On the evening of Tuesday December 2nd 1924, a small bluff-bowed 42ft gaff-rigged ketch of antique appearance approached Cape Horn from the west across the Great Southern Ocean. The weather had been unsettled with winds from several directions, and two days previously squalls from the northeast had brought flurries of snow, despite it being early in the southern summer. But conditions were improving as the Horn came abeam at a more-than-safe distance around 2200hrs in the last of the daylight.
With the onset of the short southern summer night with scarcely any real darkness, the wind settled in the north, and the little ship made steady progress despite the lightness of the breeze. By noon on Wednesday in fine conditions, she had made good 140 miles in 24 hours, aided by a favourable current of at least one knot.
Cape Horn is often thought of as the most southerly tip of the mainland continent of South America, but in reality it is the most southerly tip of a complex archipelago. More properly it is Kaap Hoorn, first named by an exploring sea captain from that formerly important ancient port in The Netherlands
"Exceptionally good" visibility enabled the ketch's crew to admire the massive scenery along the rugged coast as they shaped their course to pass eastward of Staten Island. The wind then drew fresh from the northwest, and despite progress being slowed by their vessel's fouled bottom - for they had been at sea for more than 40 days since leaving New Zealand – they could lay the close-reaching course for the Falklands, and by Saturday December 6th at 16:00hrs, they were anchored in Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands.
The plans of Saoirse. Designed by Conor O'Brien in his cottage on Foynes Island in the Shannon Estuary, she was built by Tom Moynihan and his team in the boatyard at the Fisheries School in Baltimore, County Cork, in 1922
That anchoring was the first proof positive that Conor O'Brien, with his own-designed Baltimore-built 42ft ketch Saoirse, had become the first yacht – and a small yacht she was by the standards of the day – to sail round the storm focus of Cape Horn at 56 degrees South, after running down his full Easting from New Zealand.
CAPE HORN CONFIRMATION
Reaching Cape Horn – more than 20 degrees further south than the next great Cape of the Southern Ocean – had involved sailing day after vigilant day – sometimes with frustratingly little wind, sometimes with too much, sometimes with head winds - across the trackless wastes of the Southern Sea, among ocean swells of unfeasible size that remained unchecked in height as they rolled endlessly around the world.
Saoirse gets under way from Dun Laoghaire, 20th June 1923
In 1924, although global communications were improving rapidly, a small vessel sailing these waters could only hope that an obliging ship passing nearby, or a properly-manned lighthouse, might pass on a message if contact could be made. But Saoirse and her crew had no opportunity for such a link, and they had no outside contact whatever between the departure from Auckland on October 22nd 1924, until the observed though unexpected arrival to what became a warm welcome in Port Stanley on 6th December.
Morbid as it is to think it, it could just possibly have been the case that even if Saoirse had doubled Cape Horn in classic style, she could yet have foundered or been wrecked before reaching any port, with her great achievement unknown and uncelebrated. But the rattle of her heavy chain in the Port Stanley anchorage in mid-afternoon on 6th December was the defining action. And it was probably the happiest single moment in the sometimes troubled life of Conor O'Brien (1880-1952), who came to regard Foynes Island in the Shannon Estuary as his home in every sense.
CENTENARY COMMEMORATION IN DUN LAOGHAIRE
Yesterday afternoon (Friday, December 6th 2024) was the annual Christmas Lunch (East Coast) of the Irish Cruising Club. Commodore Alan Markey and his members – who include some Cape Horn veterans - were hosted by the Royal Irish Yacht Club, which saw the departure of Saoirse on 20th June 1923 to start her global circuit.
Conor O'Brien in relaxed mood at the helm of Saoirse, southward bound in the Atlantic Ocean
That Centenary was marked at the RIYC in June 2023, and Saoirse's return on June 20th 1925 will be duly marked in June 2025. But there was something special about yesterday's exact Centenary-honouring of an event that so privately and specifically confirmed that the Everest of the Oceans had been conquered.
TRAGIC LINK
There was a tragic piquancy to the almost immediate analogy made suggesting that Conor O'Brien and Saoirse had conquered "the Everest of the Oceans". In his younger days, O'Brien's enthusiasm for mountaineering was greater than his interest in sailing, but his volatile temper on the rock faces – recorded with some amusement by the poet Robert Graves, who was a fellow climber in a group in North Wales – was such that O'Brien was never seen as a true team player.
Mount Everest. In 1924, Conor O'Brien's former climbing companions George Mallory and Sandy Irvine may have managed the first ascent of Everest, but as they died at some stage in the attempt, it can never be confirmed whether or not they achieved the peak. But meanwhile that same year, their frustrated team hopeful Conor O'Brien had focused his attention on ocean voyaging, and made the first proper small craft rounding of Cape Horn. Photo Wikipedia Commons
Thus when the group's top climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine were putting together the elite squad for a Mount Everest expedition in the 1920s, the name of Conor O'Brien was not on any list of potentials, short or long. It may be purely a coincidence that in 1921, O'Brien went off on his own to sail to Scotland in the ketch Kelpie to climb the Cuilins of Skye with a un-named companion who joined at Portree. But this perhaps temporary cutting of ties with Snowdonia resulted in his trying to return south towards Dublin Bay to windward, sailing solo against light headwinds through the North Channel.
It was frustrating and tiring sailing, and at night - off watch for a couple of hours - an ineffective alarm clock meant O'Brien slept on, while the heavy Kelpie came gently but irretrievably ashore on rocks on Scotland's Galloway coast near Portpatrick. The slight but inevitable swell meant the old 1874-built ketch soon started to break up in the dark, and soon had to be abandoned by her lone skipper.
Conor O'Brien's cottage of Barneen on Foynes Island, as seen from the restored Ilen. Photo: Gary Mac Mahon
THE NEW LIFE STARTED IN PORTPATRICK
O'Brien was to arrive out of the morning mist at Portpatrick's little harbour rowing his ship's dinghy, surrounded by his personal possessions. He retreated to Foynes Island to recover, and when his psychological bounce-back started, it was remarkable in speed, strength and determination. By 1922 Tom Moynihan and his team at the Fisheries School Boatyard in Baltimore were building O'Brien's own-designed ocean voyaging 40ft transom-sterned ketch. It was the largest he could afford, but Moynihan insisted on increasing the length for aesthetic and seaworthiness reasons to 42ft with a short characterful counter, and O'Brien – an architect by training - was forever grateful.
Under the original inspiration of Gary Mac Mahon of Limerick, the Conor O'Brien-designed 56ft trading ketch Ilen of 1926 has been brought back to Ireland from the Falklands and restored at Liam Hegarty's boatyard in Oldcourt near Baltimore, while a re-creation of Saoirse (seen here) for Fred Kinmonth has since been built in the same ancient shed, originally a grain store. Photo: W M Nixon
Until the voyage round the world, O'Brien had made no ocean passage whatever, other than aboard a warship during his service with the Royal Naval Reserve, and even that was a mixed experience, as he proved to be a Charter Member of the Awkward Squad in any structured setting organized by someone else.
CAPE HORN GATHERING
Today, the rounding of Cape Horn under sail – sometimes in remarkably small boats – has become almost commonplace. But the recent international gathering of 162 Cape Horners in Portsmouth reminded us that it is still something very special. And although other comparable craft may have been in the Cape Horn region before Conor O'Brien, Saoirse's straightfoward doubling of this epic headland in December 1924 was historic in every meaningful way.
The original Saoirse sailing off the coast of Cornwall while in the ownership of Eric Ruck in the late 1950s. She was lost in a beach in Jamaica in 1979. Photo: Eric Hiscock
It was enhanced down the years by subsequent failed attempts, the most notable being in 1956-57 when voyager/mountaineers Miles & Beryl Smeeton, with their 46ft Bermudan ketch Tzu Hang and one crewman, headed east for Cape Horn after attending the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia. They were twice pitch-poled in two attempts to round the Horn, and had to have Tzu Hang shipped back to England from Chile for restoration.
THE BOOK OF THE VOYAGE
But for Conor O'Brien in 1923-24-25, the need was for publicity to help sales of his book Across Three Oceans about the voyage. As the second son of a land-owning family, his birth in 1880 had coincided with the first of many Land Acts in Ireland which steadily decreased any rental income, however small it might have been for his oldest brother.
The Voyager. Conor O'Brien as portrayed by the artist Kitty Clausen, whom he married in 1928
Landlordism was in any case something he increasingly abhorred, but income from his qualifications as an architect with ecclesiastical applications did not always sit comfortably with his adventuring on hills or at sea. Although he had designed a new rood screen for St Mary's Cathedral in Limerick, it was still not installed when he sailed away, and when Saoirse was approaching Ireland again two years later, it was installed in such haste that when the newly-famous O'Brien was taken to see it, he had to point out that it fitted into the cathedral structure back-to-front.
ACCEPTED CENTRE OF OPINION AND DEVELOPMENT
But in promoting himself as a voyager/author, he was singularly purposeful. In assessing the overall situation, he considered the 1880-established Royal Cruising Club to be the heart of accepted opinion and development. So in 1919 he somehow arranged that he became a member, proposed by Commander Frank Gilliland of Derry whom he'd met through RNR service in the Great War of 1914-q918, and seconded by Erskine Childers with whom he'd closely interacted – despite Childers' misgivings about O'Brien - during the Howth and Kilcoole gun-runnings in 1914.
A jaunty little ship. The re-creation of Saoirse for Fred Kinmonth, berthed in the Ilen River at Oldcourt. Photo: W M Nixon
The extreme oddity of this membership attainment was already evident when Saoirse departed in 1923. For at the same time, Frank Gilliland was on track to become the Aide de Camp to the first Governor of the recently-created Northern Ireland, and was happily engaged in designing his new uniform – it was a cherished hobby he particularly enjoyed. And as for Erskine Childers, having opposed Partition, he was now dead, having been controversially executed in November 1922 by the new Free State Government for being an armed opponent of the Partition-creating Treaty.
SKATING ON THIN ICE
But meanwhile Conor O'Brien skated rapidly on across the thin ice of 1920s Anglo-Irish relations, for being in the RCC meant he could submit his logs for its annual cruising competitions and yearly review.
Through that, he was connected to the real power in the Club and in top-level cruising, RCC Vice Commodore Claud Worth, the notably distinguished ophthalmic surgeon. Despite being very busy professionally, Worth designed his own fine cruisers and supervised their building, having personally selected the timber to go into his future boats when it was still wood in a growing tree.
Renaissance man of sailing and eye surgery – Claud Worth (1869-1936)
Worth's international stature was such that when Bill Nutting set about creating the Cruising Club of America in the early 1920s, the first thing he did was sail across the Atlantic in his ketch Typhoon, and meet Claud Worth in a raft-up to get his approval and support for the establishment of a Cruising Club of America, which was willingly given.
FRIENDLY ATTITUDE TO IRELAND
But Claud Worth's affection for Ireland, and his fond regard for the loose cannon that was Conor O'Brien, seemed to be on another plane altogether. Perhaps we get some insight into it from this page about his 1895 cruise from his book Yacht Cruising, when they were supposed to be sailing clockwise and expeditiously around Great Britain, but couldn't resist a quick diversion westward from the North Channel to cruise Donegal after a tantalizingly short glimpse during an earlier round Ireland cruise.
They are in Mulroy Bay on Donegal's north coast and in a couple of paragraphs, Worth's account goes from the humdrum to the almost lyrical:
Page 77 of Claud Worth's Yacht Cruising, Second Edition 1921. Unlike the rest of it, the second paragraph becomes almost lyrical
In 1921, the quaint words at the end of the second paragraph saying that "there can be no indiscretion in saying that our visitor added a further charm to the picturesque beauty of the scene" was remarkably frank and startling for someone of Worth's background and position. But while that may be more than intriguing for the everyday reader, cruising folk will want to know the practical results of his pilotage research, and here's his sketch – reminiscent of Arthur Ransom's children's books – of Mulroy Bay and Lough in 1895.
The many intricacies of Mulroy Bay in North Donegal, explored in detail by Claud Worth in 1895
Nowadays the character of Mulroy Bay as a cruising ground has changed, and not for the better. There's a high-powered electric cable at only 6 metres guaranteed height across the north end of the Moross Channel into the North Water. And though the Harry Blaney Bridge across the Second Narrows may provide good clearance, it threatens the totally away-from-it all nature of the "Land Between the Waters" close to the north.
DRASCOMBE COUNTRY
Nevertheles the last time we were there, that remoteness seemed to be still evident and the fine bridge certainly was convenient, but for many the appeal of Mulroy is diminished by its modern profusion of profitable fish farms. It's assumed they are prosperous because if they weren't, we'd soon hear a cry for help to sustain these valuable sources of local employment. But either way, Mulroy is probably best explored these days – if at all - in Drascombe style.
THE FOREWORD THAT SAYS EVERYTHING
Meanwhile, returning to Cape Horn and Conor O'Brien and Claud's Worth's support, he continually boosted the Foynes Island skipper's reputation by awarding him the Royal Cruising Club Challenge Cup, the worldwide senior of all cruising and voyaging trophies, in 1923,'24 & '25. And and when asked to provide the foreword for Across Three Ocean, he waxed lyrical again about all things Irish with these timeless and heartfelt words that say everything:
"Anyone who knows anything of the sea, following the course of the vessel day by day on the chart, will realize the good seamanship, vigilance and endurance required to drive this little bluff-bowed vessel, with her foul uncoppered bottom, at speeds of 150 to 170 miles a day, as well as the weight of wind and sea which must sometimes have been encountered…..
….. however common long ocean voyages in small yachts may become, Mr O'Brien will always be remembered for his voyage across the South Pacific and round the Horn."
Amen to that.
Slipping along. Conor O'Brien delighted in traditional rigs, and when the engine-less Saoirse had her square-sail set, if the winds were light she could also set classic stunsails.
