The post office tree.

I love history, and sometimes little weird stories catch my attention like the famous post office tree in Mossel Bay, Cape province, South Africa.

In 1501 Portuguese navigator Pêro de Ataíde sought shelter in Mossel Bay after losing much of his fleet in a storm. He left an account of the disaster hidden in an old shoe which he suspended from a milkwood tree near the spring from which explorer Bartolomeu Dias had drawn water. A year later the report was found by the explorer to whom it was addressed, João da Nova, warning of the dangerous waters there, and the tree served as a kind of de facto post office for decades thereafter. The tree became a de facto post office box, where sailors would exchange letters protected in boots, iron pots, or beneath rocks. Seamen would leave their messages behind, trusting that their countrymen would pick them up and deliver them to their correct destination, albeit very slowly.

In those years, travelling by ship from Europe to India for the spice trade was new and dangerous, and the trip could take years to complete, sometimes never. For the most part, the seas between the Cape and India was uncharted.First it was the Portuguese, later it was the Dutch, with the Dutch East India Company, who started a resupply station at the tip of Africa for their sailors, which led to the founding of the Cape Colony which eventually became South Africa.

João da Nova erected a small shrine near the Post Office Tree, and although no traces of it remain, it is considered the first place of Christian worship in South Africa.

More recently, a boot-shaped post box has been erected under the now famous tree, and letters posted there are franked with a commemorative stamp. This has ensured that the tree has remained one of the town’s biggest tourist attractions.

It is estimated that the tree is 600 years old. It is amazing that letters could be left there and a year later someone from another ship would retrieve it and eventually deliver it to the intended recipient back in Europe. what an exciting event to have a sailor approach you at your office at the harbor and hand you the 2 year old letter from a fellow shipmate on another ship from the company you sail with and recount their adventures they had. And you would be going there soon, and now would be armed with the information given by him to you . Those days are long gone, with our current technology and instant delivery of news reports. But just knowing that it used to be like that you can imagine what it was like, and it leaves a yearning in your soul for those long ago years. I wonder how many letters never found their intended recipient, or did, but too late to be of use. I wonder if that kind of postal system would ever be used again, say in space travel, to Mars, or another planet. It is kind of fun to think about, even though we have advanced technology at our fingertips, doing something like that would create a historical moment in time that would reverberate over the decades and millennia. And make you stop in your tracks in your mad rush of daily life, and look back with regretful nostalgia on what life used to be like when things were slower, and more poignant and meaningful. Just something simple like a letter left under a tree in a faraway land. Or a message in a bottle floating in the ocean. Have you ever done that?