Stock Photo - Views of the Drake Passage, the body of water between the southern tip of South America at Cape Horn, Chile and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica It connects the southwestern part of the Atlantic Ocean Scotia Sea with the southeastern part of the Pacific Ocean and extends into the Southern Ocean The passage is named after the 16th century English privateer Sir Francis Drake, whose only remaining ship after passing through the Strait of Magellan was blown far South in September 1578 and who inferred an open connection of the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean Half a century earlier, after a gale had pushed them South from the entrance of the Strait of Magellan, the crew of the Spanish navigator Francisco de Hoces thought they saw a land´s end and possibly inferred this passage in 1525 For this reason, some Spanish and Latin American historians and sources call it Mar de Hoces after Francisco de Hoces The first recorded voyage through the passage was that of the Eendracht, captained by the Dutch navigator Willem Schouten in 1616, naming Cape Horn in the process The 800 km 500 miles wide passage between Cape Horn and Greenwich Island is the shortest crossing from Antarctica to the rest of the world´s land The boundary between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans is sometimes taken to be a line drawn from Cape Horn to Snow Island 130 km 80 miles north of mainland Antarctica Alternatively the meridian that passes through Cape Horn may be taken as the boundary Both boundaries lie entirely within the Drake Passage There is no significant land anywhere around the world at the latitudes of the Drake Passage, which is important to the unimpeded flow of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current which carries a huge volume of water about 600 times the flow of the Amazon River through the Passage and around Antarctica