Seabird Islands of South Africa
Robben Island
Jan van Riebeeck was sent to Cape Town by the Dutch East India Company
to establish a replenishment station for ships travelling to the East.
He arrived on 6 April 1652. He paid his first visit to Robben Island
five months later, in
September.
His diary records that he returned to the mainland with a good haul of
seabird eggs, some
penguins and some seals.
This was the start of a long process of exploitation,
and the beginning of a long history of human impact on Robben Island.
Robben Island is the largest of the islands along the coastline of South
Africa. It is 507 ha in area, roughly oval-shaped,
and about 2 km in length from north to south. The island is fairly flat,
with a few low sandy ridges.
The bedrock is a blue slate, eminently suitable for construction.
Rock quarried on Robben Island was used by the newly-arrived Dutch settlers
to build the castle in Cape Town in the 1660s.
The Robben Island lighthouse was built in 1863 on the highest point of
the island,
called Minto Hill, which is
about 30 m above sea level.
Photo L.G. Underhill
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| Robben Island, with Table Mountain in the background.
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Robben Island's proximity to Cape Town had the inevitable result
of it becoming
the least natural of all the islands along the South African coastline.
For three and a half centuries, it has been used for many purposes.
First, the seals and seabirds were exploited.
Subsequently it has been used for agriculture, for quarrying slate and lime,
as a military base to defend the approaches to the port of Cape Town,
as a place of isolation for lepers and the mentally disadvantaged,
and then as a notorious prison.
It is now the
Robben Island Museum
.
Robben Island acquired the status of World Heritage Site in 1999.
In spite of all the modifications, the island remains a choice destination
for ecotourists.
The original colony of
African Penguins
on Robben Island was
exterminated
by about 1800. From then until 1968, when
SANCCOB
was started,
penguins would only have occurred on the island as occasional vagrants.
Robben Island was the place where SANCCOB released most oiled penguins after
they had been cleaned. They left the island almost immediately, and headed
back to their own colonies.
One penguin, which had been oiled in 1979 on
St Croix Island
and brought to
SANCCOB for cleaning, was released here and covered the 900 km back to
its island in 11 days.
In 1983, penguins recolonized Robben Island.
The colony has grown rapidly, and there are now about 13 000 penguins
which moult on the island ? this means that they regard Robben Island
as "home".
In May 2000, just before the
Treasure
oil spill
,
there were 5 500 pairs of penguins on the island,
making this the third largest colony for the species.
Only the colonies at
Dassen Island
and
St Croix Island
were larger.
Apart from the mainland colonies at the Boulders and
Stony Point (Bettys Bay)
,
Robben Island provides the most accessible place for people wanting to
see the penguins.
It is also the best of the three colonies to give an impression of seeing
penguins in their natural breeding environment
(the two mainland colonies are not in typical penguin habitat).
The ferry service to the Robben Island Museum runs almost hourly,
especially in summer;
there is enough time
within the standard three-and-a-half hour museum tour to give the visitor
an opportunity to see the penguins.
Just north of the harbour where the ferry arrives is an excellent
hide which overlooks the main penguin landing shore. There is also a
raised boardwalk from which visitors can almost always see penguins
on their nests. From the hide, there are always penguins in view. The
section of the island's coastline in front of the hide was the part
that was worst impacted by the
Treasure
oil spill
in June 2000. Thousands of oiled penguins were removed
from this area over a period of several weeks as they came ashore oiled
and taken to SANCCOB for cleaning. Many thousands more clean penguins
were captured on their nests in the adjacent colony and were translocated
to
Cape Recife
, Port Elizabeth, to prevent
them from becoming oiled.
Robben Island is the subject of the first
Bright Continent Guide
published by the Avian Demography Unit.
This booklet, by
Rob Crawford
and Bruce Dyer, provides a valuable overview
of the wildlife of the island.
There is also a chapter describing the seabirds,
whales and dolphins you have a good chance of seeing during the ferry
crossing from Cape Town harbour.
Robben Island on this website:
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