Hope

If anybody asks you, “What Is the Southernmost point of Africa?” you would probably say “The Cape of Good Hope.” And you probably identify that location with the City of Cape Town, South Africa. But you would be a little off. Cape Town is located at a point which the earliest Portuguese explorers called the “Cape of Storms.” But their King, John II, after receiving their report, decided on a more optimistic name, because rounding that point signified a true opening of the route to the Far East. So it became the Cape of Good Hope and is more or less the site of the modern City of Cape Town.

But what about the real Southernmost point? That is actually a place called Cape Agulhas, which is some 90 miles south of Cape Town. I have been there, and I can tell you that the whole area has nothing particularly to recommend it to the visitor.

About Cape Town itself, however, I have a much more positive feeling. First, let me tell you how I got there. I was then a much younger and more adventurous person – and I had a wife, named Dorothy, who also loved to travel. We were living in San Francisco. But I had always wanted to visit Cape Town, ever since I’d learned at school that it was in one of the few geographical areas, apart from the Mediterranean itself, which had what was termed a Mediterranean type of climate – which I found particularly agreeable. The others were on the southwest coast of South America, and the southwest coast of Australia, around Perth – and, of course, Southern California.

But to me (as the storied shipping and cruise line Cunard used to say), “Getting there is half the fun.” And getting to Cape Town would not be much fun, if it just involved a couple of airplane flights. I thought it would be more interesting to go as directly as possible. Looking at a globe and stretching a piece of string from San Francisco to Cape Town, you could see that the most direct route would go right across the widest part of South America, more or less following the Amazon River, to its outlet at Belem, on the coast of Brazil. There would then only be the problem of getting across the South Atlantic.

So that was what we actually did – taking a German freighter down to Colombia, then connecting with a riverboat (which required more patience than we expected), and finally boarding another German freighter across to South Africa. The whole journey took something like three months.

Being a passenger on a freighter is unlike life on a cruise ship. We sat at the same large dining table as the Captain and the crew. But you can’t expect much in the way of entertainment. I spent many hours walking on a deck where my main companion was a large albatross in flight, who seemed to enjoy following the ship. 

Cape Town proved to be even more worth a visit than we expected. First, it is spectacularly beautiful, spreading up from the harbor to a great steep plateau called Table Mountain, the top of which could be reached by a cable car.

Because of its convenient location as a stopping-place, Cape Town has traditionally been known as the “Tavern of the Seas.” The inhabitants are a mixture of races. But, at the time we were there, the whole country was still governed under a system called “Apartheid,” or “Apartness.” Nelson Mandela, future President of the country, was still in prison.

Apartheid’s general purpose was to keep the “White” and “Non-White” races apart. This did not apply in the big department stores and on the streets. We did once, however, see it in practice in an odd way.

My wife had a maritime ancestor who had died at sea but was buried in Cape Town. After seeking – and failing to find – the headstone in the oldest local cemetery, we had been directed to a small office of what was called the Cape Cemeteries Board. Its furnishings consisted of a single table with a line down the middle; one side labeled “Whites,” and the other “Non-Whites.” It was manned by just one official, who, after consulting some files, couldn’t help us.

Concerning Hope, my own big one had been to travel north, up through the middle of Africa, to Cairo. But a letter came saying my application for U.S. citizenship required my urgent return. I’m still waiting for another chance to fulfil that Hope.