Cape Horn Grain Route
The stormy passage that kept the last commercial sailing ships alive carrying Australian grain to Europe until the 1940s.
Overview
Steel four-masted windjammers such as Pamir, Passat and Pommern ran Australian wheat, and earlier Chilean nitrate, eastward around the Cape of Good Hope and home around Cape Horn, riding the westerlies of the roaring forties and furious fifties where eastbound passage is fastest and most dangerous. Crews of around 30 handled ships of up to 4,000 tonnes because labor, not capital, was what sailing could not afford. The grain races to Falmouth for orders ran into the 1930s. The Pamir rounded the Horn in 1949, one of the last working passages, and the era of commercial sail closed.
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