The Peking Battles Cape Horn

It's a voyage you'll never forget, from the winter North Sea gales that nearly drove the ship ashore, to the Cape Horn snorters that punished the Peking so severely that a whole section of her strong steel side was driven in.

"That taught me to learn forward forward into life," said Irving Johnson later, and in this edition of a sea classic, he looks back on the voyage from the perspective of a long and adventurous career at sea, adding depth and new meaning to a voyage that was the experience of a lifetime.

The brave men and able ships that fought their way round Cape Horn, the dread headland at the tip of South America known to generations of sailormen as "Cape Stiff," come vividly to life in this classic confrontation.