South Africa: Explore the Dias Museum in Mossel Bay

🗺️ South Africa: Explore the Dias Museum in Mossel Bay

The Bartolomeu Dias Museum Complex was officially opened on 3 February 1989, though the roots of the whole thing go back considerably further than that. The Mossel Bay museum scene can actually be traced to the 1960s, when a modest local museum first opened its doors to the public. Over the years it evolved and expanded, eventually becoming known as the Post Office Tree Museum Complex before being formally renamed and relaunched in 1989 to mark the 500th anniversary of Dias’s landmark voyage. Today the complex brings together five interconnected museums on a single site near the beach, set within beautifully maintained indigenous gardens and housed partly in a restored 19th-century granary building that was itself a wheat mill and then a sawmill before anyone thought to fill it with history.

We were on our way along the Garden Route when Karen, who does most of the advance reading in our household — and thank goodness for that — came across a reference to this museum complex, the centrepiece of which was a maritime museum dedicated to the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias. Now, we’ll be honest: we didn’t know a great deal about Dias before we arrived. What we discovered turned out to be one of those genuinely gripping stories of human ambition, navigational courage and rather spectacular bad luck that history occasionally throws up. Back in 1486, King John II of Portugal — a monarch with serious expansionist ambitions and an eye on the lucrative spice trade routes to India — commissioned Dias to undertake an expedition around the southern tip of Africa, in the hope of finding a sea route to the East that didn’t involve going through territory controlled by the Ottomans or the Arabs. The small fleet of three vessels, including two square-rigged caravels and a supply ship, left Lisbon in or around July 1487. By 8 December 1487, after months at sea, they had reached the Golfo da Conceição — what we now know as Cape Cross, north of Walvis Bay in Namibia, which we’d actually visited during our time in that country, so it felt pleasingly joined-up to be encountering this story again further south. Then, on 4 February 1488, after a remarkable 30 days at sea out of sight of land and navigating entirely by the stars, Dias and his crew rounded what would prove to be the southernmost navigable point of the African continent and arrived in the sheltered bay that would later become Mossel Bay. He named it Angra de São Brás — the Bay of Saint Blaize — and the crew went ashore to take on fresh water and trade with the local Khoikhoi people, though that encounter turned somewhat sour when a stone was thrown and Dias fired a crossbow in response. The relationship between Europeans and the indigenous inhabitants of southern Africa was, from its very first moments, a complicated one. Dias himself never made it home from a subsequent voyage: in May 1500, captaining one of four ships in a fleet led by Pedro Álvares Cabral, he encountered a catastrophic storm off the Cape of Good Hope and was lost at sea on 29 May along with his crew and three other vessels. He was roughly 48 years old.

🌳 The Post Office Tree

The first thing we explored on the museum grounds was the famous Post Office Tree, and it’s one of those wonderfully eccentric pieces of history that you couldn’t really make up. The story begins in 1500, when a Portuguese captain named Pedro d’Ataide, sailing as part of Cabral’s third India fleet, was separated from the rest of the fleet somewhere along the East African coast. D’Ataide made his way back to what the Portuguese called “the watering place of São Brás” — present-day Mossel Bay, which was already well known to Portuguese sailors as a reliable stop for fresh water and provisions — and went ashore. Before he left, he wrote a letter containing urgent intelligence for any Portuguese fleet that came after him and left it in a sailor’s old leather boot, which he tied to a large milkwood tree on the shore. The letter warned of hostile conditions for the Portuguese at Calicut — now known as Kozhikode, on the south-west coast of India — and cautioned of rough seas further to the east. It was, in effect, the earliest piece of postal correspondence in southern African history. The fourth Portuguese fleet to pass through, in July 1501, found the boot and the letter exactly where D’Ataide had left it, and the information it contained proved genuinely useful. The captain of that fleet was sufficiently moved by the ingenuity of the arrangement that he left his own inscription carved into a stone nearby, which was later found in 1850 and is now represented by a replica inside the Maritime Museum, declared a provincial heritage site.

The milkwood tree that sheltered all this correspondence is still standing — ancient, gnarled and apparently quite unimpressed with its own fame — and in 1963 the local tourism organisation placed a large postbox next to it in the shape of a sailor’s boot, where visitors can post letters and postcards and have them stamped with a special commemorative frank acknowledging that this, improbable as it sounds, is where South Africa’s postal history began. The post is collected twice a day in season, once a day out of season, which suggests a level of dedication to the bit that we found rather admirable.