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Updated: June 5, 2025
This part of the coast is well lighted, and it was always a matter of felicitation at night when, every eighty miles or so, the guiding rays of a lighthouse shone out in the soft gloom of the starlight night. One of these lonely towers stands more than eight hundred feet above the sea-level, and warns ships off the terrible Agulhas Bank.
And the flat-iron, constructed, as has been before said, solely for the defense of rivers, met the great roll off Cape Agulhas and was swept from end to end and sat upon her twin-screws and leaped as gracefully as a cow in a bog from one sea to another, till Mr. Davies began to fear for the safety of his engines, and the Kroo boys that made the majority of the crew were deathly sick.
The minister did not budge from the ship the three days we lay in port, and, indeed, it seemed to me that he kept his cabin. At any rate I did not see his great figure on deck till we were tossing in the choppy seas round Cape Agulhas.
There is a point not far from Cape Agulhas between it and the Cape of Good Hope named Point Danger, where courage of the highest kind once calmly faced and fought with Death. On that Point, in February 1852, the Birkenhead was wrecked.
"'Heading as you go, the captain sang out, 'you're bound on a true course for the Antarctic Circle, and, anyway, it's a long stretch for Agulhas by way of Cape Horn out of these seas. How can we serve you?" 'Will you send one of your officers in a boat? came back the reply very promptly, 'that he may put us in the way of steering a course for the Cape of Good Hope?
Bad weather off Cape Agulhas made the rounding of the southernmost part of Africa a disagreeable business, but in ideal climatic conditions the convoy, with two destroyers still on escort duties, approached Cape Delgado, beyond which the territory of German East commences.
All my life have I been under the false impression that the Cape of Good Hope was the most southerly point of Africa. It is nothing of the sort. Cape Agulhas, not far distant, is the real extremity of South Africa. We doubled it on the 3rd of April. Oh!
The belt of Diatom ooze is certainly a little further to the southward in long. 83° E., in the path of the reflux of the Agulhas current, than in long. 108° E.
We pass over the melancholy details of this miserable voyage, in which disgusts and distresses of every kind seemed to threaten all on board with death, every day bringing its mortality. At last on Sunday, May 28th, the welcome sight of Cape Agulhas cheered them at the distance of ten miles. The weather was now fine, but the mortality continued, the fatal cases averaging four a-day.
In making the outward passage round the Cape, it is necessary to go well south, in order to avoid the great westerly set of the Agulhas current, which for ever sweeps steadily round the southern extremity of the African continent at an average rate of three or four miles an hour. To homeward-bound ships this is a great boon.
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