Action off the Cape of Good Hope by Samuel Scott

The English twice took over the Cape Colony at the southern end of Africa, first in the late 18th Century and then in the early 19th when they came to stay. Both times, it was part of the war with the French. Both times, the intent was to secure an important refueling spot on the sea route to India, and to secure the route against enemy shipping.

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) had the first of these goals very much in mind when they founded the colony in the 17th century, nearly 200 years after the first Europeans sailed into the region.

In the fifteen century, the Silk Roads — the land route for trade with the East — was becoming more difficult for European traders. The captain of that first expedition, Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias  called the point off which the route turned East Cabo de Boa Esperanca, the Cape of Good Hope, because he hoped the route would clear the way to India, avoiding the land route. The name was bestowed on the way back. Stormy conditions meant he didn’t see the Cape on his way east, but once he had sailed far enough to confirm that the coast had turned to head northeast, he returned, and had a clearer view on the way back.

The Cape is the point at which a warm current from the Indian Ocean meets a cool current from the Antarctic, so storms are common and dangerous, which won the Cape its other name, Cape of Storms.

Problems and miscommunications with the local people, the Khoi, made the Portugese wary, and it was another 100 years before the Dutch took the plunge and founded a settlement on the west coast just north of the Cape of Good Hope.  The VOC initially intended a supply station, but when company servants asked for dispensation to set up private farms, they changed their minds. They brought in slaves and settlers, and built a fort to protect the colonists from invasion.

In 1795, the French took over the Netherlands, and the exiled Prince of Orange asked his English hosts to secure the colony, which they cheerfully did, gave it back when a peace was signed, then reinvaded after Napoleon took over the Netherlands again.

This time, they were there to stay, with many more storms in their future.

(I’ve been half living in the Cape colony in 1812 all this month. My hero is stationed there as part of the naval force patrolling the waters.)