History[edit]

The area around what is now called Algoa Bay was first settled by hunting and gathering people
ancestral to the San at least 100,000 years ago. Around 2,000 years ago, they were gradually
displaced or assimilated by agriculturalist populations ancestral to the Xhosa, who migrated into
the region from the north.
The first Europeans to have visited the area were Portuguese explorers Bartholomew Dias, who
landed on St Croix Island in Algoa Bay in 1488,
[3]
and Vasco da Gama who noted the
nearby Bird Island in 1497. For centuries, the area was simply marked on navigation charts as "a
landing place with fresh water".
[4]

One of the Portuguese's main goals in the Indian Ocean was to take over the lucrative trade of
Arab and Afro-Arabian merchants who plied routes between the East African coast and India. As
they took over that trade they established trading with their colony in India, Goa. The name,
"Algoa," meant, "to Goa," just as the port further north in present day Mozambique, "Delagoa,"
meant, "from Goa." Algoa reflected that it was the port from which ships left for Goa during the
season when the winds were favourable, while Delagoa was the port in Africa at which they
arrived from Goa in the season when the winds for the return trip were favourable.
The area was part of the Cape Colony, which had a turbulent history between its founding by
the Dutch East India Company in 1652 and the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.


Fort Frederick
In 1799, during the first British occupation of the Colony during the Napoleonic Wars, a stone
Fort was built, named Fort Frederick after the Duke of York. This fort, built to protect against a
possible landing of French troops, overlooked the site of what later became Port Elizabeth and is
now a monument.
[4]