Around 600 BC,
Necho II reputedly commissioned an expedition of
Phoenicians, who are said to have sailed for three years from the Red Sea around Africa back to the mouth of the Nile; and this would thereby be the first completion of the
Cape Route. Herodotus' account was handed down to him by
oral tradition, but is seen as potentially credible because he stated with disbelief that the Phoenicians "as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya (Africa), they had the sun on their right"—to the north of them (
The Histories 4.42). Pliny reported that
Hanno had circumnavigated Africa, which may have been a conflation with Necho's voyage, while
Strabo,
Polybius, and
Ptolemy doubted the description;
at the time it was not generally known that Africa was surrounded by an ocean (with the southern part of Africa being thought connected to Asia).
Eudoxus of Cyzicus ( ) was a
Greek navigator for
Ptolemy VIII, king of the
Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty in
Egypt. In or about 116 BCE, while returning from a voyage to India, Eudoxus found the wreck of a ship that appeared to have originated in
Gades (later Cádiz), in what was then Roman
Hispania Baetica. At the time, the only way such a vessel could have reached the
Indian Ocean was by rounding the Cape. When Eudoxus was returning from his second voyage to India, the wind forced him south of the
Gulf of Aden and down the coast of Africa for some distance. Somewhere along the coast of East Africa, he found the remains of the ship. Due to its appearance and the story told by the natives, Eudoxus concluded that the ship was from Gades and had sailed anti-clockwise around Africa, passing the Cape and entering the Indian Ocean. This inspired him to repeat the voyage and attempt a
circumnavigation of the continent. Organising the expedition on his own account, he set sail from Gades and began to work down the African coast. The difficulties were too great, however, and he was obliged to return to Europe. After this failure, he again set out to circumnavigate Africa. His eventual fate is unknown. Although some, such as
Pliny, claimed that Eudoxus did achieve his goal, the most probable conclusion is that he died on the journey. In the 1450
Fra Mauro map, the Indian Ocean is depicted as connected to the Atlantic. Fra Mauro puts the following inscription by the southern tip of Africa, which he names the "Cape of Diab", describing the exploration by a ship from the East around 1420: that navigate in the Indian Ocean. Fra Mauro explained that he obtained the information from "a trustworthy source", who traveled with the expedition, possibly the Venetian explorer
Niccolò da Conti who happened to be in
Calicut,
India at the time the expedition left: Fra Mauro also comments that the account of the expedition, together with the relation by
Strabo of the travels of
Eudoxus of Cyzicus from
Arabia to
Gibraltar through the southern Ocean in
Antiquity, led him to believe that the
Indian Ocean was not a closed sea and that
Africa could be circumnavigated by her southern end (Text from Fra Mauro map, 11, G2). This knowledge, together with the map depiction of the African continent, probably encouraged the Portuguese to intensify their effort to round the tip of Africa. In 1511, after
Afonso de Albuquerque conquered
Malacca, the
Portuguese recovered a chart from a
Javanese maritime pilot, which, according to Albuquerque, already included the Cape of Good Hope. Regarding the chart Albuquerque said:
European exploration Name origin '', ) In the
Early Modern Era, the first European to reach the cape was the Portuguese explorer
Bartolomeu Dias on 12 March 1488, who named it the "Cape of Storms" (). It was later renamed by
John II of Portugal as "Cape of Good Hope" () because of the great optimism engendered by the opening of a sea route to
India and the East. The Dutch called them
Hottentots, a term that has now come to be regarded as pejorative. In 1652, the
Dutch East India Company's administrator
Jan van Riebeeck established a resupply camp for the
Dutch East India Company some 50 km north of the cape in
Table Bay on April 6, and this eventually developed into
Cape Town. Supplies of fresh food were vital on the long journey around Africa and Cape Town became known as "The Tavern of the Seas".
The French refugees in the Cape Colony On 31 December 1687, a community of
Huguenots (French Protestants) arrived at the Cape of Good Hope from the Netherlands. They had fled from France due to religious persecution and gone to the Netherlands, before making the journey to the Cape Colony. Members of this group included
Pierre Joubert, who came from
La Motte-d'Aigues, as well as
Jean Roy. The Dutch East India Company needed skilled farmers at the Cape of Good Hope and the Dutch government saw opportunities to settle Huguenots at the Cape. The colony gradually grew over the 150 years that followed until it extended hundreds of kilometers to the north and the north-east.
The European coalitions and Napoleonic wars effect on the Cape Colony During the
French Revolutionary Wars, the Dutch Republic was occupied by the French in 1795. The Cape Colony then became a French vassal and enemy of the British, who were at war with France. British troops invaded and occupied the Cape Colony that same year. The British relinquished control of the territory in 1803, under the
peace of Amiens, but reoccupied the colony on 19 January 1806 following the
Battle of Blaauwberg. The Dutch formally ceded the territory to the British in the
Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814. It would remain a separate British colony until its incorporation into the
Union of South Africa in 1910.
Routes explorations and commemorations The Portuguese government erected two navigational beacons,
Dias Cross and
da Gama Cross, to commemorate
Bartolomeu Dias and
Vasco da Gama, who were the first modern European explorers to reach the cape. When lined up, these crosses point to
Whittle Rock, a large, permanently submerged shipping hazard in
False Bay. Two other beacons in
Simon's Town provide the intersection.
Contemporary The Cape of Good Hope saw an increase of ship activity after the
2021 Suez canal obstruction, and the
Red Sea Crisis with ships needing a different route from the
Indian Ocean. The Cape of Good Hope route took a toll on the sea freight industry—stretching the transit time, reducing carriers availability, and skyrocketing shipment cost and container hire. Carriers' attempts to resort to the Red Sea route came at the expense of vessels and seafarers' safety as the Red Sea witnessed multiple sunken carriers struck by
Houthi rebels. Many large shipping companies and industries were afflicted by the situation such as
IKEA,
Amazon, Automotive companies, and
Maersk. == Geography ==