Angra Pequena (Portuguese for "small cove") was a small coastal area in what is now known as Lüderitz, Namibia.
First discovered by Europeans in 1487 by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias. On April 10, 1883 Heinrich Vogelsang (emissary of Adolf Lüderitz of Bremen) first landed at Angra Pequena. Vogelsang signed a fraudulent lease of land from Joseph Fredericks, Kaptein of the Bethanie community. (Vogelsang used the unit of geographical miles in lieu of ordinary miles, effectively obscuring the true amount of land to be leased.) Angra Pequena was made into a trading station by German trader Adolf Lüderitz in 1883 who subsequently renamed the cove Lüderitz after April 24, 1884, when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck declared that the station and the surrounding area would be henceforth a protectorate under the German Reich. (The act took effect on August 7, 1884.) Bismarck's hasty act was propelled by the belief that Britain was about to claim the area as a protectorate.[1]
Renamed Lüderitzbucht (Lüderitz Bay) by the Germans, the location then became a naval base for German South West Africa, modern day Namibia.
Islands off the coast of Angra Pequena, rich in guano deposits, were annexed by Great Britain in 1867 and added to Cape Colony in 1874. Hence, Shark Island, an island in Angra Pequena bay (or as it became known, Lüderitzbucht), was connected to the mainland by a bridge. It might then be claimed that Shark Island (or Haifisch Insel) was technically not an island, thus avoiding the British claims.
Shark Island later became the world's first extermination camp.