by Chris Marais
The captain left us in the able hands of Chief Engineer Billy Arnold, a nuggety Port Elizabeth man. Was this a dangerous job?
“Being linked to law enforcement makes us a target,” he said. “They’ve thrown stones at me, they’ve mugged me and they’ve shot at me. But we’re not afraid of these people. We’re doing a great job.”
We began cruising down to Cape Point. Jules and I had not packed our sea legs, and we could feel the curry supper from the night before planning a great escape from our bodies. But the story was spellbinding. Did his family ever come under threat from poachers?
“My family is far away,” Billy said. “Even so, I once got a panic call from my wife to say a group of poachers were out on my lawn, calmly having a braai.” It was a clear warning. We know where you live.
China spent so much cash on the abalone that the ‘alpha’ poachers had the best boats, the finest equipment and the biggest engines around. They took cellphones underwater in plastic bags and warned each other when boats such as the Pelagus approached – then they simply ditched the abalone and escaped.
“They send spies to come and see what equipment we’ve got so they can get faster stuff,” he said. This was particularly irksome to him, who took great pride in maintaining the boat’s twin 500-hp Rolls-Royce engines.
We approached Seal Island, the snack spot for the famous great white sharks of False Bay. Many years ago, I’d heard a legend about The Submarine, a shark so huge that they had to manufacture a massive hook especially for it. The hook was baited with ‘half a horse’ and lowered into the sea. After much tugging on the thick line, it came up – horseless and straight as a pin. Reflecting on that tale now, I realise I must have gleaned it from someone who was very drunk at the time.
However, the real angle to the great whites of False Bay is their ‘Air Jaws’ display as they leap through the air to catch seals, their favourite prey. And after hearing how seals ritually ‘de-gloved’ dear little jackass (aka African) penguins, unzipping their pelts from their quivering bodies, I was fully in the great white camp.
Stomachs heaving, Jules and I crawled up to the top deck and met Jerome Fouten, the Second Engineer. Jerome, who had also faced death in the course of his job, didn’t put such a brave face on the matter. We soon found out why.
“A while ago I was hijacked by three guys who blindfolded me, put me in the back of a car and drove me around for about 40 minutes,” he said. “By the time they stopped the vehicle, I was just able to see under the bottom of the blindfold. We were in an isolated, bushy area. One man had a gun. I knew what they were going to do. I elbowed him out of my way, his gun fell to the ground and I ran for my life.”
Jerome – younger than the rest of the crew – skippered the on-board hunter vessel, an inflatable dinghy. When they chased a suspect boat, it was invariably Jerome and the DEAT inspector at the sharp end of the quest.
“I’m not armed and I don’t get to wear a bullet-proof jacket,” he said. “I tell the poachers I’m just the taxi driver, they mustn’t shoot at me. Obviously, they don’t listen.”
We bumbled around the Pelagus feeling green, interviewing the working crew, who had all been victimised on land by the poacher communities. A large skiff loaded with happy smiles and a good catch came by. They saw my cameras and began to pose with their fish. Then the seas got serious. I managed to retch and take photographs at the same time. Jerome rescued Jules and pointed her to a cabin where she could lie down. I joined her a minute later. Most of the crew made concerned appearances at our door. Billy came and offered us a shot of Worcestershire sauce, “to settle the stomach”, and it seemed to work.
Then there was action of another kind. Two small boats had been spotted, one of them “suspicious” because it immediately made a run for it. The dinghy was winched down in a flash. Jerome and Osborne hopped in. Jerome pulled a blue balaclava over his head, immediately transforming himself into a rather ominous anonymous person, and they sped off in pursuit of the running boat.
We hauled ourselves up off our pallets and visited the captain.
“It’s not all cowboys and crooks out here,” he said. “Two weeks ago, we took a few divers out to release a whale that’d got tangled in lobster-fishing ropes. You see a thing like that, you really understand that whales are mammals – they’re not just big fish.
“After we freed it, the whale went down and came up again and slapped the sea with its tail before swimming off. I swear, it was saying ‘thank you’.”
A garlicky-chilli kind of aroma had risen from the inner depths of the Pelagus. We went down to the galley, where Robert Prinsloo stood in tears. Slicing onions can be a very sad business. What did the boys like to eat?
“Meat stews,” he said. “Seafood pizzas and steak. Sometimes I bake them a cake.” We left him to his weeping and went to see how the hunter boat was doing. Jerome and Osborne were back. The suspects had escaped.
We approached Simon’s Town. On the flanks of the mountain you could see some really wealthy homes.
“These people,” sighed Billy, his voice laced with more than a tinge of disgust. “Some nights, we moor here. And then they complain when we switch on anything more than navigation lights. It seems the rich find our little cabin lights very disturbing. They think they own everything.”
This left me with subversive thoughts. Billy and his mates get shot at for protecting our natural resources. They often have to arrest members of their own community for poaching – people who don’t really see an alternative way to earn money. And then the rich folks on the hillside – who should be grateful beyond measure – want them to dim their cabin lights. Preferably disappear after sundown. Hmm.
Another crisis had, in the meantime, snuck up on me. While I was trying to photograph the shoreline, something in my long Howitzer-type lens collapsed and was near death. I had to get to Cape Town fast. We thanked the chaps, paid the Fish Fleckers of Kalk Bay handsomely and sped off to the Mother City.
At a stop street in Bishopscourt, a black guy wearing a blonde wig, pink lipstick and a summer dress tried to flog us a joke book, speaking in a quavering, sex-kitty voice:
“Hi, my name is Portia.” Jules could not help mimicking his transvestite tones.
“Actually, I’m Sipho,” he answered in a deep voice and smiled. “I’m just trying to sell these funny things in a funny way.”
We bought one and darted through the traffic to the top of our beloved Long Street, where we handed the long lens in to Uncle Camera Doctor, who promised us he’d operate immediately. We thought we’d have lunch and wait for the patient to come out of theatre.
After our morning at sea, Cape Town lunchtime society found me stinky and unpresentable. A young waitress mouthed the word “scum” to her mate and gingerly handed me a menu. I grinned and ordered something in an avocado.
The next morning we heard some intriguing news. A scuba diver had gone missing off Miller’s Point near Simon’s Town the day before. He had apparently run out of oxygen while diving five metres down. Had he been left behind by a fleeing poacher boat? No one could say. But the three bags of perlemoen found near the dive site seemed to tell their own story …
Chapter 11: False Bay
Penguin Town
Abdullah Moses is a strapping 16-year-old in the year 1900, and it’s the time of the Anglo-Boer War. It is also a time of whaling, and where he lives in Simon’s Town, there is always great excitement when a fluke is spotted in False Bay.
The youngsters of his community are used as look-outs. They light a fire the minute they see any sign of whales. The whaling boat goes out to meet the giant. As soon as it is within striking distance, the boys on the cliffs put out their fires and wait.
One lovely day, the boys spy a whale out near Roman Rock. The whaler Monarch, skippered by a Mr Marnewal, is dispatched from Jaffer’s Bay. His harpoonist is the trusty Abdol Clark. The whale is harpooned and begins to tow the boat out towards the open sea. This is normal procedure.
> Today, however, there is another, perplexing, obstacle. The wounded whale has a fiercely protective calf swimming alongside her. Every time the boat gets within striking distance of the mother whale, her calf intercedes. Finally Mr Marnewal himself, losing patience, spears the calf with his lance.
The next scene should have been filmed and shown to wannabe whalers all over the world for the next 100 years.
The dying calf begins to sink to the bottom of False Bay. The mother tries desperately to lift it back to the surface. As she realises the calf is dead, the records state (Abdullah Moses’s own words in Whaling in False Bay) that she “came up and gave a scream”.
The enraged whale rises out of the waters and charges the boat in grief-stricken fury. Mr Marnewal and his crew realise they’re at the doorstep of Hell, about to be shoved in by a vengeful whale. They try desperately to back the boat away. The whale bites the boat in half. The very lucky crew hang on to bits of the Monarch until a rescue boat arrives. The whale, meanwhile, has left False Bay …
I was reading this story to Jules on the porch of one of Cotton’s Cottages, a delightful self-catering establishment (fittingly named after a famous local harpooner) overlooking Simon’s Town on the kind of evening you want to preserve in aspic. Yachts in the bay, someone doing parking manoeuvres with the country’s brand-new Navy frigates, washing machine humming happily inside with three weeks’ grimy clobber, freshly picked lavender in the bedroom. Yet in this crepuscular moment just before nightfall, we both fell silent and sad as we pictured the whale hunt.
“Moving right along,” I said, not wanting to lapse into a sunset funk. “Did you know that Cotton’s Cottages lie on Paradise Road, which was where all the hookers used to live and work?”
We sipped at our gins and thought about that for a while. Conjured up the talk on the street, the old cars struggling up the hill, the frilly dresses, the snap-brimmed hats, the flash of thighs and the jazz music. Paradise Road. We cheered right up.
Simon’s Town, I found, had a two-tone history. Cobbled streets, charmingly preserved buildings, harbours, jetties, maritime business, bookshops, restaurants and a naval base all spoke of a former age of purposeful elegance. We walked the ‘Historic Mile’ of Simon’s Town where, in the late 1700s, young Horatio Nelson went nosing around while on shore leave from the HMS Badger.
Forget Cape Town, I say. For real action back in the 18th century, Simon’s Town seemed to be the hub of the sailing universe. All sorts of traffic flowed past here, from heavily laden spice ships to slavers to Men o’ War to privateers to grimy whalers to passenger vessels. All good business for the shopkeepers and tavern owners of Simon’s Town.
This was where, if you sat in the right corner and kept your ears open, you would hear all the news from east and west. Which countries were at war, what pirate was in town, which naval captain was out of favour with the Admiralty, who had been lost at sea in the latest shipwreck and were you attending the execution this afternoon? No? Then see you at the ball tomorrow night.
“Simon’s Town was more brilliant than the far larger Cape Town,” says Lawrence Green in Tavern of the Seas. “Huge wooden buildings were erected specially for the naval balls, and fireworks entertained those outside.”
We drove down to the Simon’s Town Historical Museum, formerly the Residency, a multistoreyed mansion containing snippets from False Bay’s past eras. One section displayed old World War II posters warning citizens to keep mum about troop and ship movements. Also:
“Save kitchen scraps for hens. Council will collect.”
“Would you like to see the dungeon?” came a disembodied voice from behind. I spun around in shock, to see a kindly lady in her middle years with a look of enquiry on her friendly face. Why not?
A young man called Alan Green took us downstairs to the Black Hole, where misbehaving prisoners used to be stripped naked and tossed in, without so much as a blanket or bucket. After up to three months in the Black Hole, they would end up “seriously touched”.
“The stench down here was horrible,” said Alan. “We used to allow tourists to go into the Black Hole, but we stopped. Too many people found it too deeply disturbing.”
Then Alan put me in the stocks, trapping my legs between two heavy pieces of wood. This was what they used to do with people who were drunk and disorderly in public around here.
“About time,” observed my wife dryly, as she saw me squirm uncomfortably in the throes of ‘participatory journalism’.
“They sat like this for eight hours,” said Alan. “No access to food, water or toilet facilities. A popular Sunday outing for a Simon’s Town family would be to come out here with all the rotten fruit and eggs [probably those damn stinky penguin eggs again] they could lay their hands on – and throw them at whoever was in the stocks.”
The litany of horrors in the dungeon continued. We saw marks on the walls that were made on the down-swing of the lead-tipped cat-o’-nine-tails when a man was whipped.
“After being recaptured, an escaped slave would be flogged and branded on the cheek. If he escaped again, his ears, the tip of his nose and his right hand would be cut off,” said Alan. “They stopped this practice because the sight of mutilated people walking down the road offended the people of Simon’s Town.
“Any child born to a slave woman belonged, of course, to the master. In one particular incident in 1831, a slave woman admitted under torture that she had murdered her baby. She had her breasts pulled off with red hot pincers and then she was ordered to be burnt to death.”
The authorities, in a rare display of ‘leniency’, changed her sentence, sewed her into a sack and dropped her into the deep blue sea. So it wasn’t all quadrilles and quaffing of fine wines around here in the heady old British Navy days. Someone who did have himself a bit of a party back in 1896 was one Edgar Wallace, author and founder-editor of my dear Rand Daily Mail. He arrived at the Simon’s Town clinic as a medical corps orderly and later wrote People; Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon:
“There was a compact little surgery, and in the hours when I was alone I experimented on myself with every drug. I took opium, morphia, cocaine (which made me laugh hysterically), chloroform, ether and Indian hemp. The morphia nearly killed me, but I suffered nothing from the others. And I had no desire to repeat the experiments.”
At the Heritage Museum near the naval dockyards we met Zainab ‘Patty’ Davidson. Her maiden name was Amlay. Patty’s husband Dick was having a snooze upstairs but she was happy to show us around her family home, which had been taken from the Amlays under apartheid legislation in 1975 and, 30 years later, was being reclaimed by the family.
“The Navy asked me to move in while the claim is being processed,” she said. “That’s to stop the vagrants from taking over.” The bottom storey of the house was a shrine to Simon’s Town’s Malay culture and history. Muslim wedding finery, items of Muslim faith and records of the arrival of the Sheik of Macassar were all on display.
“Before the forced removals, everyone had friends across the colour bar in Simon’s Town,” she said, without a hint of rancour. “We, my sister and I, even dared to sit in the Whites-only section of the local cinema. Other families found themselves in ludicrous situations, where fairer ones were classified white and the darker ones, coloured.”
How would she and Dick break their fast that evening, we asked, ever curious about culinary matters.
“We’ll have a couple of dates, some samoosas, then some soup and then I’m planning a cottage pie with vegetables, maybe some caramel-and-banana pudding afterwards,” Patty said, lingering lovingly on the description of each dish. “By the way, would you like to meet a ship builder from Norway?”
Next door was Marton Berg, who had a yacht in his front yard. He thought he might sell it. It wasn’t one of those suburban ‘scam boats’ that never hit the waters. This was a dinkum ocean-going vessel “made for two, but able to be sailed by one”. Marton had toyed with the idea of sailing it back to Norw
ay.
“But now I’m not so sure. I’ll probably just fly over,” he said. We told him we were going to visit the penguin colony at nearby Boulders Beach.
“I think I may have helped start that colony back in the late seventies,” he said. “I took in a few penguins in False Bay that were covered in oil slick. I tried to return them to Robben Island, but they kept swimming back.”
Perhaps it was a case of cartoon overload, but as I sat on the rocks at Boulders Beach watching the clans of African penguins hopping about, they looked to me like short little waiters just before opening time at an open-air beachfront restaurant. You could fix a dishcloth onto their sloping shoulders, perhaps a sling-bag for tips and change about their necks. The Special of the Day could be displayed (in washable ink, of course) on their white chests and you could just tick off what you wanted. The lovable African penguin. Just don’t expect him to serve you the catch of the day without taking a small bite out of your dish.
Known as the ‘urban penguins’ of the Cape, this 4 000-strong colony has many natural enemies, not the least of which is man, who sometimes shows a barbaric tendency to want to barbecue a penguin on the beach. Back in the mid-1600s, however, penguins got a far rougher deal from the human race. Their eggs were part of the local diet. Penguins themselves were used as fuel to supply ship boilers. When people tried to eat a penguin, however, they invariably cursed the fishy meat as “foul fare”.
Today, those big tankers you see on the horizon are the main penguin killers. Whenever they spill oil, it spells potential death for these flightless birds.
Up at Boulders Beach Lodge – not short of penguin-themed logos – we met John ‘Chops’ Craig, a former Simon’s Town Citizen of the Year.
“Back in the eighties, someone came and asked me where the penguins were,” he said. “I said ‘What? There are no penguins in Simon’s Town.’
“A couple of days later I took my dog for a walk along the beach and thought I heard a walrus. Then I thought no, that sounds more like a donkey braying. Then I saw it was a breeding pair of penguins.” I asked him why everyone called him Chops. He said his mates had given him the nickname, but he wasn’t sure why.
