Cape of Good Hope: The Cape of Storms, Crab-Eating Baboons, Red Sea Detours

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The Cape of Good Hope is not Africa's southern tip. That is Cape Agulhas, about 150 kilometers to the east southeast, where the warm Agulhas current meets the cold Benguela current and breeds hurricane force winds and waves up to ten stories high. The rocky peninsula matters because it is where ships stop heading south and start heading east. Around 600 BC, Pharaoh Necho II reportedly sent Phoenician sailors on a three year voyage around Africa, and Herodotus doubted their claim that the sun was on their right, the very detail that now suggests they crossed deep into the southern hemisphere. Around 130 BC, Eudoxus of Cyzicus found a wreck with a carved horse head from Gades, modern Cadiz, on the East African coast. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias named the headland the Cape of Storms, and King John II of Portugal renamed it the Cape of Good Hope to win over investors and crews.

In 1652 the Dutch East India Company sent Jan van Riebeeck to build a supply post at Table Bay, the start of Cape Town, the Tavern of the Seas. Fencing off grazing land brought war and smallpox to the Khoikhoi, herders who had lived there for about 1,500 years. Huguenots arrived in 1687, Britain took the Cape after the Battle of Blaauwberg in 1806, and it joined the Union of South Africa in 1910. The Suez Canal sidelined the route in 1869, but the 2021 canal blockage and the 2024 Red Sea crisis sent ships from Maersk, Ikea, and Amazon back around the Cape, adding three to four weeks and causing a shortage of shipping containers.

• The 1450 Fra Mauro map describes an Indian junk blown about 2,000 miles past the Cape around 1420.
• The Cape Floristic Kingdom, the smallest of six, holds 1,100 native plant species on the peninsula alone.
• Many fynbos seeds wait for smoke chemicals called karrikins to signal it is time to germinate.
• Chacma baboons here forage in the freezing intertidal zone for shellfish and crabs.
• Luis de Camoes invented the storm giant Adamastor for the Cape in his 1572 epic poem.