Cape Cross Seal Reserve

The cross that left for Berlin, and the men the guano killed

The cross Diogo Cão left on this headland carries two dates, and neither matches the year he is thought to have landed. Its inscription, cut in Latin and Portuguese under the royal arms, counts 6,685 years from the creation of the world and 1,485 from the birth of Christ. Historians put the landing in January 1486. The pillar was limestone, three and a half metres tall and a little over a tonne, and it stood here for four centuries. Cão himself is a loose end. The ministry’s history sheet has his crew sailing home without him, an old Portuguese chronicle has him back in Portugal, and nobody has settled it.

Two crosses at the cape, and neither is the real one

When Captain Gottlieb Becker of the German cruiser Falke came ashore in January 1893 the pillar was still standing but leaning badly. He took it down, left a wooden cross in its place and shipped the original to Germany. The Kaiser ordered a copy in granite, with a German inscription and the imperial eagle added, and that copy went up at the cape in 1895. So the older of the two crosses you see today is itself a colonial object.

The second came in the 1980s, when the National Monuments Council put up a dolerite replica, closer to the original and paid for by private donations. The ministry says this is the one on the exact spot where Cão’s stood. The council chose to keep the Kaiser’s version too. Near them are stones most people walk past, among them a ‘seal stone’ with an English summary of the old inscription and an oval one engraved with Cão’s coat of arms.

The original had a longer trip. It spent more than a century in Germany and passed to the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin in 1990. In June 2017 Namibia asked for it back. Two years on it was still the only colonial-era object for which the German government had received an official request of that kind. The museum’s trustees agreed on 16 May 2019 and the pillar was shipped that August. In June 2021 the German government told its parliament that the cross was sitting in a warehouse in Walvis Bay with the handover papers unfinished, held up by the pandemic. I have not found a record of it going on public show since.

What the guano cost: 92 men in three years

In 1895 Walter Matthews travelled north from Swakopmund looking for seals and found the rocks caked in guano as well. With a wealthy uncle’s help he set up the Damaraland Guano Company. For nine years a camp of about a hundred men worked the cape, with a police station, a customs office, a post office (robbed, in what the ministry calls the country’s first postal robbery) and a plant to distil water. Drinking water also came by ship from England, in torpedo bottles. The small museum at Cape Cross Lodge, which Nadine Downing and her mother Conni opened in 2013, holds workmen’s tools, crockery, bits of the railway and photographs from the early 1900s.

The ministry’s own history sheet gives the cost. Between 1899 and 1901, 92 men died here, which it says was half the workforce. Their graveyard is near the reception office and gets far less attention than the two crosses. By 1903 the rocks had been stripped bare.

On the drive in, look left. A faint curved line runs between a granite outcrop and the edge of the salt pan. That is the bed of the 21 kilometres of track that carried guano and seal skins down to the ships. The salt pan is the bay they anchored in.

What the seals are doing, month by month

The colony never empties, but it changes. From the middle of October the bulls come ashore, 200 to 300 kilograms each, and stop eating. They hold a patch of rock and fight for it until mating is over. Pups arrive in a rush from mid November into December, born black. After that the cows come and go: roughly four days at sea in summer, nearer a week in winter, then back to pick one pup out of thousands by its call and its smell.

Some years go badly wrong. In 1994 about 10,000 seals died at Cape Cross and some 15,000 cows aborted, which was put down to starvation with a bacterial infection on top.

Jackals by day, hyaenas hardly ever

Black-backed jackals are the animal you will see besides seals, in daylight, working the edges of the colony. Researchers who studied them on the Namib coast found that jackals on empty beaches live in small groups and defend long thin territories, while at a seal rookery with more food than they can eat they live in large groups and do not bother with territories at all. They also found the jackals walking a long way inland on set paths, probably to get away from the cold coast and warm up.

Brown hyaenas do come to the beach, but under cover of darkness, when the day visitors have gone. For brown hyaenas at a seal colony in daylight the place is Baker’s Bay, far to the south in the Tsau //Khaeb (Sperrgebiet) National Park, where the Brown Hyena Research Project works.

The smell follows you out

Every account agrees on the smell, and the ministry’s leaflet is honest about the rest: heat as you get out of the car, then a cold wind as you near the seals. On the 4x4 Community forum one overlander, thinking back to a visit thirty years earlier, put it among the ten smelliest places on earth, and another said the reserve campsite smelled of dead seals when they passed around Christmas 2025. Travel writers mention the noise as much as the smell, a steady racket of bleats and barks.

One family who camped here wrote of how little the seals seemed to care, lying inches from the walkway and flopping over each other. The ministry says the Brandberg can be seen from the cape, so look inland too.