The first European to ‘discover’ the cape was Portuguese mariner Bartolomeu Dias, who named it Cabo das Tormentas - the Cape of Storms. It marks the point on a circumnavigation of Africa where ships stop going predominantly south and start to travel more easterly. For this reason, as a critical landmark on the sea route to India, King João II (the ‘Perfect Prince’) renamed it Cabo da Boa Esperança.
The Cape Peninsula forms the western side of False Bay, so-called not because it isn’t a bay - it is - but because when returning from the East sailors would mistake Cape Hangklip at the east side of the bay (known to the Portuguese as Cabo Falso) with the Cape of Good Hope, and thought they had reached Table Bay (and, with it, the Dutch East India Company supply station which would develop into Cape Town).
A third cape, Cape Point, lies a couple of kilometres to the east of the Cape of Good Hope, and was the site of the sinking of the Portuguese liner Lusitania in 1911 - not to be confused with Cunard’s RMS Lusitania, sunk by German U-boats off the south coast of Ireland in 1915. None of these capes are Africa’s southernmost, or the point where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet - that would be Cape Agulhas (Cape of the Needles).
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