Kwaaihoek is a rocky headland on the coast of Algoa Bay, at Boknesstrand near Bushman's River Mouth in the Eastern Cape province of

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...

. It is a section of the Addo Elephant National Park. It is here that the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias erected the ''Padrão de São Gregório'', his first

padrão A ''padrão'' is a stone pillar left by Portuguese maritime explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries to record significant landfalls and thereby establish primacy and possession. They were often placed on promontories and capes or at the mouths o ...

, or stone cross on 12 March 1488. First visited by

Robert Jacob Gordon Robert Jacob Gordon (29 September 1743, in Doesburg, Gelderland – 25 October 1795, in Cape Town) was a Dutch explorer, soldier, artist, naturalist and linguist of Scottish descent. Life Robert Jacob Gordon was the son of Maj. General Jacob ...

on 13 February 1786, remnants of the cross were rediscovered in 1938 by E. Axelson and transferred to the

University of the Witwatersrand The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (), is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits ( or ). The university ...

Johannesburg Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu and xh, eGoli ), colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, or "The City of Gold", is the largest city in South Africa, classified as a megacity, and is one of the 100 largest urban areas in the world. According to Dem ...

. away, shortly after midnight on 17 July 1755, the East Indiaman ''Doddington'' struck the south-eastern corner of the low-lying Bird Island (or Chaos Island as it was then known). She went down within 20 minutes, with only 23 of the 270 passengers and crew surviving. They were marooned on the island for seven months, before they managed to make their way to India on a sloop they built on the island.

References

Landforms of the Eastern Cape Headlands of South Africa {{EasternCape-geo-stub

See also

References