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.
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