing has been done to death. It seems that every married couple or single-hander, who has ever sailed from Miami to Nassau, has written a book. Usually, a hero-worshipping book with its immodest author as principal subject. From William Buckley's Airborne series to the online logs of the Vendee Globe, I've read so many accounts of ocean-crossings I can nearly predict the day a wave-tossed sailor will lose a self-steering device, a mast, a lover, or a grasp on reality.

It is precisely from this surfeit of sailing books, that Hal Roth rises above the crowd. I keep thinking of Roth's long training in journalism - that's where Hemingway started too - and I wonder if that's still the best training-ground for a prose writer. Roth again:
 
All of a sudden I became aware of a thundering noise. Somewhere ahead the seas were exploding. As I peered nervously eastward from the top of a crest I could see mist and white water two or three miles in front of us. The great swells of the Southern Ocean were breaking on rocks.

The land appeared to be continuous to the right, so we eased off to port and gradually left the white water to starboard. The swells increased in steepness, and when we were down in the troughs we were quite becalmed and could see nothing except towering walls of gray water on all sides. Then up again for a look at the excitement toward the land. Margaret muttered something about taking a photograph but I had lost all interest in cameras. I wanted to get the hell out of there. My nerve ends were tied in knots and my stomach muscles were a mess.
 
The first time I came upon Two Against Cape Horn, I bought it at a charity book-sale for $1.00. What's this? I thought and threw it in my carry-bag. Later, at home, I began reading - and kept on, being led into the unknown new world of southern Chile. Happily, Roth's voyage is not all storm and peril. There are long passages of near perfect weather, of Indian markets, of new friends made. I've read Two Against so many times now that it has become therapeutic for me, a book of escape and refuge: Isla Chiloe, Puerto Montt, shellfish, onions, hot springs, a secure anchorage, the Andes rising straight up from water's edge . . . Am I in love with this book? Yes . . . Even its paper is comforting: a rich, heavyweight stock, perfect for drumming a finger against, perfect for the book's many photographs, maps, illustrations. Nearly every other page you turn to reveals beautiful photography.

The further south the Roths sail the fewer the settlements, and the colder and more rugged the terrain. Hal Roth has a goal in all this, we remember: to round Cape Horn in tiny Whisper. For sailors through the ages, Cape Horn is the ultimate challenge - a maritime Mt. Everest. (It was named by the Dutch in 1616 in honor of a sea captain's hometown of Hoorn.) Crossing it, arguably, is the most dangerous bit of sailing on the planet. Roth is too intelligent a traveler to undertake such a goal without a shrug of self-mockery- and he wonders if all this sailor's talk is "a lot of romantic balderdash." Still, he and Margaret press on.

The last photograph in Two Against Cape Horn is a shot of Margaret, steering Whisper in what looks like an Arctic blizzard. She's encased in foul-weather gear, squinting upward in pain and near-hypothermia. The boat is covered in thick ice and snow; the seas are precarious, foam-flecked, insane. As a tourist-board advertisement, such a photo should probably be left out of the brochure.

For myself, whenever I get to the end of Two Against Cape Horn, I like to flip back a few pages to an earlier chapter and a photograph of a paunchy, benevolent Chilean named Don Pedro, whom the Roths met months before in an isolated settlement far north of Cape Horn. Don Pedro and two of his sons are sitting in a skiff near their home in Cahuelm. The two boys are happily pulling oars, while Don Pedro, in the stern of the tiny boat, turns quietly and looks back toward the camera (held by Hal Roth in Whisper, of course).

The water is calm; mountains drop down to the edges of the fjord. Probably Don Pedro has just paid a visit to Whisper, bringing potatoes and onions from his garden and a string of fish that he caught that morning. The Roths have given him some spare clothes and household goods and the three adults have raised glasses of wine. It's a scene near the beginning of the voyage to which I return again and again.

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William Caverlee is a Contributing Writer to The Oxford American Magazine, and has also appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Florida Review, Cimarron Review, and other quarterlies. A book of his essays has just been published by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press: Amid the Swirling Ghosts and Other Essays.

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