A Cape Horner’s last words on the last time around

Five years ago a man walked into my office and placed a thick sheaf of paper bound with a rubber band on my desk. The visitor, sturdy looking and of older but indeterminate age (it turned out he was 71), introduced himself as Bill Stark. The hundreds of typed pages he brought with him told a story he hoped to have published someday as a book.

He hadn’t traveled far for the meeting; his office was located in a small Wisconsin town 40 miles inland from SAILING’s headquarters. He had spent most of his life there running a family-owned candy company. That made what I was to learn from him and his manuscript all the more remarkable: Bill Stark, small-town businessman, had lived one of the great adventures of the 20th century. He had sailed as a member of the crew of the 316-foot, four-masted square-rigger Pamir on the last voyage around Cape Horn by a freight-carrying sailing ship, a passage from Australia to England that marked the end of the Great Age of Sail.

The manuscript is now a book, published in November 2003 by Carroll and Graf as The Last Time Around Cape Horn.

It seems odd to think of the Age of Sail lasting into the middle of the 20th century, but Pamir’s history-making voyage took place in 1949. Think of it—people on land had television sets in their homes and cars with automatic transmissions and power windows in their garages. Meanwhile at sea, Bill Stark and his mates were fighting to sail around Cape Horn in a sailing ship that had no auxiliary power, no electricity or heat, no electronic navigation equipment. Except that their vessel was made of steel, their rounding of the Horn in 1949 was no different, and every bit as miserable and dangerous, as that of square-rigger sailors who endured it two centuries earlier.

That’s the stuff of a great sea story, and that is what Stark has written in the book that appeared 54 years after the Cape Horn challenge was met for the last time in a sail-powered freighter. His story is not varnished with notions of the romance of sailing. Many times, Stark confided, he wished he were not aboard the ship that was making history while putting her crew through a classic sailors’ hell.

He was a 22-year-old college student in Europe when he heard the Pamir was loading what would likely be the last cargo to be carried by sail around the Horn, 60,000 sacks of barley destined for a distillery. On a whim reflecting his preference for adventure over school, he made his way to Port Victoria, Australia, and finagled a berth on the Pamir as an ordinary seaman at $200 a month.
Stark was a rookie among the hard, seasoned sailors of the grain trade. He stepped into an alien world in which he slept in a dank fo’c’sle that was lit by a single kerosene lamp, had no source of heat to combat the unrelenting cold of the southern winter and smelled of tar and sweat and ate unvarying meals of salted meat, beans and oatmeal.
On the bright side, the captain was a stern but fair Finn who cared enough about his crew to personally lance their saltwater boils with a straight razor and was liberal minded on the subject of the consumption of rum by the sailors after a stressful watch.
Six days out, the college boy whose previous sailing had been on placid Pine Lake near his home in Wisconsin found himself climbing aloft in a gale at night to furl the royals on yardarms 168-feet above the deck. Terrified and, by his admission, useless, he was sent on his way by a burly bosun with a shove and a shouted insult: “This is what you signed on for—you aren’t on your daddy’s yacht now.”
Thus began what Stark described as “6,000 miles of hell,” a grueling 44-day slog through the dangerous latitudes below 40 degrees south to Cape Horn. “We hated the days and nights of climbing high into the screaming rigging, painfully gripping the ice-coated shrouds with raw-rubbed hands that oozed blood and pus,” Stark wrote. “We were cold and wet and tired, always tired. For 11 days in a row I didn’t take off my clothes. When off duty, I shucked my oilskins and dropped into my bunk.”
He wrote of the crew having to bail for hours with pumps and buckets after a “40-foot sea came crashing over the ship, stoving in the messroom skylight and flooding our quarters. The lee side of the ship was under water, and the crew clung on for life.”

Things eventually got better, as they always do when the sea shows its more forgiving side, and Stark reveled in a glorious sailing experience. Pamir rounded the Horn and turned north, the weather improved, and after 16,000 miles and more than four months at sea, the ship dropped her anchor in Falmouth Bay—an exclamation point at the end of an era.

With a belaying pin in his seabag, a souvenir he took with the captain’s blessing, and a tear in his eye, Stark left Pamir to finish college and go home to run the family business.

That’s the end of Bill Stark’s Cape Horn sailing story, but it’s not quite the end of the story of his book. He worked on the book for years, but never saw it in print. Soon after putting the finishing touches on the manuscript, he jumped to his death in a Colorado gorge in January 2003. His son Peter Stark writes of it in a tragic coda to the book and a haunting story in Outside magazine.

Bill Stark may have settled into a relatively quiet life, but he was an adventurer at heart. At the age of 16, he served as a crewman aboard a Great Lakes ore freighter. At 20, he worked his way across the Atlantic on a Swedish freighter. When he set his sights on catching the boat for the last time around Cape Horn, he embarked on a trip from Italy to Australia that was so harrowing it could have come out of a script for an Indiana Jones movie. He never sailed much after the Pamir adventure, but in canoeing, skiing, traveling and the other pursuits of an active life, he was always comfortable on the edge, according to his son.

Then, in his mid-70s, physical problems for the first time limited his activities and compounded the depression he had fought for much of his life. Peter Stark wrote: “Therein lies one of the pitfalls of an adventurous spirit. If you define yourself only by your exploits and travels, your feats of physical courage, when the time comes that you can no longer live such a life, you’ve lost the standard by which you measure yourself.”

That may be true, but with his book Bill Stark has left a standard by which others can measure him—a story of a young man who, on a square-rigged sailing ship in the sleet-laden gales of the Southern Ocean, faced and overcame fearsome challenges now consigned to history by a softer, more careful world.