Last Monday, I fulfilled a longstanding wish by visiting the Cape of Storms at the southwestern tip of Africa. The morning was appropriately blustery, and we had to tread carefully on the Cape’s uneven shore-side rocks to avoid being blown off balance. Among the dozens of seabirds riding the gusts, a lone gull tried to fight the current, flapping its wings furiously before admitting defeat and being thrown back dozens of meters. The cliffs rising from the shore, eroded by the merciless air, were as bare as naked brick buildings. Hardy bushes grew on the sheltered side, and a little inland where the wind was less hostile.
It was easy to understand how hundreds of ships and thousands of sailors had perished over the centuries trying to cross this treacherous stretch of water where two oceans met, how gales had made masts shake and timbers creak and driven struggling crews inexorably onto fatal rocks. It was here that the Flying Dutchman was said to have run aground, here that generations of petrified sailors swore they had seen its ghost crew emerge out of the clouds.
The place is better known as the Cape of Good Hope, but that’s as misleading a term as Greenland, at the other extremity of the inhabited world. They say a Norwegian named Erik the Red colonised the frigid island between Europe and the Americas a thousand years ago, and named it Greenland to encourage more settlers to travel to the icy mass. Did he greet the bewildered Norsemen who followed him there with a loud, “Fooled ya!”, I wonder? They say Leif Erikson, Erik the Red’s son, sailed further yet to the west, becoming the first European to step onto American soil. Even if he did get to Canada, though, his achievement is meaningless, for the nature of a discovery matters less than its consequences. Five hundred years after Erikson, Christopher Columbus became without doubt the last man to discover America, and without doubt the most consequential.
A quest for India
Columbus, we know, was trying to find a route to India, in order to go on to China and seek an audience with the Great Khan whose magnificent court Marco Polo had described 200 years previously. When Marco Polo met Khubilai Khan, the earth was flat. By the time Columbus sailed, the Mongol Khans had been overthrown, and the earth had become a globe. Columbus bet his life and that of his sailors on the earth’s sphericity, and though his belief was correct, his calculations were not. Fortunately for him, there was a massive landmass waiting to be found while sailing west from Europe to India.
Columbus’s peers attempted the more conventional method of getting to the east by travelling east. After the Turks conquered Constantinople, Europeans had to pay them heavily to import Asian pepper, spices and silks. Gaining a ship-full of these goods by sailing around Africa was a prize worth the risk. For decades, Portuguese caravels crawled ever further down the West African coast, and in 1488 an aristocrat named Bartolomeu Dias sailed south and east to the point that his ship pointed more east than south, and then pointed east and north. He named the corner he had turned Cabo das Tormentas, which is much more evocative than its English version, Cabo das Tormentass. The southernmost tip of the continent is actually Cape Algulhas some miles to the east of the Cabo das Tormentas, but it’s placid and uninteresting in comparison.
Brimming with optimism
They say Phoenicians had rounded the Cape centuries before Dias. Admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch in the Ming court, certainly made the journey the other way round, and returned to China with leopards, ostriches and giraffes, only to find an emperor disinterested in the world beyond the Middle Kingdom. Those who followed Dias, on the other hand, notably his colleague Vasco da Gama, inaugurated the gradual takeover by Europe of South and East Asia, imbuing his paltry curve with more significance than Zheng He’s magnificent African voyages. The Portuguese king was pleased enough to give the Cape of Storms a more optimistic name. The switch in nomenclature didn’t help Dias, whose ship ran aground a few years after his first African voyage near the spot with which he will forever be associated. He never managed to get beyond what is now the Republic of South Africa, but he turned the most crucial corner in the history of the world.
There were a few visitors already at the Cape’s southernmost point when we got there, and more spilling out of tour buses and rented self-driven vehicles. Happily, the place allowed us to block each other out, if we so desired, and imagine ourselves into the past. Some sites are so transformed by time and human intervention that no amount of dreaming can summon up their history. But the hills, rocks, bushes, birds and surf at the Cape of Storms appeared little changed since the time of Zheng He and Dias, and it was possible to conjure up a caravel in the distance struggling to keep its course despite adverse winds, and changing history’s course in the process.
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It was easy to understand how hundreds of ships and thousands of sailors had perished over the centuries trying to cross this treacherous stretch of water where two oceans met, how gales had made masts shake and timbers creak and driven struggling crews inexorably onto fatal rocks. It was here that the Flying Dutchman was said to have run aground, here that generations of petrified sailors swore they had seen its ghost crew emerge out of the clouds.
The place is better known as the Cape of Good Hope, but that’s as misleading a term as Greenland, at the other extremity of the inhabited world. They say a Norwegian named Erik the Red colonised the frigid island between Europe and the Americas a thousand years ago, and named it Greenland to encourage more settlers to travel to the icy mass. Did he greet the bewildered Norsemen who followed him there with a loud, “Fooled ya!”, I wonder? They say Leif Erikson, Erik the Red’s son, sailed further yet to the west, becoming the first European to step onto American soil. Even if he did get to Canada, though, his achievement is meaningless, for the nature of a discovery matters less than its consequences. Five hundred years after Erikson, Christopher Columbus became without doubt the last man to discover America, and without doubt the most consequential.
A quest for India
Columbus, we know, was trying to find a route to India, in order to go on to China and seek an audience with the Great Khan whose magnificent court Marco Polo had described 200 years previously. When Marco Polo met Khubilai Khan, the earth was flat. By the time Columbus sailed, the Mongol Khans had been overthrown, and the earth had become a globe. Columbus bet his life and that of his sailors on the earth’s sphericity, and though his belief was correct, his calculations were not. Fortunately for him, there was a massive landmass waiting to be found while sailing west from Europe to India.
Columbus’s peers attempted the more conventional method of getting to the east by travelling east. After the Turks conquered Constantinople, Europeans had to pay them heavily to import Asian pepper, spices and silks. Gaining a ship-full of these goods by sailing around Africa was a prize worth the risk. For decades, Portuguese caravels crawled ever further down the West African coast, and in 1488 an aristocrat named Bartolomeu Dias sailed south and east to the point that his ship pointed more east than south, and then pointed east and north. He named the corner he had turned Cabo das Tormentas, which is much more evocative than its English version, Cabo das Tormentass. The southernmost tip of the continent is actually Cape Algulhas some miles to the east of the Cabo das Tormentas, but it’s placid and uninteresting in comparison.
Brimming with optimism
They say Phoenicians had rounded the Cape centuries before Dias. Admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch in the Ming court, certainly made the journey the other way round, and returned to China with leopards, ostriches and giraffes, only to find an emperor disinterested in the world beyond the Middle Kingdom. Those who followed Dias, on the other hand, notably his colleague Vasco da Gama, inaugurated the gradual takeover by Europe of South and East Asia, imbuing his paltry curve with more significance than Zheng He’s magnificent African voyages. The Portuguese king was pleased enough to give the Cape of Storms a more optimistic name. The switch in nomenclature didn’t help Dias, whose ship ran aground a few years after his first African voyage near the spot with which he will forever be associated. He never managed to get beyond what is now the Republic of South Africa, but he turned the most crucial corner in the history of the world.
There were a few visitors already at the Cape’s southernmost point when we got there, and more spilling out of tour buses and rented self-driven vehicles. Happily, the place allowed us to block each other out, if we so desired, and imagine ourselves into the past. Some sites are so transformed by time and human intervention that no amount of dreaming can summon up their history. But the hills, rocks, bushes, birds and surf at the Cape of Storms appeared little changed since the time of Zheng He and Dias, and it was possible to conjure up a caravel in the distance struggling to keep its course despite adverse winds, and changing history’s course in the process.
