|
Port Elizabeth or The Bay ((ズールー語:Bhayi); (コサ語:iBhayi); (アフリカーンス語:Die Baai)) is one of the largest cities in South Africa, situated in the Eastern Cape Province, east of Cape Town. The city, often shortened to PE and nicknamed "The Friendly City" or "The Windy City", stretches for 16 km along Algoa Bay, and is one of the major seaports in South Africa. Port Elizabeth was founded as a town in 1820 to house British settlers as a way of strengthening the border region between the Cape Colony and the Xhosa. It now forms part of the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality, which has a population of over 1.3 million. ==History== 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 Bartholomeu Dias, who landed on St Croix Island in Algoa Bay in 1488,〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=Love To Know )〕 and Vasco da Gama, who noted the nearby Bird Island in 1497. For centuries, the area was simply marked on European navigation charts as "a landing place with fresh water".〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=Nelson Mandela Bay Tourism )〕 One of the main goals of the Portuguese Crown 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, the Portuguese strengthened trading with Goa, their colony in India. The name ''Algoa'' meant "to Goa," just as the port further north in present-day Mozambique, ''Delagoa'' meant "from Goa." Algoa 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 became part of the Cape Colony. This area 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 as a result of the British winning the Boer War. 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. It is now operated as a monument.〔 From 1814 to 1821 the Strandfontein farm, which later became the Summerstrand beach suburb of Port Elizabeth, was owned by Piet Retief. He later became a Voortrekker leader and was killed in 1837 by Zulu king Dingane during negotiations about land. An estimated 500 men, woman and children of his party were massacred. After Retief, the Strandfontein farm was owned by Frederik Korsten. Another contemporary suburb of Port Elizabeth is named for him in the 21st century. In 1820 a party of 4,000 British settlers arrived by sea, encouraged by the government of the Cape Colony to form a settlement to strengthen the border region between the Cape Colony and the Xhosa people. At this time the seaport town was founded by Sir Rufane Shaw Donkin, the Acting Governor of the Cape Colony, who named it after his late wife, Elizabeth. Diplomat Edmund Roberts visited Port Elizabeth in the early 1830s. He noted that Port Elizabeth in the 1820s had "contained four houses, and now it has upward of one hundred houses, and its residents are rated at above twelve hundred persons." The Apostolic Vicariate of Cape of Good Hope, Eastern District, was established in the city in 1847, and in 1861 Port Elizabeth was granted the status of autonomous municipality. The town expanded as a diverse community comprising European, Cape Malay and other immigrants. The population increased rapidly after 1873 when the railway to Kimberley was built. Prime Minister John Molteno had formed the Cape Government Railways in 1872, and the massive expansion of the Cape Colony's railway network over the following years saw the harbour of Port Elizabeth servicing a large area of the Cape's hinterland.〔Burman, Jose (1984). ''Early Railways at the Cape''. Cape Town. Human & Rousseau, p.66. ISBN 0-7981-1760-5〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=Info Please )〕 During the Second Boer War, the port was an important transit point for British soldiers, horses and materials headed to the front by railway. While no armed conflict took place within the city, many refugees from the war moved into the city. These included Boer women and children, who were interned by the British in a concentration camp. Following that war, the Horse Memorial was erected to honour the tens of thousands of horses and mules that died during the conflict. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Port Elizabeth」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|