The Cape of Storms

It was not Vasco da Gama who first rounded the Cape of Storms, in 1497, later renamed the Cape of Good Hope. Nor was it Bartolomeu Dias, nine years earlier, in 1488. The first to sail around the southern tip of Africa were not Portuguese at all.

So who was it? Search online or open the history books and most will tell you it was Gama. Look closely, though, and you will see the careful wording: Gama was the first European, and the Portuguese the first Europeans, to open the sea route to India. Dias, likewise, is the first European to round the Cape.

A voyage 2,000 years earlier

That precision has a reason. It was the Egyptians, with Phoenician crews, who first sailed around Africa, and so around the Cape of Storms. They did it about two thousand years before the Portuguese, around 600 BC, soon after the Pharaoh Necho II abandoned his canal between the Nile and the Red Sea. Our source is Herodotus, the father of history (c. 484 to 425 BC). In Book IV of his Histories he writes that Necho sent Phoenicians out by ship with orders to come home through the Pillars of Hercules. Sailing from the Red Sea into the southern ocean, they put ashore each autumn wherever they were, sowed wheat, waited for the harvest and then sailed on. In the third year they passed the Pillars of Hercules and returned to Egypt.

The sun on the wrong side

The detail Herodotus could not believe is the one that convinces us. The sailors reported that as they went around Libya, as Africa was then called, they had the sun on their right. Herodotus doubted it, since in his day the Earth was not thought to be round. Yet that is exactly what you would see sailing westward around the bottom of Africa, south of the equator, with the land always on your right. It is the proof that they really rounded the Cape.

If it amazes us that fifteenth-century Portuguese sailors made the voyage in their small caravels, it is more astonishing still that Egyptian ships, cruder even with Phoenician know-how and driven mostly by oars, managed it two millennia earlier.

The longest voyage

Since the Egyptians were Africans, Gama, Dias and the Portuguese were the first Europeans to round Africa, opening the sea route to India and an age of global empire. It came at a cost: the violence of Gama and those who followed gave the Portuguese a brutal reputation among the kingdoms of India. The Cape route let Portugal avoid the contested Mediterranean and the dangers of crossing Arabia, and the distances covered on Gama’s outward and return journeys made his the longest ocean voyage ever made until then.

He may not have been the first, but the credit for the longest voyage is his.

Pedro