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Updated: May 6, 2025
At 8 a.m. on the 9th we arrived at Walvis Bay. General Botha, who, with his Chief of Staff, A.D.C.'s, etc., had embarked at the Cape on the auxiliary cruiser Armadale Castle, arrived at Walvis later in the morning. We spent the day on board the Galway Castle awaiting orders and the disembarkation of horses.
It was a four days' trip to Walvis Bay; we thought we would have rather a jolly time. Disillusion is hateful. And that trip was disillusionment itself. I suppose we inexperienced ones overlooked automatically the fact that we were in the ranks and travelling to war by transport. It wasn't a high-browed, superior outlook that caused our undoing, I fancy.
When you have left the green-covered kopjes of the Cape a few days before and come to anchor in Walvis Bay on a cold morning you think you have reached No-man's-land after a fast voyage. It is a first impression only. The place is desolate enough; it suggests the Sahara run straight into the sea, or the discomforting dreariness of Punta Arenas, in Patagonia.
Since the beginning of the operations in South-West Africa the world has been flooded with descriptions of Walvis Bay; at least I have seen two books with long descriptions of the place, and more than a dozen articles on the subject.
It is not a man's fault that he is not a good sailor; nor is he to blame for knowing little of the ways that make for cleanliness and comfort under even the most trying conditions on shipboard. But on the whole we did not enjoy that four days' voyage to Walvis Bay. It was a case of bedlam as to noise, and "muck in" and take what you can get.
But first impressions are not everything. Walvis Bay is desolate; a study in yellow ochre sands, burnt sienna duns, tin shanties veiled in hot desert winds, and a sea that seldom knows anything more than a ripple. But that is the point. Walvis Bay is nothing now but it is a bay. As a fact, it looks to be one of the finest natural harbours in the world.
With the South-West interior developing in the future, Walvis Bay should have something to look forward to. We left the Galway Castle on the 11th, disembarking into lighters, to be towed up the coast to the occupied German port of Swakopmund. Down to the tender, on to the lighter, kits and equipment, and farewell to the quietened steamer.
It will be remembered that a colony had been established near the mouth of Delaware Bay. Two vessels were dispatched from Holland for this point containing a number of emigrants, a large stock of cattle, and whaling equipments, as whales abounded in the bay. The ship, called the Walvis, arrived upon the coast in April, 1631.
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