Africa’s famous cape is not actually the continent’s tip
The Cape of Good Hope is a rocky Atlantic headland on South Africa’s Cape Peninsula—not the continent’s southernmost point, which is Cape Agulhas about 150 kilometres farther east. Sailors still call it simply “the Cape,” a hinge on clipper and Cape routes toward Asia and Australia.
People often think this headland divides the Atlantic from the Indian Ocean. It does not. The real oceanic seam is a shifting boundary where warm Agulhas water flowing south runs into the chilly Benguela and turns around, and that boundary wanders between Cape Agulhas and Cape Point, which lies about 1.2 kilometres east of the Cape of Good Hope.
Its real significance is directional. Sailing south along Africa's Atlantic shore from the equator, a vessel rounding this point finds its course swinging from mostly southward to mostly eastward. That is why Bartolomeu Dias's rounding in 1487, the first in modern times, was such a milestone in Portugal's effort to trade directly with the Far East. Dias named it the Cape of Storms. It remains a waypoint on the Cape Route and on the clipper route to the Far East and Australia, and several offshore yacht races still pass it.
Earlier voyages may have beaten Dias. Around 600 BC the pharaoh Necho II reputedly sent Phoenician crews on a three-year voyage that left the Red Sea, circled the continent and came home by way of the Nile. Herodotus doubted their report that the sun stood on their right as they sailed west around the continent's southern end, a detail that ironically makes the story more believable. Pliny credited Hanno with circling Africa, perhaps a mix-up with Necho's voyage, while Strabo, Polybius and Ptolemy were sceptical. Around 116 BC the navigator Eudoxus of Cyzicus, returning from India, found a wreck that seemed to come from Gades, modern Cádiz, which could have reached the Indian Ocean only by rounding the Cape.
The name has stretched far beyond the rock. A slice of Table Mountain National Park, formerly a separate reserve around Cape Point, carries it. So did the settlement the Dutch East India Company planted in 1652, the British colony that existed in two spells, 1795–1802 and 1806–1910, and the province formed when South Africa united in 1910.
Source: Cape of Good Hope
