Shorelines (9 page)

According to reports, it took the family years to recover from the tragic death of the young skipper.

The most enthralling character in the Stephan clan turned out to be Oom Carel Stephan, born in 1843. As a young buck, he fell in love with Marie Rochier, whose parents farmed near the Berg River. They disapproved of Carel and would not give their permission for a marriage. So, in the true tradition of ‘the old days’, Marie went off and drowned herself in the farm dam. Out here in the
Wuthering Heights
atmosphere of the
sandveld
.

On that day, a heartbroken Carel swore he would never marry. He bought a condemned French barque called the
Nerie
, towed it to the mouth of the Berg River and made it his fortress, warehouse and home. From here he traded and managed the Stephan empire, seldom socialising. He ruled his work-force like the Godfather and called them
“
my children”.

Oom Carel kept a much-loved parrot up there in his floating quarters, like Captain Hook. Upon the bird’s demise, he went off to the local carpenter and ordered a tiny coffin to be made to fit the parrot. He ordered all his clerks to attend the funeral. The local missionary, who also enjoyed the patronage of Oom Carel, had to read the formal service, almost as though the parrot had been a human family member. But that was the West Coast in those days – you always expected the unexpected.

Oom Carel used a Khoi runner called Piet Danster to relay messages. Piet carried a little whip, which he would use on himself when he felt he was slowing down on the run. He would regularly embark on 80-km runs, cheerfully negotiating the routes between Stompneus Bay, Lambert’s Bay, Hopefield and Saldanha Bay.

Then came the Anglo-Boer War, and Boer general Manie Maritz rampaged up and down the West Coast with his flying commandos. They helped themselves to stores from the French barque, made their way north to Lambert’s Bay and fired a couple of shots at a British gunboat. This was to be the one and only ‘naval engagement’ of the Anglo-Boer War.

At nearby Vredenburg, the Boers looted shops and came away with knives, sweets and savouries. Then they hit the local hotel and one of the commandos got so jolly they had to leave him behind, snoring under the bar counter. He woke up with a special thirst the next morning, presumably surrounded by some very irritated burghers.

The Stephans had a store in Vredenburg. The cash from the store was hidden in a secret hole in the pulpit of the local church. No one thought to look there. Oom Carel, meanwhile, decided to sandbag his ship in anticipation of future attacks. Unfortunately, all that weight broke the old ship’s back, and she sank into shallow mud, scant metres from the hotel where we had enjoyed lunch and Dr Lichtenstein’s racy river memoirs. Oom Carel, one presumes, took up new lodgings on dry ground.

“Goodness,” I exclaimed, just as the sun was setting. “And where does your father fit into all this?”

“He worked for the Stephan brothers and did most of his salvage operations in a boat called the
Luna
,” said René, whose clan hailed from the French-Spanish border lands.

When a Portuguese mailboat, the
Lisboa
, went down on 24 October 1910, near Paternoster, it was René’s father and the
Luna
who went to her rescue. All 250 passengers survived; three crewmen drowned. The cargo consisted of barrels of olive oil, red wine and a number of fighting bulls, destined for the arenas of Lourenço Marques. Even the bulls were brought ashore, and they no doubt strengthened the bovine gene pool of the West Coast over the decades to come.

The wine, however, enjoyed another fate. Paternoster’s Italian fishing community went to ‘check up’ on the wine barrels that had washed ashore. After a week-long absence, their wives went to look for them. The fishermen were found in a cave, having ‘secured’ the casks of hearty Portuguese red. They were reportedly in a sorry, sorry state.

“Now,” René said the next morning. “Would you like to try some
bokkoms
?”

Jules and I had had a dodgy virgin experience with fish biltong back at Doring Bay, but we were hardy troupers on the road and willing to try again. So off we marched to
bokkoms
Lane, centre of the West Coast dried fish industry.

All along the river banks, there were piles of silver harders left to dry on poles after a good soaking in brine. Paul Marais, one of the last
bokkoms
barons of the river, said the money in his business was lousy. Not like in the past, when everyone on the farms ate
bokkoms
as part of their rations. Somewhere in the sheds, they were also packing snoek heads, which someone in this world regarded as a delicacy. Thank God no one asked me to snack on a snoek head.

“OK, are we going to do this
bokkoms
thing?” Jules nudged me in the car. We were driving towards a speciality shop near the harbour. I wasn’t keen at first, but once we’d bought a bag of the stuff and parked where no one could smell us, I tucked in. Unlike the tough little fish from Doring Bay, this lot were fleshy and yielding to a middle-aged tooth.

So there we sat within sight of the sea, eating
bokkoms
in the correct way by nibbling the flesh from the bone.

In fact, that evening I sat on the porch chatting to René, gamely chomping clumps of
bokkoms
and washing them down with gulps of Jack Daniels as the cormorants swooped over the boats on their winding way home upriver. Bliss by the water. Then my cellphone called and it was fellow writer, drinking partner and co-conspirator Pat Hopkins, on the line from a disreputable watering-hole in the south of Jo’burg. I told him about the Teazers SMS (just in case he had a moment to rush out and catch the early show) and he told me to go to Paternoster.

“Where you must visit the Panty Bar.”

I promised him that we would waste no time in getting there the next day …

I’m sitting on a jetty overlooking the Berg River at Velddrif waiting for the sun and feeling a tad peckish. Last night’s supper of
bokkoms
and bourbon is but a careless burp in the wind. I would really like Mrs Hildagonda Duckitt to appear live from the pages of Cape history and serve me breakfast. Boy, did this auntie know how to cook.

She was the Martha Stewart of the late Victorian era in the Cape, the lifestyle guru everyone listened to. And you always wanted to travel with her, because Mrs Duckitt came well stocked. For instance, when she visited a farm on the Berg River (recounted in the rarely found
Hilda’s Diary of a Cape Housekeeper
), her picnic hamper contained: “bread, butter, hard boiled eggs, corned breast or ribs of mutton;
frikkadel
s, that is minced mutton, with bread-crumbs, spices, etc, made into little balls and fried – they are excellent for travelling”.

In the midst of this cosy pre-dawn cuisine dream, I watch the fishermen chug in and cheerfully begin unloading the night’s catch of harders,
hotnotsvis
and yellowtail. Is that a snoek before me, down in the hold? The fishermen are laughing and mocking one another and competing and singing softly while they work. A truly beautiful sight, and I’m getting ready for that sunrise so I can take postcard pictures of this lot and march off with my iconic images of the typical Cape fishermen bringing home the bounty from the sea.

In
Fishermen of the Cape
, Frank Robb says:

“The Cape Coloured fisherman is … a small man with a hardbitten face deep-etched by sea and sun and too often further ravaged by shoreside dissipations, with a mordant wit admirably expressed in the vivid ‘Capey’ dialect, and with a fish-wife who is a bold, flaunting harridan-witch with a gift for invective enabling her to hold her own in any slanging match.”

This quote – which would probably not win Robb any PC points in the New South Africa – was ferreted out by Lance van Sittert, writer of the excellent thesis
Labour, Capital and the State in the St Helena Bay Fisheries (1856–1956)
. Robb continues:

“In South Africa too, fishermen have acquired a novelty value on a par with ‘Bushmen’ and other ‘primitives’ whose lives appear … intertwined with Nature. This association, in the case of fishing, sustains a thriving local tourist-, coffee-table publishing- and amateur art industry, dedicated to faithfully reproducing in curios, postcards, books, paintings and photographs the essentially timeless nature of fishing.”

What I think he’s saying is that the tourist industry – for example, outsiders in general and populist hacks like me – buys into the myth of the Cape fisherman without giving a shit about his real life, his real problems and the question of who puts food on the table when his quota is retracted or the fish don’t run.

There are also a couple of centuries of background to consider: alcohol abuse, labour abuse and the ever-present Company Store. You know how it goes. Work for me, here’s a tin shanty for you and your wife to make lots of little future fishermen in. Here’s a berth on a boat and a credit note for my shop nearby. If you run over your limit this month, don’t worry. We’ll write up a tab for you. And you’ll work forever to try to catch up with your debt to the Company Store. By the way, here’s some extremely cheap liquor to drink on that one day off when you’re not out at sea pulling in fish for me. Welcome to the family. Like any family, it will occasionally be hell on earth. But you will always get just enough to eat, just enough to exist on.

In this way, the employer’s money never leaves the homestead. It just circulates from the boss to the fisherman to the Company Store and back into the boss’s pocket again. And they’ve been doing it all over the world for centuries now.

But it wasn’t always a case of
dronkverdriet
(alcoholic melancholy) and hard times in the local fishing community. Robin Lees wrote the classic on the industry, called
Fishing for Fortunes
. She tells of the boom times of the late 1940s, when crews were making big money out at sea.

“For the first time in their lives, the fishermen had money to spend, money to squander as recklessly as they wished. They spent it on sweets and sometimes on shoes for their children; on smart clothes and shiny gadgets. They spent it in the new cinemas and shops that had opened in every village … and in the bars, peppermint liqueurs and expensive whiskies were ordered in large glasses instead of cheap wine by the gallon.” They would buy a brand new car, crash it and walk back to the dealership for another one. Happy days. Briefly.

In the St Helena Bay district, a mysterious tragedy played itself out – more than once. In 1936 nearly five dozen false killer whales beached themselves on the sands around the bay. It happened again in 1981, when 65 false killer whales came ashore. Of these, most were females, with worm encrustations around their ear holes.

One of the theories explaining the bizarre beachings is that the whales had erroneously swum up the deep Cape Submarine Canyon, which runs perpendicular to the coast and ends near St Helena Bay. But the real question is why, once beached, the whales persistently refused to return to the sea – even when they lay exposed and literally cooking under the hot sun.

“And let me tell you about another bloody tragedy,” I raved as we drove on. “It’s called Paternoster.”

Back in the 1980s, my late friend the photographer Herman Potgieter came here and shot classic images of fishermen’s cottages around Paternoster, a sleepy little village. These photographs stuck in my brain and, a decade later, lured me all this way to the West Coast. When I arrived, I was devastated. I could not find Herman’s cottages anywhere. Yuppie suburban rot had eaten most of the village. Prince Tourism had simply ridden up on his big white 4x4 horse and kissed Princess Paternoster to life.

“And then she immediately turned into a cane toad,” I said as we drove in from the east.

The bourgeoisie were still well represented in Paternoster, riding around in lycra-wrapped family packs on purple mountain bikes and sipping cappuccinos on the porches of their ‘fisherman-style’ shuttered homes amidst the
faux
seine nets and chintz.

Today the Somerset West Photo Club was out
en masse
, cheerily stalking the main beach and fish market in search of iconic shots – as I was – of those wizened old fishermen and their boats.

But we had been to Strandfontein. After the pre-Christmas ghostly sterility of Strandfontein, Paternoster was just fine. At least some fishermen still lived in the village among the moneyed encroachment of weekend warriors from Cape Town. At least the ‘Shoo Wah Brigade’, with their Land Rovers and their private-school kids and their red setters, had mostly built their homes in the West-Coast fisherman style.

“And there’s always the Panty Bar,” I exulted as we parked outside the Paternoster Hotel and walked in according to Pat Hopkins’s instructions. But we were early for opening time, so I read some Hopkins,
Eccentric South Africa,
to Jules:

“The crowded pub is decorated with such appalling taste that it takes on an appeal of its own. Signs like ‘Fuck the seals. Save the fishermen’ and ‘Traffic cops are proof that prostitutes do fall pregnant’ compete for space with panties and G-strings collected from honeymooning brides, plastic flowers, rubber breasts, penis candles …”