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Vleesbaai is a seaside vacation town, situated between Mossel Bay and Gouritsmond in Western Cape, South Africa. ==History== Although the native Khoi (otherwise known as Hottentot) people inhabited the southern shores of Africa long before it was discovered by Europeans on their seafaring expeditions, Vleesbaai, like many other South African coastal places, is known today by the name it was given by European explorers. The first European to set eyes on the bay now known as Vleesbaai was Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias in 1488. Dias would have come into the bay, as he discovered the southern shores of the African continent en route to the East, in the process of establishing the spice route. It took more than a century after the Bartolomeu Dias expeditions for Vleesbaai to get this name, and the bay was christened by another explorer, the Dutchman Paulus van Caerden. It was due to bad wind conditions on the 14th of July 1601 that Van Caerden was forced to seek refuge in the protected bay. He was pleased to discover that many natives ashore were willing to trade their well-fed livestock for scrap metal and other fancy Western articles and goods – he named it Vleys Baeye, the Old Dutch word for Vleesbaai, directly translated into English as “Bay of meat”. Van Caerden was also the man responsible for naming the neighbouring settlements in the vicinity, including Visbaai (Afrikaans, meaning 'Fish Bay') to the west, and Mosselbaai (Afrikaans, meaning 'Mussel Bay'), known as Mossel Bay in South African English, approximately 30 km to the east of Vleesbaai. It is interesting to note that for many years there was confusion as to which of the two neighbouring bays – Vleesbaai en Visbaai – were which. This was largely due to the fact that for many years the names of the bays were swapped around and displayed incorrectly on maps. However, it was officially corrected in 1972 by the Surveyor-General’s Trigonometry Surveys and Mapping Office. Vleesbaai and its surrounding region proved to be good agricultural land for livestock, and as result it saw an increase of nomadic farmers from the Cape region creating farm settlements in the area during the greater part of the nineteenth century. It was only towards the first part of the twentieth century that the first informal settlements started in the bay as a holiday camping site for the local farmers.〔Stimie, C.M., Joubert, J.J.F., Marais, A.N., Scheffler, Helena. 1988. Vleesbaai 500 – Die storie van ’n Boerestrand.〕 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「Vleesbaai」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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