In his book The Long Way, Bernard Moitessier tries to express the significance to a sailor of the great capes:

A sailor’s geography is not always that of the cartographer, for whom a cape is a cape, with a latitude and longitude. For the sailor, a great cape is both a very simple and an extremely complicated whole of rocks, currents, breaking seas and huge waves, fair winds and gales, joys and fears, fatigue, dreams, painful hands, empty stomachs, wonderful moments, and suffering at times.

A great cape, for us, can’t be expressed in longitude and latitude alone. A great cape has a soul, with very soft, very violent shadows and colours. A soul as smooth as a child’s, as hard as a criminal’s. And that is why we go.

You never understand just what a cape (the geographical feature) is until you’ve rounded one, under sail. Under powered navigation, its just a spot on the chart to be avoided, there are rocks and currents there, shoals, fluky winds and other other dangers, so you give it a wide berth and try to avoid getting too close.

But under sail, its very different. No longer a physical location, a fixed hazard, some sort of inflection point in the coastline (usually conveniently marked with a lighthouse) but a living breathing thing. It is your enemy, a menace, it is out to get you. A cape is a monster, it eats ships, here there be dragons, Scylla and Charybdis, where your naked ears are tortured by the sirens sweetly singing.

Under power you just steam around it, well offshore, but under sail it reaches out to you, you can feel its hunger, its evil. It draws you in.

The wind always seems against you, the current pushes you back, and it always seems to be to your lee. No matter how carefully you plan your approach, it always demands an extra tack, or two or three, to round it. And when you do round it, it is always closer aboard than you had originally planned. The wide safety margin you had left for yourself has shrunken to the bare minimum. Nobody sleeps, everyone’s on deck, and you invariably spend too much time staring through your glass at it–a distant headland where the waves crash and leap into the sky.

Its like climbing a great hill, exhausting, demoralizing, even terrifying. And when you do clear it, when you finally round the cape, the ship seems to sigh in relief, the sheets are loosened, the wind backs, and the sea seems to flatten out to welcome you and reward you for facing down the danger. I know its all in your mind, but the sea and the weather always seems different, kinder, on the other side. From now on its downhill all the way. The skipper feels like he is entitled to go below and get some rest and to let the watch take her on from here.

On the chart they may not look like much, but from the water they are the edges of the Earth, where the ships fall off. There is no doubt they are there, although their exact location is never quite clear. The old timers used to get an earring to celebrate rounding Cape Horn. On the left ear, for the downwind run. On the right ear if they had to claw their way westward, uphill, to windward.

That’s why the great capes all have names, Horn, Good Hope,
and on our own Atlantic Seaboard, the big four: Canaveral, Fear, Lookout and Hatteras, all of them graveyards of ships. On the California Coast, sailors always know when they’ve rounded Cape Concepcion. Going South, the hard part of the passage is over. Going North, its just beginning.