Simon's Town, setting for my book The Girl from Simon's Bay, has never been short of famous visitors.
As I mentioned in my last post, many of the great Antarctic explorers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, called in to the town and stayed at The British Hotel before heading into the Southern Ocean. Perhaps the most famous of these was Robert Falcon Scott, who was determined to get to the South Pole before his rival, Norwegian Roald Amundsen. But when Scott's expedition reached the Pole on 17th January 1912, they discovered they had been beaten to it by the Norwegian team. The 1500 km return journey took a terrible toll on the five men who had made it that far: Evans died in mid-February, Oates walked into the snowy wilderness to avoid slowing the team down and was never found, the remaining three men - including Scott - died in their tent of starvation and exposure at the end of March. Tragically, their final stop was only 20km from a previously-replenished supply dump that might have saved their lives.
There's one earlier visitor, though, who went on to become perhaps the most famous seafarer in the world: Lord Horatio Nelson.
But did he actually set foot ashore in Simon's Town?
At the time, he was a young, 18 year old midshipman on his way back to England after contracting malaria in the Far East in 1776. And according to some accounts, he was too ill to leave his ship and go ashore.
What a pity! But it has not stopped Simon's Town from claiming his presence.
Here I am in front of the Lord Nelson Inn, which has been offering hospitality to seafarers and landlubbers alike ever since...
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