On Treaty Road in Woodstock, wedged between a railway line and a row of industrial buildings, stands a gnarled old white milkwood tree, Sideroxylon inerme. Commuter trains rattle past it. Delivery trucks reverse beside it. Most Capetonians have never heard of it, and the ones who drive past assume it is simply a tree the developers forgot to remove.
It is, in fact, around 500 years old, and it may be the most overlooked witness to Cape history in the city. It was already growing when Portuguese sailors first stumbled ashore nearby, it was close by when they were chased back into the sea, and it was still standing when the Cape changed hands between empires. To understand why, we need to go back to two Portuguese captains, one of whom did all the hard work and one of whom got all the credit.
The Man Who Did the Hard Part
In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias became the first European to sail around the southern tip of Africa. He did it largely by accident, blown far south by a storm before turning east and finding the coast again. He landed at what is now Mossel Bay, where the first meeting between Europeans and the Khoikhoi ended, rather predictably, with a misunderstanding over water and a crossbow bolt. He pushed on as far as the Eastern Cape before his exhausted crew refused to go any further, and he turned for home.
On the way back he passed the great headland at the tip of the peninsula and, having had a rough time of it, named it the Cape of Storms. The King of Portugal, who had not had a rough time of it, thought this was poor branding for the gateway to the riches of India, and renamed it the Cape of Good Hope. It remains one of the most successful marketing exercises in history. The storms, unfortunately, did not read the memo: in 1500 Dias was lost in a storm off the very cape he had discovered.
Dias called it the Cape of Storms. The King renamed it the Cape of Good Hope. The weather ignored him.
The Man Who Got the Credit
Nine years after Dias, Vasco da Gama followed his route, stopped at St Helena Bay and Mossel Bay, traded cattle with the Khoikhoi, sailed past a stretch of coast on Christmas Day 1497 and named it Natal, and finally reached India in 1498. Da Gama got the statues, the history books and the epic poem. Dias, who had shown him the way, got a storm. Exploration, it turns out, is a lot like office life.
The Portuguese never settled the Cape, but they named it, and many of their names are still on the map. Cape Agulhas, the Cape of Needles, is where their compass needles pointed true north. Natal survives in KwaZulu-Natal. Algoa Bay comes from Baía da Lagoa. In 1503 António de Saldanha anchored in Table Bay and climbed the mountain, and the bay was named after him; the Dutch later moved the name up the West Coast to Saldanha Bay, where it remains, slightly lost. Even the Afrikaans word kraal is often traced back to the Portuguese curral.
The Battle of Salt River
The Portuguese sailed past the Cape for decades, stopping only for fresh water. Then, in 1510, came the day that changed everything. Dom Francisco de Almeida, the first Portuguese Viceroy of India and fresh from crushing a much larger fleet at the Battle of Diu, anchored in Table Bay on his way home. He was one of the most powerful men in the Portuguese empire, at the height of his career.
His men went ashore for water, quarrelled with the local Khoikhoi and, depending on which account you read, tried to take their cattle and even their children. On 1 March 1510 around 150 armed Portuguese marched on a village near the Salt River. The Khoikhoi responded with stones, fire-hardened spears and a tactic no European manual had prepared for: trained cattle, driven forward as moving shields. The Portuguese broke and ran for the beach, only to find their boats had been moved. Sixty-four of them died, including Almeida and eleven of his captains. He was buried on the shore, not far from where the Treaty Tree still stands.
The man who had conquered the Indian Ocean was beaten on a Cape beach by herders and their cattle.
What the Tree Would Say
If the Treaty Tree could talk, it would start with Portuguese sailors running for their boats. The defeat shook Portugal badly, and its ships were firmly instructed to stay away from Table Bay. They built their stations further up the coast instead, at Mozambique Island and on St Helena, and for the next century and a half the Cape was left largely alone, until the Dutch arrived in 1652 and found a perfectly placed refreshment station that nobody else seemed to want.
It is one of history’s great what-ifs. Had Almeida’s men behaved better, or fought better, the Cape might well have become a Portuguese colony, like Mozambique and Angola: no Dutch East India Company, no Afrikaans, no Cape Dutch gables, and a very different South Africa. Peri-peri chicken, as it happens, got here anyway.
The tree would have plenty more to tell. In the centuries that followed, enslaved people were reportedly sold beneath its branches and convicts hanged from them. And on 10 January 1806, after the British defeated the Dutch at the Battle of Blaauwberg, the agreement handing the Cape to Britain was made under it, which is how it got its name. It was declared a national monument in 1967.
One tree, standing near the place where Portugal lost the Cape and on the very spot where Holland signed it away, and nobody notices it at all. It has no visitor centre, no gift shop and no queue, just a plaque, a fence and the next train to Bellville. On my city tours I like to stop here precisely because nobody else does. Come and see it before somebody finally notices and builds a parking garage next to it.