Table Mountain as a Terrestrial ParadiseThe narratives surrounding the fabulous kingdom and personage of Prester John are linked to the legends of King Arthur and the Round Table, Parzival and the quest for the Holy Grail, and the lost paradise of Shamballah or Monomotapa. Like Marco Polo, Prince Henry the Navigator was inspired by fabulous tales of a black Christian potentate who could prove to be a useful ally in the struggle against the Muslims. Although no such ruler or dominion was ever found in Asia or Africa, it is well worth noting how the literary tradition of Prester John found its historical enactment in an age of Portuguese conquests. At this time Christians hoped the Grail legend would become history, or that thirteenth-century fiction would become fact in the fifteenth century. The early explorers enrolled themselves as knights to enact, both literally and figuratively, the quest for the legendary Terrestrial Paradise (Garden of Earthly Delights) where enlightenment and an everlasting life awaited them. After sailing down the desolate West African coast (where the barren Namib and Namaqua deserts reminded fearful sailors of the Grail legend's Waste Land) the Cape seemed like a place of abundance - a lost Garden, East of Eden. Weary after voyages lasting several months these homesick, scurvy-ridden seamen rejoiced at the prospect of sweet water and fresh meat. In a verdant valley below the mountain they found perennial springs and bountiful game, unknown elsewhere on earth. On the summit was a vast mountain plain that later writers associated with Dante's Paradiso: 'Upon the top of this promontory [Table Mountain] Nature... hath formed here a great plain, pleasant in situation, which with the fragrant herbs, variety of flowers, and flourishing verdure of all things, seems like a terrestrial paradise' (Livio Sanuto 1588). The Portuguese, perhaps to terrify their rivals from sailing to the East Indies, made the voyage round the Cape a matter of far greater danger and peril than it later proved to be (Robinson 1922). Thus, on finding the Portuguese report to be most false after passing the Cape on 18 June 1578, Sir Francis Drake protested against its reputation as the most dangerous cape in the world, proclaiming: 'This Cape is a most stately thing and the fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth'. This statement pitted Elizabethan enlightenment against medieval superstition, the lucrative New World against the fabled Lost Kingdoms. The Cape was thus seen as a fulfilment of existing concepts and representations of the strange and the familiar, of a far-away place that was 'wild' and 'tamed' at the same time. It was both the Cabo da Tormentoso (Cape of Storms) and the Cabo da Boa Esperança (Cape of Good Hope). Following Harriet Deacon (1996), 'There could be no Paradise without Purgatory, no Cape of Good Hope without a Cape of Storms'. Many of the first images of the mountain were drawn either from memory or by report, and were often exaggerated for effect, the 'exotic' aspects of Africa being played up for the audience in Europe. John Kench Know Table Mountain 1988
Table Mountain as a Stereographic View |
