Rerouted Suez mariners face an old threat: ‘The Graveyard of Ships’

Any gamble taken by shipowners to reroute around the blocked Suez Canal isn’t just costly and time-consuming — it’s also dangerous.

The alternate route, skirting southern Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, is infamous in maritime lore as one of the world’s most treacherous passages, littered with hundreds of wrecks and sometimes called “the Cape of Storms” and “the Graveyard of Ships.”

The phrase “Women and children first!” was first popularized from an emergency evacuation of the Birkenhead, a British vessel carrying troops and some civilians, which struck a submerged rock off the Cape of Good Hope in 1852. Of the 643 people aboard, 193 survived, a feat that historians attributed to the crew’s bravery in what became known as the Birkenhead Drill. It was further immortalized in a Rudyard Kipling poem, “Soldier an’ Sailor Too.”

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In 1815, the Arniston, a merchant vessel that had made eight voyages from England to Asia, was caught in a violent storm off the Cape’s western coast and struck a reef. Only six men out of 378 passengers and crew survived the wreck, clinging to flotsam, making their way ashore and huddling for two weeks in a cave, where they subsisted off a salvaged bag of oatmeal. The nearby fishing village Waenhuiskrans, which means “wagon house cliff’ in Afrikaans, became known as Arniston and is a popular whale-watching spot.

So many wrecks lie off the Cape of Good Hope that they have enhanced the area as a tourism destination. South Africa even promotes a “Shipwreck Hiking Trail” along one stretch of coast where at least 120 vessels met doom from 1682 to 1992.

Modern-day mariners said the Suez Canal conundrum facing shippers was probably more a problem of time and expense, rather than the risk of becoming another statistic on the roster of the Cape of Good Hope’s shipwreck victims. But they did not discount the area’s legacy of danger.

Robin Knox-Johnston, who in 1968-69 became the first person to sail single-handed nonstop around the world and who also wrote a book about the Cape, said that Suez-bound shippers needed to add at least 14 days to voyages if they shifted to the Cape route to avoid the clog created by the stuck ship, the Ever Given of the Evergreen line.

“If they get the Evergreen vessel off in the next couple of days, the Cape route was the wrong answer, but if not….?,” Knox-Johnston, 81, wrote in an email. “I would not like to be faced with that decision, which has huge costs.”

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While remnants of many shipwrecks have been discovered there, others have remained a mystery. In 1909, a 500-foot passenger steamer, the Waratah — sometimes called “Australia’s Titanic” — sank and disappeared en route from Durban to Cape Town. No trace of the ship or its 211 passengers and crew was ever found.

Wrecks wrought by the Cape’s dangers were not confined to military and civilian traffic. Ships of the slave trade also sank in the region’s storms and fogs.

One of the most notable was the 1794 destruction of the São José Paquete Africa, a Portuguese slave ship bound for Brazil’s sugar plantations, crammed with 400 to 500 enslaved people from what is now Mozambique below deck. The ship struck rocks 100 yards offshore near Cape Town and broke apart, many of the victims still chained. Half of the enslaved people and the entire crew survived.

Although the wreck was discovered in the 1980s, researchers didn’t determine the vessel’s true purpose until many years later, announcing the finding in 2015.

The origin of the Cape’s name is not clear. By some accounts, the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias devised the name in 1488 after rounding the coast on a return voyage. Others attribute the name to King John II of Portugal, who viewed the discovery as good omen that India could be reached from Europe by sea.