The Drake Passage is named after Sir Francis Drake, the English privateer and explorer who sailed through the waters south of Tierra del Fuego in 1578 during his circumnavigation of the globe. The naming is somewhat ironic, though, because Drake never intentionally crossed the passage. He was blown there by violent storms, and the body of water already had an earlier European claimant to its name.
How Drake Ended Up There by Accident
In 1577, Drake set out from England with a small fleet on what would become the second circumnavigation of the world. By August 1578, his ships entered the Strait of Magellan, the narrow channel cutting through the southern tip of South America that was the known route into the Pacific. The fleet made it through in 16 days.
What happened next was unplanned. Ferocious storms hit as soon as the ships entered the Pacific, scattering and destroying the small fleet. One ship was lost entirely. Another, the Elizabeth, became separated and turned back through the Strait to limp home to England. Drake was left entirely alone, with no reserve vessel. The storms drove his ship, the Golden Hind, far south of Tierra del Fuego into the open water between South America and Antarctica.
This accidental detour turned out to be geographically significant. Drake realized that the massive southern continent European mapmakers had drawn, called Terra Australis, did not extend into this area as widely assumed. There was open ocean here, not land. That insight reshaped European understanding of the world’s geography, and the passage eventually took his name in English-speaking cartographic tradition.
The Spanish Say It Has a Different Name
More than 50 years before Drake’s storm-tossed voyage, a Spanish expedition may have already found this same stretch of open water. In 1525, a fleet of seven ships set out from Spain under the command of García Jofre de Loaísa. One of those ships, the San Lesmes, was captained by Francisco de Hoces. During the voyage, Hoces and his crew are believed to have been the first Europeans to discover the passage to the Pacific around what is now Cape Horn.
In Spanish-speaking countries, the passage is still called Mar de Hoces (Sea of Hoces) in honor of that earlier voyage. The Center for Maritime Strategy notes that “while he gave his name to what had been christened as Sea of Hoces, Drake did not cross it during his own circumnavigation,” a pointed reminder that naming rights in exploration often went to whoever had the better publicists. English-language maps cemented “Drake Passage,” and that’s the name used in most international contexts today.
The First Intentional Crossing
Neither Hoces nor Drake deliberately sailed through the passage as a planned route. The first people to do that on record were Dutch navigators Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire. On January 31, 1616, their ship the Eendracht rounded what they named Cape Hoorn (now Cape Horn) in hail, rain, cold weather, and enormous waves. It was the first documented rounding of the southern tip of South America by open sea, proving the passage was a viable, if terrifying, alternative to the Strait of Magellan.
What Makes the Passage So Notorious
The Drake Passage stretches roughly 850 kilometers (about 530 miles) between the southern tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula. It connects the southeastern Pacific Ocean to the southwestern Atlantic, and it is one of the roughest stretches of open water on Earth. The seafloor drops to depths approaching 6,000 meters in places.
The reason it’s so violent is straightforward: this is the narrowest bottleneck through which the Antarctic Circumpolar Current must squeeze. That current is the largest ocean current on the planet, carrying an average of about 141 million cubic meters of water per second through the passage. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly 600 times the flow of the Amazon River. All of that water is being funneled through a relatively narrow gap, and with no continental landmass anywhere at these latitudes to slow the winds, storms build unimpeded as they circle the globe.
Waves in the passage are consistently large, and conditions shift rapidly. Sailors historically divided crossings into the “Drake Lake” (a rare calm crossing) and the “Drake Shake” (the far more common experience of massive swells and gale-force winds). Modern cruise ships heading to Antarctica still cross the passage, and even with stabilizers and weather forecasting, two days of heavy rolling seas remain the norm.
Why the Passage Matters Beyond Navigation
The Drake Passage isn’t just a sailor’s nightmare. It plays an outsized role in Earth’s climate system. Before the passage existed, South America and Antarctica were connected, and ocean currents flowed in very different patterns. Tectonic plates gradually pulled the two continents apart, with estimates for when the passage fully opened ranging from 49 to 17 million years ago. Analysis of ancient sediment chemistry from the Southern Ocean suggests that shallow Pacific seawater began flowing through the gap around 41 million years ago.
Once the passage opened, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current could flow uninterrupted around Antarctica. This thermally isolated the continent, cutting it off from warmer waters to the north and allowing the massive ice sheets that define Antarctica today to form. The opening of the Drake Passage is one of the key events in Earth’s long-term cooling over the past 40 million years.
The waters themselves are biologically productive. The continental margins on either side of the passage have surface nutrient concentrations roughly 50% higher than the open water in the center, driven by upwelling and shelf-edge processes that fuel phytoplankton growth. That productivity supports dense populations of krill, which in turn feed whales, seals, penguins, and seabirds. The Drake Passage is effectively the gateway to one of the most biologically rich marine ecosystems on the planet.