A river of many names

Even before the first European voyage around Africa in 1488, stories abounded about the Vigiti Magna. Jan van Riebeeck was given two objectives when he reached the Cape of Good Hope; the first, as we know, was to found an outpost to supply passing VOC ships. The second, never taught to us in school, was to find the city of gold. The initial fort was barely complete when the board of directors of the VOC (the world’s first multinational company) instructed that the first expeditions be sent out. Van Riebeeck’s foremost source of information was a report by the company’s trade route pioneer, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, penned in 1583, and also a testimony by the Spanish priest, Father Martini, who visited Van Riebeeck’s outpost in 1653. Both sources insisted that Vigiti Magna was real and the VOC and Van Riebeeck believed it. By Van Riebeeck’s estimations, the city of gold was no more than 20 days per horse from the outpost. Between 1660 and 1664 at least five expeditions left to search for the city but only one of them, led by Jonas de la Guerre and Pieter van Meerhof, came anywhere near the Orange River. They did, alas, not find Vigiti Magna. When Nama representatives visited the Castle of Good Hope in 1684, Governor Simon van der Stel, Van Riebeeck’s successor, eagerly enquired about the elusive river which was by now called the Camissa. The Namas confirmed that a great river did indeed exist, but, much to the Dutch governor’s chagrin, said there was no city of gold. The Namas explained that they had names for all the tributaries of the great river, but no name for the river itself. They referred to it as Kai !Garib, which is simply a term (yet a respectful one) meaning ‘great river’. Van der Stel nevertheless led an expedition in 1685 into the Namaqualand and finally found this great river which he marked as the “Ein” on the first map to accurately depict a section of the Orange River as it would later be called. In 1760 an elephant hunter named Jacobus Coetsé became the first white man to discover the mouth near modern-day Alexander Bay and he named it ‘Grootrivier’ or Great River. Later still, in 1797, the explorer J Barrow noted in his book An account of the travels into the interior of Southern Africa: “The peasantry had no name for it but that of the ‘groot’ or great river.” Despite all the facts before them, many Europeans still couldn’t accept that the Vigiti Magna river had been found and it was only in 1777 when the Scottish-born Dutchman, Robert Jacob Gordon, encountered the Orange River near modern-day Bethulie, and later traced the river through the Namaqualand to its mouth, that the mystery was finally solved. Gordon was apparently so moved by the discovery that English explorer, William Patterson, who accompanied Gordon, wrote in his diary: “In the evening we launched Colonel Gordon’s boat, and hoisted Dutch colours. Colonel Gordon proposed first to drink the State’s health and then that of the Prince of Orange, and the company; after which he gave the river the name Orange River in honour of that Prince.”