Kaiser's Holocaust (3 page)

Sometime in the late summer of 1484 two ships slipped out of Lisbon harbour, caught the wind in their sails and turned south. They were the caravels of Diogo Cão, and they were heading further south than any Europeans had ever ventured. King João II of Portugal had ascended to the throne determined to advance the age of exploration begun by his illustrious father King Henry ‘the Navigator’. The prize sought by João and every navigator and explorer of the fifteenth century was a sea route to India and China. In the same year that Diogo Cão left Lisbon harbour, Portugal had officially abandoned the notion of attempting to reach India by crossing the Atlantic, an idea then being suggested by little-known navigator Christopher Columbus. In 1484 the focus of Portuguese interest was Africa, the great continent to the south, around which they were convinced lay the shortest route to India.

In the fifteenth century the Portuguese, like other Europeans, knew almost nothing of Africa. African kingdoms and peoples who had been in regular contact with Europe during the empires of ancient Greece and Rome had, from the fifth century onwards, been cut off from Europe by the rise of Islamic North Africa. For almost a millennium, black and white humanity had been separated, and in parts of Europe black Africans became almost mythological figures. Africa was imagined as a land inhabited by monstrous creatures, where the sun’s heat was so intense it might prove deadly to Europeans. Yet it might also offer riches and bountiful trade, and beyond its shores more wealth might flow from India and China.

Although by the middle of the fifteenth century black Africans had been brought to Portugal and the wealth of the continent was already flowing back to Lisbon, each new discovery raised more questions and uncovered new mysteries. Despite several expeditions, no explorer had been able to map even the coast of the continent, while the interior remained completely unknown. Critically, no one had any idea how far to the south Africa stretched.

On his first expedition in 1482, Diogo Cão had discovered the Congo, a river larger and more powerful than anything Europeans had previously encountered. Yet he had failed to find a route around the continent. How large
was
Africa? What perils might lie along that seemingly endless coastline? What other great rivers, strange peoples and exotic animals were waiting to be discovered? In late 1484 Diogo Cão’s two caravels sailed east along the lush green shores of West Africa. The wealth of the coast was clearly visible. Enormous kingdoms had risen and fallen over centuries. Millions populated the fertile forest belt, hundreds of miles thick, and broad rivers regularly cut into the forests, offering possibilities for future explorers and traders to penetrate the unknown interior. Tracking along the lagoons at the mouth of the River Niger, they then turned south along the coast of Cameroon, passing the mouth of the Congo. Further south they sailed past the coast of what is today Angola, finding shelter in the natural harbours that were later to become the centres of Portugal’s slave empire. The further they went, the more the landscape began to change. The tangled forests of fig trees and giant baobab trees that fought for space on the shoreline of the Congo Basin began to dwindle. Mile by mile the trees became smaller, fewer and further apart.

As they passed the mouth of the Kunene River, the explorers saw a green island feeding off the Kunene’s waters; this was the last dense burst of vegetation they were to encounter on their journey. South of this, the shore they surveyed was utterly desolate. Vast fields of sand dunes stretched back from the shore, a sea of yellow running parallel to the cold blue of the ocean. Dark
and sombre mountain ranges were occasionally visible in the far distance, half lost in the heat haze.

Each morning a heavy sea mist would roll in and blanket the coast with a thick grey fog, as if the icy waters of the South Atlantic were turned to steam on contact with the roasting sands of the southern desert. Salt and spray hung in the air and bitter winds raked the coastline, whipping up the sands, reshaping the dunes and cutting into the faces of the sailors on deck. As they pushed further and further south, they will have seen humpback whales cruising to their breeding grounds and the broad fins of the great white sharks that still patrol the coastline. Nearer the coast, they will have come across Cape fur seals and killer whales. In the icy Benguela currents that stream up the coast from their source in Antarctica, the explorers would have encountered the bizarre sunfish and various species of sea turtle. But on the coastline there was nothing but stillness, solitude. An early twentieth-century description of this little-travelled coastline gives some indication of its desolation and danger:

What Diogo Cão had ‘discovered’ was the coastline of modern-day Namibia, the Skeleton Coast. The dunes he viewed in the distance were those of the Namib Desert, an enormous belt of bleak coastal sands, 1,000 miles long and ranging between 30 and 100 miles in width, that sealed off the interior of south-western Africa from the rest of the world.

In January 1486 the explorers came across a small bay populated by hundreds of thousands of Cape fur seals. Here Diogo Cão and his men became the first Europeans ever to set foot in
the Namib. Before landing they carefully lowered one of three stone
padrãos
they had carried from Lisbon into a launch. The
padrãos
were stone markers inscribed with the Portuguese coat of arms and a dated inscription that declared the land upon which they were planted as claimed by the King of Portugal. Cão and his men planted the
padrão
on a hill above the bay, where it stood 6 feet high, alone on the horizon in a land without trees, framed by the black hulk of the Brandberg Mountain in the far distance. The raising of the
padrão
claimed the empty desert for Portugal and King João II, but also marked the southern extent of Diogo Cão’s now failed journey to find a route to India. It was not the last time the Namib would disappoint and dishearten a prospective empire-builder.

The
padrão
itself was to stand where Cão had left it for 408 years. In 1893 it was finally uprooted by sailors of the German Navy and returned to Europe, becoming a trophy of the German Naval Academy in Kiel. Today, at what is known as Cape Cross, a quarter of a million Cape fur seals, the descendants of those who greeted Diogo Cão, still sunbathe noisily at the foot of a granite replica of the missing
padrão
. Here at least, little has changed since Diogo Cão rowed ashore.

Although the Namib had been claimed for Portugal, the Portuguese never arrived to take possession or to seek out its elusive inhabitants. An order for the exploration of the coast was given in 1520, but nothing seems to have happened. This was unwanted real estate: there were no thriving coastal populations to trade with or enslave, no broad rivers slicing into the heart of the continent, no gold, spices or precious stones. This was a land which profited no one – a wasteland with a murderous coastline which only added weeks of travel and additional danger to the journey around Africa. A later Portuguese writer summarised the Namib in one line, ‘All this coast is desert and without people.’
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For the next four centuries the Skeleton Coast and the Namib Desert beyond it became mute witnesses to the rise of the age of empire. Ships travelling to India in the sixteenth century via the Cape were so fearful of the coastline that they travelled 250 miles offshore to avoid its hidden rocks and treacherous currents.
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The Dutch, the master navigators of their age, dared to come closer, as they headed to their empire in the East Indies. Their sailors reported that, when peering through the fog, they could on occasion spot black figures on the shores staring back at their ships. The Dutch called these unknown people
strandloopers
– beach runners. From the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century this was the limit of human contact between the peoples of south-western Africa and Europe.

Although European ships occasionally sought shelter in the natural bays and harbours, those travellers never dared attempt to cross the desert or make contact with the mysterious
strandloopers.
The only Europeans who embarked upon that hopeless journey were stranded survivors from ships wrecked in the Benguela Currents. They stumbled blindly inland until they succumbed to the heat. It was their whitened, weathered bones that gave the Skeleton Coast its name.

For a brief moment in the 1780s, it looked as though all that might change. The nation that had eventually superseded the Portuguese as the world’s prime maritime power turned its attention to the Namib coast. Influenced by the spurious accounts of travellers who claimed to have ventured into the lands north of the Orange River (the modern-day border between South Africa and Namibia), a British parliamentary committee began to consider what role the Namib might play in Britain’s global empire. Three centuries of inaction surely meant that Portugal’s claims to ownership had lapsed, and from their comfortable offices in London the committee members speculated that the Namib might be the perfect location for a penal colony. In fact, the parliamentarians were so confident that the Namib was a suitable site for European settlement that they even debated whether it might also be offered as a new home to those loyal subjects of
the crown who had fled the American colonies after the Revolutionary Wars.

A naval survey ship, the
Nautilus
, was sent out to explore the coast and find a site for the colony. Some on the committee argued that south-western Africa would offer a more hospitable climate for the convicts than the alternative location, the Gambia. One committee member, the philosopher Edmund Burke, argued that convicts sent to the Gambia would be decimated by tropical disease and attacked by the local African peoples, and hence deportation would amount to a death sentence, ‘after a mock display of mercy’.
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Had Burke known anything of the Namib he would have considered the Gambia benign by comparison.

In 1785 the
Nautilus
returned with bad news. The Namib coastline of dense fog and thunderous seas was unchanged since Diogo Cão had encountered it three hundred years earlier. Any convicts or would-be colonists sent there would face certain death. Instead, Britain’s convicts were sent to Botany Bay and the colonisation of Australia began.