It is hard to believe amid all the traffic, but a century ago the sea was right here. The shoreline ran along today's Strand Street, the ‘Beach Street’, and everything you see towards the harbour is land reclaimed from the bay in the 20th century. The statue of Jan van Riebeeck, given to the city by Cecil Rhodes in 1899, commemorates the landing of April 1652.

1The Cape of Storms

Before the Dutch arrived, this tip of Africa already had a reputation. Tradition holds that the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias, the first European to round it in 1488, named it the Cape of Storms, and that King John II renamed it the Cape of Good Hope. Dias died in May 1500 when a tempest sank his ship off the Cape. His statue stands further down the boulevard.

2The captain who would not give in

From those waters came the legend of the Flying Dutchman. The first written reference dates from 1790: a traveller reports that in foul weather sailors claimed to see a Dutch ship that had been unable to reach port. In 1821 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine gave the captain a name, Van der Decken, and the oath that damned him.

He swore he would round the Cape even if he had to keep trying until the Day of Judgement. And so he does still, the legend says.

Wagner turned the story into an opera in 1843, and to this day some people claim to have seen, on stormy nights, a ship bathed in a reddish glow.

3What to look for

  • The statue of Van Riebeeck, gazing towards a bay you can no longer see.
  • The name Heerengracht, ‘Gentlemen's Canal’, as in Amsterdam: a canal once ran here.
  • The boulevard towards the harbour, built entirely on land won from the sea.
Painting of the Flying Dutchman: a sailing ship in a storm and a phantom vessel
‘The Flying Dutchman’ by Charles Temple Dix (19th century).

Documented

The Van Riebeeck statue was unveiled in 1899, a gift from Cecil Rhodes; Dias died in a storm off the Cape in 1500, and the Flying Dutchman legend first appears in print in 1790.

Oral tradition

The name ‘Cape of Storms’ attributed to Dias and Captain Van der Decken's phantom ship belong to tradition and literature.

Sources and credits

John MacDonald, ‘Travels in Various Parts of Europe, Asia and Africa’ (1790); ‘Vanderdecken's Message Home’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (May 1821); South African History Online (SAHO), ‘Jan van Riebeeck's statue unveiled’ (18 May 1899).

Photos:

  • Bronze statue of Jan van Riebeeck on the Heerengracht: Fritz Joubert, CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • Painting of the Flying Dutchman: a sailing ship in a storm and a phantom vessel: Charles Temple Dix, Dominio público.

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