rock art cave painting dutch ship porterville

Image credit: Trust for African Rock Art

The Porterville galleon rock painting tells story of Cape colonisation

The Porterville Galleon stands as one of the thousands of ochre rock paintings in the Cederberg.

rock art cave painting dutch ship porterville

Image credit: Trust for African Rock Art

Near enough 200kms north of Cape Town and 100kms from the nearest coastal bay, the Porterville Galleon remains a bit of a mystery.

The rock painting is believed to date back to the early 18th century and is one of a number of rock paintings which straddle the colonial and pre-colonial realities of the time.

The majority of the thousands of rock paintings in the area pre-date this one, some are as much as 3 500 years old.

According to Kimon De Geef, the paintings found in caves and boulders throughout the Cederberg are the only written and visual history of the San societies that inhabited the Western Cape before it was “discovered” by the Dutch.

The paintings are predominantly but not exclusively of animals, humans and geometric patterns. Later works start to show the collision of colonial and pre-colonial worlds where tobacco pipes and wagons begin to appear in the rock art.

However, as the effects of colonialism grew in the area, the hunter-gatherer Khoi and San societies were largely decimated by smallpox and settler militia attacks.

The Porterville galleon is one of at least five known rock paintings that depict ships in the country, and one can be forgiven for wondering about the motives of the artist.

They would have travelled 100 to 200km from the sea, possibly running for their lives or at least preservation of their way of life. Was it a warning to others a fond remembrance or something else entirely.

“It was a period of immense disruption, we don’t know why the artist travelled to the mountains from the sea, but this painting is evidence that they did,” said John Parkington, professor emeritus of archaeology at the University of Cape Town.

Parkington does urge caution, though, noting that as with many of these rock paintings, it’s very hard to be sure of its origin. “It’s a painting on a rock,” he says.

“You can never be completely sure who put it there, that it wasn’t some joker in the 1960s. But it’s likely that the image is authentic: there are much older paintings, produced with what seems to be the same iron oxide pigments, nearby,” said Parkington.

The Trust for African Rock Art has a gallery filled with rock art from South Africa.