The History of the Fishing Industry Understood…

The fish seem quite fearless, and as the water is very clear you can follow all their movements with great ease. It is a very pretty sight too, to go down to the Central Causeway any afternoon about three o’clock ad watch the fleet of fishing boats coming to the anchorage after a hard day’s toil at hooking “snoek”, silver-fish, “Hottentots”, stump nose ad “geelbeck”. There they come in a long double file, rounding the end of the North Jetty, their white sails glittering in the sun, their crews toiling at their oars in measured sweep.

Life at the Cape more than a hundred years ago. –  August 1861- Lady Visitor from England memoirs

And now, as the sun is slanting to the West, they are returning to their homes, tired, cramped and hungry. One by one the boats are cleverly beached, the gear and cargo landed, while a warm welcome greets them from their families. Then follows a process that I have never seen in use in any other part of the world, they use no mechanical means to bring their heavy, wide-beamed boats beyond the reach of high water. There are no slipways, rollers or capstans required to haul her up. These sturdy fellows reeve a rope strop through the stem and sternpost rings and through the bights of these strops they push a stout bamboo pole. Then four men, in a stooping position, get their shoulders under the ends of these poles, and with one hand on the gunwale of the boat to prevent her swing­ing, with an “altogether!” and straining muscles, they raise themselves to an upright position, lift­ing the boat’s keel clear of the sand. They walk away with her and bring her clear of the high-water mark.

Historical Media. Woodstock Beach 1845

The history of South Africa’s fishing industry is comparable to a huge incomplete picture puzzle with a few pieces in place but showing numerous gaps. Although the Bushmen and Hottentots fished and harvested from the shoreline for subsistence use it was with the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck on 6 April 1652 in Cape Town to refurbish his food supply for his crew by “draw the net for some fish for the crew”, that was the first recording of commercial harvesting.

The agenda was that the food needs of the colony personnel should incorporate the fresh supply of fish by netting and other agricultural produce either through bartering and hunting.

The establishment of commercial fishing

The establishment and chronicles of the large industrial companies are well documented, although somewhat clouded. At first the commercial fishing industry in this era focused mainly on whale-catching and sealing with stations situated in Cape Town, Saldana Bay, Kalk Bay and Simon’s Town, with the fishers supplying the local markets.

The methods and culture of the fisher folk is intricately enmeshed with the Malay slaves who were allow to fish by their masters on Sundays and the Philippino seamen of Kalk Bay who deserted from a Spanish ship in False Bay. With this introduction of the Malays, Philippinos, colonising Europeans, amaXhosa, the Khoi-Khoi, and the collapse of the whaling industry, the fishing of our resources exploded and laid the foundation of our fishing industry.