Phoenicians in the Cape of Good Hope..

Pic - A stone carving from the 1st century AD shows the kind of ship that the Phoenicians used on the Mediterranean Sea.- The Granger Collection, New York

Did you know....that there were ancient Phoenician shipwrecks found on the Cape Flats..? Bet you didn't!

I picked up on this subject on a forum where, sadly, it will get lost in comments, so I thought it worthy of a post just for interest and posterity. I know the Cape Flats, and drove the Strandfontain Road, which snakes along the shoreline of False Bay, it was my trip to work for two years, but I had never heard this facinating story about Phoenician shipwrecks being found there...here is a great brief on the Phoenicians and their early adventures around the Cape, but click on the links to read the full articles.

Lessons from History

By Mike Smith

In the next few years two movies will hit the circuit, both are about Hannibal, the Carthaginian General (247-182 BCE). One will be, "Hannibal the Conqueror", staring Vin Diesel and the other, not named yet, staring Denzel Washington as Hannibal. This is not only an outrage, but it will make both of them look like fools. Why, because Hannibal was a white man. These movies are nothing but Liberal propaganda trying to portray blacks as conquerors of whites and I want to urge every single respecting white out there to boycott these movies.
The Carthaginians were descendants of the Phoenicians, a white race who inhabited the area where Lebanon is today. From coins and other artifacts it can clearly be seen that the Phoenicians were not only white, but highly advanced. They were master ship builders whose ships’ carrying capacity of 100 tons, steel ships only bettered. The Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa (in three years) around 600BC and in 1992 two of their galleys were dug up in Pinelands near Cape Town, where they used a riverbank as a dry dock. The Phoenicians were also brilliant architects and master builders. King Hiram I of Tyre designed and built the temple of Solomon. Their alphabet was even adopted by the Greeks and their language so closely resemble Hebrew that Hebrew is used to translate their manuscripts. There is even doubt whether they were Semitic or more Caucasian.

The Phoenicians were merchants and traders and their ships had to be replenished along the merchant routes. The Phoenicians therefore had many colonies around the Mediterranean. One of them was Carthage, where modern Tunisia is in North Africa. Unfortunately many of the Carthaginian records were destroyed in the third Punic war by Rome and most of the records today about the Carthaginians are from a biased Greek or Roman perspective. What we do know is that Hannibal was from the Carthaginian upper class that were pure blood Phoenicians and therefore white. The local people around Carthage were Berbers and Kabyles, not Negroids. If you want to know how a Kabyle or a Berber looks like, look at Zinedine Zidane who is a Kabyle, from Algeria.

Read the full article HERE.

From Uncle Cracker-

"I read about those two vessels in a Cape Town newspaper article in the early 1990’s, but subsequently could not find it again online. There is a book written on the subject and a few online references."
Strange Shipwrecks of the Southern Seas – Jose Burman
http://www.catholicchurch.co.za/main.html
http://penandspindle.blogspot.com/2008/02/lost-and-found.html
http://sacoast.uwc.ac.za/publications/2D-Mgmt,Policy,Legislation.pdf
Last link scroll down to pg 11.

Lost and Found


Several years ago Gavin Menzies published 1421 The Year China Discovered The World, the story of early Chinese exploration. The research into this subject is still active, and Gavin is assisted by a team of researchers who maintain the 1421 website.

Long before Menzies published his ground breaking history, rumors existed about prior global cultures based upon trade and the ever-present myth of treasure that permeates the human psyche.

Lawrence Green, in Eight Bells At Salamander, explores the possibility of both Phoenician and Chinese expeditions around the Cape of Good Hope.

As a young reporter in Cape Town, Lawrence was summoned to the Cape Flats, a piece of land that joins the African continent to the Cape Peninsula. The Cape Flats was once under water.

Lawrence was told that an ancient wooden wreck had been found buried in the sands of the Cape Flats. By the time he arrived the local people had broken up the wreck and taken its beams home for fire wood. Lawrence was extremely disappointed, but he traveled to the archives and dug around, and came up with similar stories and an equally frustrating endings.

George Thompson, an observant Cape Town merchant, writes Lawrence, rode about the country and described his travels vividly. He seems to have been the first person to describe in any detail a ship on the Cape Flats. He did not claim to be the discoverer; but writing in 1827 he stated that there was discovered a few years ago what seemed to be the timbers of a vessel deeply imbedded in the sand. Thomson suggested that it might be the remains of some ancient Phoenician vessel wrecked when the Cape Flats were under water.

Captain WFW Owen, the naval officer who charted much of the South African coast, visited the spot with Thompson, and also formed the opinion that this was an ancient ship. He thought the timbers were cedar. This wreck, or another one, came into prominence again in the middle of the last century, when Charles Bell, the surveyor-general, examined it and reported that, however extraordinary it may seem, I am compelled to believe that this wood is part of a large vessel upward of seventy feet in length, wrecked when the sea washed up to some of the ancient sea beaches now raised hundreds of feet in height above the present highwater mark and left at least ten miles from the sea. This wreck seems to have been washed open by a change in the course of the stream about thirty years ago. When first seen the ribs and knees stood five feet above the stiff clay surface, partially connected by the planks of one side. They were broken off and carried away. A wagon-load of the timber was sent to England, but could not be identified. Iron bolts were found, but no copper.

No more was heard of ships in the dunes until 1880, when a ship was found six feet below the surface while workmen were taken out gravel and making bricks. This spot was several miles from the sea. The timber had a peculiar smell, but it burnt well and sold easily as firewood.

Lawrence concludes, those discoveries on the Cape Flats were mysteries indeed. But the brooms of time, the stinging south-east gales and merciless winter rains, have swept away the last age-blackened fragments which might have provided some clue to the lost ships. I can only say that if the Phoenicians sailed around Africa, they made the greatest voyage of all time.


SOURCE- The Pen and The Spindle