By the mid-eighteenth century, a seafarer's first view of Cape Town from the deck of a ship was the formidable stone fortress protecting a small well-ordered European colonial town that looked expectantly out to sea. A sight that impressed many travelers most vividly on first arriving at the Cape, and one that many cartographers represented in disproportionate size, was the Company's gibbet. Situated just outside the town at a slight elevation, the scaffold was visible to ships entering the Cape roadstead. This was where corpses of the condemned were hung on display to rot. Another site of execution – the gallows – stood within a walled yard next to the Castle of Good Hope at the top of the main road going inland so all travelers would pass it. This was where sentences of public punishment, torture, and execution took place. These sites, on display for all travelers and residents to see, epitomized the foundations of Dutch East India Company rule as clearly as did the Castle. The VOC's imposition of jurisdiction and monopoly of legal force over those who inhabited its settlements throughout its far-flung empire, as exemplified by these three sites – the gibbet, gallows, and Castle – enabled the Company to impose its will in the name of the law.

Places of execution at the Cape were just one of the signs and symbols of a system of discipline that incorporated ships at sea and settlements on land across the Indian Ocean.