Abstract
In the winter of 1860, Queen Victoria’s second son Prince Alfred embarked on a grand tour of British South Africa. When Sir George Grey, the Governor of the Cape Colony, invited Alfred to the Cape earlier in the year, his parents Victoria and Albert saw an opportunity to combine ‘his professional studies as an Officer in H.M. Fleet’ with the ‘acquirement of such knowledge of Foreign Countries as he may have opportunities of obtaining’.¹ George Grey had his own objectives in mind for the tour, which he used to push through funding of a Table Bay breakwater against the opposition