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Cape of Good Hope: Geography & Risks · Acedra
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Cape of Good Hope: Geography & Risks
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Even wondered why ships don’t sail around the southern tip of Africa? Well, it all comes down to Cape of Good Hope - a place that doesn’t live up to its name. It’s actually more appropriate to call it by its other name – “The Graveyard of Ships.” It’s no surprise most of the world’s ships avoid sailing under Africa - in fact, they tried to avoid this route for thousands of years. And it all began with one of the most famous ghost ship stories of all time.
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You’ve likely heard about the Flying Dutchman. The tale goes that in the 17th century, a Dutch captain, perhaps named van der Decken, was on his way home from the Far East, carrying a cargo he could sell at a big profit in Europe. Unfortunately, to get there, he had to sail around Africa - and that meant facing the Cape of Good Hope. He had the misfortune of reaching it right in the middle of a raging storm, struggling to push his ship through one of the most treacherous
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stretches of ocean in the world. The legends go that in order to complete his journey safely, he had to resort to making a pact. Some versions of the story say it was a deal with the devil. Some stories say that his efforts at preserving his safety through some other evil means condemned him with a divine curse. Either way, he never made it home. He’s now destined to wander the seas forever, bringing forebodings of doom to any navigator that spots the ghostly light of
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the Dutchman’s ship on these rough waves. Sightings of the fabled ship continued at least into the 20th century. There’s even a train ride named after him which you’ll come across if you decide to take a Cape Point tour. Reports about actual ghost ships are rarer now because sailors have a better understanding of the science of optics. But the Flying Dutchman stories actually go far in explaining all the real reasons why modern ships don’t like passing under
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Africa. Just look at the shipping data. Between 15 and 20,000 vessels transit under Africa via the Cape of Good Hope every year, with an estimated 1.6 billion tons worth of cargo. That might sound like a lot - until you realize that, in 2022, there were an estimated 102,000 ships globally and 12.3 billion tons of cargo moved in 2023. Put in that context, the Cape route’s limited popularity becomes much more apparent.
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Want one reason? If you need to take your ship under Africa, you might feel just like the Flying Dutchman – doomed to skim the waves forever. To understand why, look at a small rebel group known as the Houthis - whose destructive hobby involves firing anti-ship missiles at commercial vessels. They operate in a stretch of high-stakes real estate between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden - one of the most critical trade routes on the planet.
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The top of the Red Sea hosts one of the most important places in the world. It’s right here, the Suez Canal, which an average of 50 ships pass through every day, but that’s only the average. Hundreds of ships might be waiting at any given time, because 10% of the world’s total maritime trade passes through this channel. It’s a narrow place, though, only 674 feet (205 meters) wide, and this can pose some serious vulnerabilities to the global economy.
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Remember that ship that got stuck here in 2021? Strong winds knocked it off course and because it was longer than the Canal is wide, it blocked the entire passage - for six days. It took a flotilla of tugboats to finally get it free. And just two years later, another huge cargo ship ran aground. This one took three tugboats to set free. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that it didn’t straddle the channel, but it shows you just how delicate the canal is. Overall, ships and
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authorities on land have to communicate carefully to make sure the Suez Canal operates smoothly. So why would so many ships risk going through that kind of hassle, or even braving fire from the Houthis? Just look at the geography of Africa and you’ll see only one reason why. A journey through the Suez Canal means that a typical journey from Europe to Asia or vice versa is reduced by about 3,700 miles (5,955 km) on average. Not far away from the Suez Canal is the Persian
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Gulf. It’s also one of the world’s most important shipping routes. About 20% of the world’s total oil consumption starts in this place. Over 40% of the world’s natural gas goes through here, too. If you were a captain tasked with getting this cargo to a port in Northern Europe, you have two options open to you – travel all the way around Africa or go through the Suez Canal. The trip around Africa
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would be around 13,000 miles (20,921 km) and take 24 days. A trip through the canal would be about 7,500 miles (12,070 km) and take 14 days. Need to travel from Rotterdam to Mumbai? The Suez Canal reduces your round trip by 41%. London to Shanghai? 32%. Trips from Europe to Asia via the Cape of Good Hope used to take a year or more. Improvements in ship technology helped to change that, but even so, everyone in the world breathed
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a heavy sigh of relief when the Suez Canal opened in 1869. It was a grand occasion, with a church and mosque built side by side to offer both Christian and Muslim blessings. It was the culmination of thousands of years of trials and failures, a dream that had once seemed impossible to the world’s most powerful kings and emperors. The trip around Africa was so inconvenient, so harrowing and filled with danger, that they were willing to think - and
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build - outside the box for a long, long time. But more on that later. For now, it just helps to remember that the construction of the modern Suez canal took ten years and 20,000 deaths. There was no doubt that the sacrifice had been worth it, because convenience is far from the only reason why ships prefer not to make the journey under Africa anymore. To find the more important reasons, start by zooming out and taking a look at a map
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of the entire world. Something will stand out immediately if you know what you’re looking for. The northern hemisphere hosts a supermajority of the world’s landmass – 68% to the southern hemisphere’s 32%. 60% of the northern hemisphere is water, and 40% is land. It’s a lot more lopsided down south – 80% to 20%. That means the currents and winds in the southern hemisphere can be a lot fiercer. The Cape of Good Hope is located at
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34 degrees south latitude, but in fact, navigating it and passing all the way under Africa often requires ships to go further south, to waters that sailors ominously know as the Roaring Forties. The conditions that make up the Roaring Forties actually start far north of here, in the tropics. The air mass near the equator is warm, so it rises and tends to drift north or south, toward the poles, where cold air dominates - but unlike in the northern part of the world, there’s
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not a lot of land to act as a windbreak down here. The rotation of the Earth further deflects the air southward and helps to accelerate the winds. So you wind up with frequent gale-force east-west conditions toward the southerly latitudes. The further south you go, the faster and more violent the winds and currents can get. Wind speeds can reach 40 knots or 46 miles per hour (74 kph) on average in this part of the world. The waves at the Cape of Good Hope alone, without going into
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the Roaring Forties, can be over 46 feet (14 meters) high in the most extreme conditions. The rough elements helped earlier sailors in one way. It sped them along on their journey from Europe to Asia. They called these passages the act of “running the easting down.” But there’s a downside. You probably knew there would be a downside. Just ask the Flying Dutchman. Remember how it was a storm that forced him to make his pact with the devil? Well,
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that was oddly appropriate, because it was the original name for this place – the Cape of Storms. It got that name from the first European to reach it, the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias, who came there on the 12th of March, 1488. So why don’t we call it by that accurate name today? It all came down to 15th-century marketing. King John II of Portugal understood just how vital the cape route would be to his nation’s future prosperity. He didn’t have the benefit of going
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through the Suez Canal as an alternative, and now here was his great navigator calling this critical place the Cape of Storms? Something needed to be done to attract more investment in the route, and quickly before word of the real nature of the place got out. So he named it the Cape of Good Hope. At a time when Europeans were trying to find new ways to reach India and the Far East thanks to
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the closing of the old Silk Road trade routes, it made for a more politically expedient name – and it was sort of accurate. It was the culmination of the long search for a more direct route to Asia, the thing that they had hoped for for so long. The ad campaign was obviously a success for Portugal and then other European maritime powers. There was just one downside. The clever branding didn’t erase the storms. The bad weather here is as frequent as it is intense.
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And it gets worse. The South African coastline has a whole host of treacherous rocks that mariners need to deal with offshore. There have been nearly 3,000 recorded shipwrecks around the Cape of Good Hope, and the dangers don’t even stop at the rough conditions. There’s something else lurking under the waves – sometimes, at least – that could be even more frightening if you dare leave the safety of your ship. To find out what it is,
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start with a phrase you’ve probably heard of. “Women and children first!” Those words make for another famous maritime tradition that’s been passed down from generation to generation, starting here at the Cape of Good Hope. It comes from the wreck of the HMS Birkenhead in 1852. There were 480 officers and men in the British Army on board, reinforcements for fighting against the Xhosa in the Eastern Cape. 26 women and children accompanied them.
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The ship was rounding the coast of South Africa over the night of February 26th. In the dark, it collided with an uncharted rock near a place appropriately now named Danger Point east of Cape Town. The Birkenhead rapidly began to sink, so the women and children were ordered to be put in the lifeboats first. This effort was successful, but a second lifeboat was swamped, and a third couldn’t be launched - so only three were left for the remaining officers and crew.
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That left only two options left for the unfortunates who were now left onboard – abandon the Birkenhead or go down with it. Since jumping overboard might pose a danger to the lifeboats that were still there, Colonel Seton ordered his troops to stand fast and go down with the ship. In a testament to their discipline, the men calmly did just that. Once in the water, the troops lucky enough to not drown clung to debris or tried to swim for the shore.
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That’s where they met that other danger, the one swimming right under them. South Africa’s coastline is home to a large population of Great White sharks. In 2011, it was estimated there were around 500 and 1,000 of them lurking off the shore - but it would have been much higher in 1852, and now they struck. Wave after wave of sharks attacked the struggling crew members that night. The troops called the relentless Great Whites “Tommy Sharks,” as if
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they were soldiers like themselves. To this day, the locals still refer to their aquatic neighbors by that name. Only 193 of the people on the ship that night wound up surviving, but that figure included all of the women and children. Although largely forgotten today, the troops of the HMS Birkenhead were celebrated for their heroism and sacrifice. The “Birkenhead Drill” of attending to the women and children first in the case of a shipwreck is still standard practice
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in maritime tradition and named in their honor. The Birkenhead story stands out to us for another reason. If you had to pick one of the worst places in the world to have a shipwreck, you now see why the Cape of Good Hope would be one of them. The shipwrecks didn’t start or stop in 1852. They’re actually so common that they’re part of South Africa’s tourism industry. Along one stretch of the South African Coastline, there’s a hiking trail, appropriately named “Shipwreck
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Hiking Trail.” Its locale saw at least 120 shipwrecks between 1682 and 1992. One of the more notable wrecks came in 1965, when a 347-ton (314,793 kg) Dutch coaster called the Nolloth struck the appropriately-named Albatross Rock. Fortunately, the incident wasn’t nearly as tragic as the Birkenhead’s. The crew got to avoid the sharks because they had helicopters to save them. Even most of the cargo was spared, but it shows that even though maritime technology
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has greatly improved, ships are still at the mercy of the elements that haven’t changed. Giant, seemingly durable ships can still find their graves here. As late as 1994, a French barge carrying a huge crane was wrecked on the rocks. Too heavy to save, it needed to be abandoned. Now you might be seeing why the misnamed Cape of Good Hope isn’t as popular a trade route as it used to be. Little wonder why the ship that blocked the Suez Canal cost the global economy
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$400 million – an hour. It’s not just the longer route. Imagine the insurance rates on those goods having to pass through such risky conditions. But insurers would need to do more than calculate quotes based on the risks around the Cape of Good Hope. Passing under Africa means more than just going around the South African coastline. Africa is the world’s second largest continent. There’s a lot of coastline to pass around, and to even get to - or from - the Cape of Good Hope,
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you have to go through a place that a Portuguese King didn’t bother to give a more appealing name. Just northwest of South Africa is its neighbor Namibia, and its shoreline can also be a place of danger. A part of it is so treacherous that it’s gotten the name, “Skeleton Coast.” There have been over 500 recorded shipwrecks in this part of the world. One park ranger interviewed in 2018 said that he’d come across 112 in just the six years that he was on the job. One look at the
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landscape of this place and it’s easy to see why. Although sailors here haven’t reached the Roaring Forties yet, Antarctic currents still bubble up in these waters. The locals warn the few passersby that these currents are powerful enough to take them out 125 miles (201 km) to sea if they get the misguided idea of swimming too far from the shore. Conditions are often foggy, too, which makes
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navigation even more challenging, and there are 11 different shark species swimming around offshore. And shipwrecked crews face another obstacle. Even if they manage to make it back to shore in one piece, there’s a good chance they won’t have a happily ever after like the women and children aboard the HMS Birkenhead did. Those people had the benefit of territory that had already seen settlers come for hundreds of years. Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, on the other hand,
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is almost entirely uninhabited. This place is a desert, and sometimes, the currents are powerful enough to take ships far into it, and that’s a bad place to be. How bad? Just take a look at the most famous shipwreck here. It was an ominous night in 1942. The captain of the 13,000-ton (11.7 million kg) Dunedin Star - a ship loaded with explosives, 85 crew members, and 21 passengers - realized his vessel was in serious trouble off the coast of Namibia. The
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surf was rough - waves here can reach over 11 feet (3.3 meters) in height and over 6,500 feet (1,981 meters) long. In these conditions, the ship’s keel scraped against a submerged shoal. The captain soon called for all hands on deck. To their horror, they would have found that they were still hundreds of feet away from the safety of the shore. They knew about the sharks and the strength of the current. One wonders if a few of them were thinking about the fate of the Birkenhead.
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The order came: abandon ship. There was just one problem – the ship only had a single lifeboat, a small motor craft to take people to the shore. The Birkenhead drill of 90 years earlier was followed. Eight of the passengers were women, one of which was heavily pregnant, and three with babies. These people were given priority in the evacuation. All of the passengers eventually made it to the shore safely – but only half of the crew. The lifeboat didn’t last more
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than three trips, and as it failed, the other half of the crew realized to their terror that they had been marooned. The doomed lifeboat was put to good use by serving as a makeshift shelter for the people on the shore against the sandy winds and scorching sun when daybreak finally came. The immediate problem had been solved, but there was only a limited amount of food and water, and the nearest port was Walvis Bay, 435 miles (700 km) to the northwest. To this day, there
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is no sign of civilization for hundreds of miles in all directions. So the supplies were rationed, with each person surviving on a pittance. Three days later, it looked like there would be relief in the form of a salvage ship, which took the marooned crew members aboard – but it couldn’t reach the people on the shore, who now might have been wishing they stayed with the ship. More relief attempts came from land, sea, and sky. Each one was an odyssey of its own.
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A salvage tug, the Sir Charles Elliott, tried to reach the Dunedin Star, but this place is called the Skeleton Coast for a reason. It also ran aground before it could reach the site. Several lives were lost in this second shipwreck. Even a Ventura bomber that took off from Cape Town carrying some much needed supplies became stuck in the sand after it pushed its luck too far and tried to land on the beach. Meanwhile, a convoy of eight vehicles set out from Windhoek,
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but communications with it were soon lost. Three more bombers had to be sent out to locate the Dunedin Star’s survivors. A second convoy was sent out. And that first bomber? The crew managed to free it from the sand and get it into the air again - but the effort proved to be a Sisyphean task. It suffered engine failure and crashed into the sea. The crew fortunately survived and bobbed in the rough waves on the fuselage. They floated ashore and walked 31
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miles (50 km) to the Dunedin’s survivors on land. Fortunately, the tale has a happy ending. The first convoy didn’t disappear into the sand. It reached the survivors and evacuated them. A month after that scary night, the survivors arrived safely in Windhoek. A few things have changed. If you were the captain of a lucky shipwreck today, you might find yourself near one of the few safari camps around the area. But you might also
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come across other dangers that fortunately didn’t add to the troubles of the Dunedin’s survivors. There’s a river nearby, the Kunene. If you’re a shipwreck survivor and want to take a bath here, it’s probably best not to do so. There are crocodiles prowling it. Meanwhile on land, there are the occasional lions, rhinos, and hyenas, too. This place has safari camps for a reason. The shipwrecks continue. As recently as 2008, a fishing trawler named the Zeila was stranded
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here. You can still see it. You can still see the rusting wreck of the Dunedin Star too, provided you’re brave enough to come to a place that some people call “the end of the earth.” But we still haven’t exhausted our list of reasons why ships don’t pass under Africa yet. If you manage to get around both the Skeleton Coast and the Cape of Good Hope, there are yet more dangers waiting for you on the east coast - starting with those concentrated around
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what might be the world’s most unique island. There are things in Madagascar you won’t find anywhere else. Evidence for human presence on the island only goes back 11,000 years, and no one really knows yet if that presence was permanent. The earliest evidence of settled communities only goes back 1,000 years. Either way, humans only started to come here remarkably late in their time on Earth. Why, especially when humans were living on the mainland just across the
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strait for hundreds of thousands of years? It could be because to get to Madagascar, you have to cross the Mozambique Channel, and it’s one of the world’s more dangerous shipping lanes, so maybe our ancestors knew better. The Channel has a rough southerly current. The waters here are warm, with average temperatures over 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 Celsius). They’re also strong, flowing down into the Agulhas Current on the eastern coast
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of South Africa. You probably know what these conditions can lead to. The Mozambique Channel is a hot spot for hurricanes. Just go back to 2019 to see how destructive they can be. On March 4th, Cyclone Idai formed in the Mozambique Channel. Wind speeds reached 115 miles per hour (185 kph) at its peak intensity. Over 1,000 people across Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe perished when it hit. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. The
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storm was the second-costliest in the region, too, with the World Bank estimating at least $2 billion in total economic losses. Cyclone Idai was one of the worst, but it was far from the first. Three to 12 cyclones form every year in the Channel itself, but that isn’t the end of the danger. Cyclones can form elsewhere and then wander into it, strengthening rapidly because of the warm and deep water. But if you were an insurer trying to make a
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quote for cargoes passing through the Mozambique Channel, you’d now need to reckon with artificial dangers to go along with the natural ones. Mozambique has been dealing with an Islamist insurgency in its Cabo Delgado Province since 2017. The group responsible is called Al-Shabaab or Ansar al-Sunna, which pledged its loyalty to ISIS in 2015. The terror group looked to the sea early. Drug smuggling through the Mozambique Channel has become big business for them,
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and Mozambique has few naval resources to call on to counter the group’s maritime activities. The South Africans have sent ships there to assist, but Mozambique doesn’t want to get too dependent on their neighbor. The dangers don’t end there, though. There’s a curious place in the Mozambique Channel that we haven’t discussed yet, and it’s a preview of the things that sailors voyaging up the east coast of Africa will still experience.
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This is Mozambique Island, a 0.5 square-mile (1.3 sq km) place separated from the mainland by only 1.8 miles (2.9 km), surrounded by crystal clear blue seas. Underneath these Instagram-worthy waters lie the wrecks of at least 30 ships. Treasure hunters swarmed the place looking for loot until 2014, when the efforts of a local archaeologist named Ricardo Duarte succeeded in running them out of town – or whatever is left of it.
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Those shipwrecks are the clue to the bigger danger lying off the coast of East Africa. There are at least 300 shipwrecks, ranging from the late 17th century to the present. Sure, it’s not quite as dramatic as the records around the Cape of Good Hope or Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, but if you’re sailing these parts, it’s still best not to let your guard down. East Africa is rugged, full of coral reefs, with few natural anchorages. The first major shipwreck
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came in 1499, when the Portuguese galleon San Raphael ran aground and burned at Mtongoni in modern Tanzania. Many of the shipwrecks came from human error, including sea pilots that underestimated the forces of nature out here. But there are more famous dangers here. Somalia has more coastline than any other country on the African mainland, at about 1,880 miles (2,897 km). If you were to compare that coast with a map of the Continental United States, it would
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stretch from the Florida panhandle up to northern New York State, and then west into Michigan. That’s bad news for the world’s mariners, because Somalia has been in a state of civil war since the 1980s. The borders you’d see on your map don’t accurately reflect the military situation in the country. The internationally-recognized Federal Government of Somalia is only in control of a small part of its supposed territory. The rest is divided between the autonomous region of
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Puntland - the self-declared but unrecognized Republic of Somaliland, and various Islamist militant groups. That means there’s a lot of coastline in Somalia that’s lacking in public order. Meanwhile, the average annual income in this part of the world is only about $590 as of June 2025. You can probably guess what these two things come together to produce. Somalia is one of the world’s most popular pirate havens. Everyone knows the most famous pirate incident in
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recent memory, when the Maersk Alabama under the command of Captain Richard Phillips was hijacked 276 miles (444 km) off Eyl, Somalia, in April 2009. But not all piracy incidents get movies made about them. The so-called Captain Phillips case was only the beginning of a trend. Pirate activity there peaked in 2011, with 160 attacks recorded that year. There were 358 in the period between 2010 and 2015. Things looked like they were starting to settle
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down in 2016, amidst increased international patrols following seven anti-piracy UN Security Council resolutions. Those resolutions meant that the pirates were staring in the face of foreign navies and air forces that were now permitted to patrol the waters off the Somali coast. Those measures expired on December 3rd, 2021, and at least for a little while, things looked OK. But there’s been a recent resurgence. At least five incidents occurred off Somalia in the
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first quarter of 2024 alone. Activity has become more intense than any of the previous six years, according to Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, a security-related think tank. You can probably blame the Houthis for the resurgence. By January 2024, 354 container ships were choosing to avoid the Suez Canal and go around the Cape of Good Hope instead. With all that wealth nearby, and the easing of the international anti-piracy
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measures, the temptations proved too much. And here’s the thing about the pirates in Somalia. They don’t stay in Somalia. They have a long reach because there’s so much coastline for them to choose from. In March 2024, Somali pirates hijacked a ship on the way from Mozambique to the United Arab Emirates. They were over 620 miles (998 km) away from their home waters and wound up with a $5 million ransom payment. And that’s not even the longest attack on record. They’ve
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hijacked ships over 1,100 miles (1,770 km) away from their homeland. They’ve been deep into the Indian Ocean, into the Gulf of Aden up to Saudi Arabia, and south to Madagascar. So let’s say you’re a ship captain coming from Asia on the way to Europe and you’ve chosen to avoid the Suez Canal for fear of the Houthis. If you make it to the Cape, it means you’ve avoided the Somali pirates. But you’re still in for some bad news. It turns
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out that Somali pirates aren’t the only pirates that could give you a hard time on your journey. The people living near the Gulf of Guinea have it better than their counterparts in Somalia, but their average income here is still small. If you live in Gabon, you might expect a yearly income of just under $8,000, or around $4,800 if you’re in Equatorial Guinea. Don’t expect much over $2,000 if you live in one of the other countries on this shoreline. No surprise then, that
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illegal fishing is rampant, but that’s not the only illegal activity that’s popular around here. The Gulf of Guinea is yet another pirate hot spot. It’s actually been an even more pirate-prone place than Somalia over the last decade. There are a lot of prizes for the pirates to win out here. It has 25% of Africa’s internal maritime traffic and plenty of oil and gas extraction. With so much wealth and so much poverty being so close together, it’s little
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wonder why piracy rose in the Gulf so quickly. 2020 was the peak year for the pirates here, with 2 incidents in the first quarter alone. 130 of the world’s 135 maritime kidnappings took place here. In 2021, it made up 43% of the world’s total piracy incidents. And the pirates have been known to go far. Not quite as far as their Somali counterparts, but far. In 2021, the furthest known attack came 242 miles (389 km) south of Cotonou,
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when the pirates kidnapped 15 crew members of a Maltese chemical tanker. So why aren’t they being stopped? Well, the countries along the Gulf of Guinea don’t have the highest level of trust in each other and are unlikely to tolerate outside naval presences in their territorial waters. The long coastline of Somalia allowed for a more concentrated effort to suppress the pirates there. It’s not the same in the Gulf of Guinea. Meanwhile,
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the states involved lack the necessary security architecture to suppress the organized criminal enterprises that sponsor these pirates. There are a lot of local officials in on the act, too. The web of crime runs from corrupt security services personnel, to political officials, to foreign traders and financiers. Piracy-related incidents declined sharply after 2020, but that was partially because of the pandemic-era slowdown in international trade.
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After bottoming out in 2023, the first quarter of 2024 saw an uptick. Now with more ships being forced to sail the long way around Africa, there is great temptation. It’s little wonder why people have gotten so creative in trying to avoid going under Africa whenever they could - even since ancient times. The Egyptians knew the dangers. So they tried to build their own Suez Canal. There was once the Canal of the Pharaohs, which
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Aristotle said started as far back as the 19th century BC under the reign of the Egyptian King Senusret III. The canal didn’t connect directly to the Mediterranean. Instead, the course was supposed to start at the city of Pelusium on the northeast bank of the Nile. From there, you would go downriver to Zagazig just north of where the great river splits apart. The proposed canal would
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then take you past Heropolis to the Bitter Lakes. A smaller channel would then be dug from there to the Red Sea. It might have been indirect, but it was much better than going around Africa. Just ask the Pharaoh Necho II, who Herodotus reports sent the first known expedition around the continent in search of a more desirable trade route to Asia. Unfortunately, both Senusret III and Necho ran into problems with their canal – the sea was higher than the land,
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and they feared a deluge of saltwater into the Nile that would ruin irrigation. 10,000 men died in the attempt to reopen the canal. But the hope stayed alive. Darius the Great came along and also worked on the canal - he has inscriptions to prove it. Whether he completed it or not is subject to debate. Ptolemy II later used water locks to solve the pesky “land higher than the water” problem. Strabo reported that the canal was about 164 feet (50 meters) wide.
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But there was something badly wrong with this great achievement. Centuries later, the Roman Emperor Trajan had to make repairs to the canal. It fell into disuse. The canal stayed open in one form or another until 767, when the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur closed it to shut down supply routes between his enemies in Egypt and Arabia. Apparently the place was never as significant to global trade as Senusert originally hoped for, so it
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was expendable. It was forgotten for 1,000 years. In the meantime, the Venetians and Mamluks tried to build an entirely different canal to solve the same problem. Construction began in 1586, but it would quickly end in failure. Louis XIV thought about trying his hand, too, but ultimately left it in the realm of fantasy. Then another great ruler came around. Napoleon discovered the ancient canal and wanted to build a modern version. Construction got
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underway in 1799 but there was just one problem - the French engineers thought that the Red Sea was about 33 feet (10 meters) higher than the Mediterranean, so it ended in another failure. The latest modern attempt started in 1859 and succeeded ten years later. The dream of Senusert III had at last become a reality. But the dream of avoiding the route around Africa at any cost isn’t over yet. The 2021 incident and the Houthis are keeping the dream alive.
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The trip around the continent is so forbidding that Russia is hoping to cash in on the opening of the Northeast Passage, and China is eager to help its troubled strategic partner along. As the ice slowly melts, the waters here have become more navigable. Between 2013 and 2023, the recorded annual distances of ships in this remote place went from 6.1 million (9.8 million km) to 12.9 million (20.7 million) miles. The arctic sea routes mean that ships don’t have
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to go around Africa if something goes wrong with the Suez Canal route. Compared to that journey, the cold doesn’t seem that bad. Anything to avoid the Graveyard of Ships. Thanks for joining me today! I hope you enjoyed the video, and if you want to see more videos like this, then please consider subscribing and turn on notifications, really does make a difference. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time on Map Pack!
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