The Eastern Frontier's Martello tower

The Eastern Cape town of Fort Beaufort is home to a Martello tower, a structure used for coastal defence as early as the 15th century to ward off Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean. Mike Burgess looks at why one was built on the Cape’s 19th century Eastern Frontier more than 100km from the ocean.

- Mike Burgess

In 1822, a British officer, Lieutenant- Colonel HM Scott, established a military post along the Cape’s Eastern Frontier and called it Fort Beaufort in honour of the fifth Duke of Beaufort, father to Lord Charles Somerset, the then governor of the Cape.

By the 1840s, a Martello tower, first encountered by the British on the island of Corsica almost 50 years earlier, had been added to the defences of Fort Beaufort, by now a fully-fledged British garrison town on the banks of the Kat River along the Cape’s notorious Eastern Frontier with the Xhosa.

COASTAL DEFENSIVE TOWERS

As early as the 15th century, the Mediterranean island of Corsica was home to coastal defensive towers used for protection against pirates. The construction of these ones- and two-storey stone towers was initially paid for by local villagers who also remunerated watchmen to scan the Mediterranean for suspicious vessels.