Table Bay
Wide bay on the north coast of the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, on which Cape Town stands. It is overlooked by Table Mountain and contains Robben Island, on which Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for many years before the end of the apartheid regime in 1994.
History
The Portuguese merchant and explorer Antonio de Saldanha was the first European to discover the bay (1503). The massacre of a Portuguese party on the shore of Table Bay (1510) probably accounts for the Portuguese not having settled here as they did to the east and, later, along the west coast of Africa. The first European settlers along the shore were the Dutch in 1652.
