Spain preferred to sail cargo to one coast of Panama and then haul it more than fifty miles across the sweltering, disease-ridden jungle to ships waiting on the opposite coast. Anything to avoid tempting the Horn. Herman Melville, who made the passage, compared it, in White-Jacket, to the descent into hell in Dante’s Inferno. “At those ends of the earth are no chronicles,” Melville wrote, except for the ruins of spars and hulls that hint of dark endings—“of ships that have sailed from their ports, and never more have been heard of.”
