Late in the afternoon I reached Gansbaai, a scruffy town that would be my home for the night. Seals floated on their backs in the harbour basin and Hartlaub’s gulls wheeled overhead crying for scraps. Boats were drawn up on the hard in a dry dock where skateboarders wearing low-slung tracksuit bottoms and beanies plied the concrete. The cold front was brewing and the western horizon appeared to be smeared with grease. Even inside the harbour, deep-sea vessels were fidgeting at their moorings, the ropes creaking with an ancient moan. It felt very “˜south’ here, exposed, close to the end of the continent and the Roaring Forties. These southern Cape coastal scenes always evoke strong feelings in me, a certain nostalgia, a love of this corner of the Atlantic, this treacherous Overberg shore. The swell was talking to the concrete dolosse protecting the breakwater, whispering tales of wrecks and gales, of fishermen who’d spent their lives working the Agulhas Bank.
I’d booked a bed at Saxon Lodge. It was sort of Cape Dutch and sort of overlooked the harbour. I sat alone at the bar sipping a Birkenhead lager and feeling a bit awkward. Should I be trying to talk to people, or maybe order a couple of tequilas to liven things up? Just then a good facsimile of Long John Silver appeared in the doorway, limped over and lifted himself gingerly onto the barstool beside me. He ordered whisky and milk. I cleared my throat, half turned and offered a smile. He ignored me. There was a long silence. “˜Hi, I’m Justin,’ I said.
Slowly he turned and looked at me. “˜Hardman,’ he said finally, holding out a sunburnt hand. Then he downed his whisky like a shooter and ordered another double.
André Hardman – shark-cage operator and diver extraordinaire – had slightly slurred speech from a stroke which had partially paralysed one side of his body. There was a moth-eaten beard, squonk spectacles, jeans rolled up almost to the knee and his feet were bare. Conversation immediately turned to shark diving. He told me he’d started out as a spear fisherman and switched to shark-cage diving when the tourist boom began.
“˜Do you still spear?’ I asked.
“˜Nah. My kids do. The one’s fourteen, the other’s eleven. When I go to Dyer Island with clients I drop ’em off the back of the boat near the rocks.’
“˜But that’s shark-infested water,’ I said.
“˜Ja, they gotta stay in the kelp. Last month, they bumped into a great white in two metres of water.’ He made his hand into the shape of a fin. “˜My eldest boy fended it off. My youngest was lank proud that his brother just shoved the shark, jabbed it with his spear gun. The shark was really interested in taking my little one. Three times it came for him.’
“˜In the kelp?’
“˜Ja, in a gully that opens to the sea. The smell from the rock, you know, all the seals. The shark was following the smell. Lucky they saw it coming. ‘Cause the danger is, if you don’t see it “¦’ André smacked a fist into his hand, imitating a white taking its prey from below.
“˜Yes, I’m a surfer,’ I said. “˜There’s the scary thought I’d probably never see it coming.’
“˜Normally happens in bad viz. When whites go into the surf zone they’re looking for red meat. You see, a dolphin likes to surf with its lighties. In bad viz they look like surfers. You take off on a wave and bang! Tickets.’
There was a pause as he weighed my reaction, then a sly smile.
I wanted to know if he’d ever had a bad shark encounter.
“˜Nah, not really. Was bitten once. Young white shark, ’bout six foot. I was fucking stupid though, dangling my foot over the side while we were chumming, you know, luring sharks by pouring fish oil and stuff in the water. He gave me a nip. Just a few puncture holes, cupla stitches.’
I asked about chumming, especially at Seal Island. A Cape Town teenager had recently lost his leg in an attack at Muizenberg. Some say the fishy chum drifts ashore with the southeaster, drawing sharks towards surfers and bathers. Eco-activists argue that chumming is like driving through a game reserve dragging a carcass behind your car to attract lions.
André gave a snort of derision. “˜You gotta see how we do things, okay? Here at the island, we do a helluva lot of chumming.’ Dyer was simply “˜the island’, which lent it a certain gravity. (Apparently, it’s named after an African American, Samson Dyer, who somehow landed up collecting guano on this inhospitable desert isle in 1806.)
“˜In summer, sharks move closer to the beach. We actually lure them away from the shore with our chumming. The stuff gets poured in the water far offshore and they come check it out. We use mostly shark liver and that’s a natural thing for them to find.
“˜Look, even when there’s no chumming, there’s plenty sharks near the beach. I mean, you often see five-metre whites in the back line at Pearly. When the wave is about to break, there they are, silhouetted. Beautiful. The ous that do research at the island have acoustic tags on some of the sharks and a receiver on the sea bottom which picks up info. There’s one right at the beach and it gets three-quarters of the hits. But no bather has ever been attacked. So you gotta actually speak to the scientists,’ he was animated, shifting on his bar stool. “˜We have no nets, no nothing. You fly in a microlight over that beach, you see one two three four five big sharks swimming just behind the surf, right next to the bathers. Nuther drink?’
Another double was poured. André took a sip, baring his teeth with pleasure.
“˜Gansbaai’s got a bit of a reputation for poaching,’ I ventured, changing the subject.
“˜Ja.’ He wiped the wet ring of the glass with his hand, weighing up whether he should go on. “˜In fact, yesterday, five black poachers swam from Pearly Beach out to the island. Six o’ clock in the morning. It’s about three kays. They stuck to the kelp, but there’s a cupla open patches and one of them got bitten on his flipper. Scared the shit out of them. By afternoon, they had enough abalone and were swimming back to shore. One of the guys got hit: bam! The shark breached on him, took the bugger right out the water. Bit his leg off. Swallowed the leg. Grabbed the next leg. Ate that. Then gobbled the rest. His buddies could do nothing, just made a beeline for the beach. But it’s all about bad viz, man. They were swimming through bad viz. Today, all the blacks in the township are talking about it. Bit of a lesson.
“˜In the beginning, when poaching began, I was part of it. Years and years ago. But we all did it. Small scale, you know, mostly for the pot. Then it got really big. The cops are clamping down quite heavily now, but there’s still people hanging in. The money’s good. You talking about two, R300 a kilo. But the stocks are being wiped out. Thing is, government has stopped the local population from touching perlemoen, but they still give out commercial quotas. I believe they should stop it altogether. And they must simply shoot everyone they find in the water.
“˜Most of the area they used to poach belongs to I&J fisheries. One day, the head of company security was going along the beach on his off-road bike and bumped into a bunch of coloured poachers. They beat him up; fucked him up stupid. Had to plead for his life. When he got away, he said bugger this, I’m gonna call in the heavies. So I&J hired some ex-Koevoet army guys. It didn’t take them two weeks: black oke sits on the front of the Jeep, sees a spoor, says stop, jumps off and disappears. Comes back and says the poachers dived there, there and there, left the bag over here. Then a few of them go back and watch the spot. That night, the poachers return to fetch their bag and the Koevoet guys fuck them up so stupid they’ll never ever come back. Scared the shit out of ’em. The I&J area has never been poached since. The cops could never do that.’
“˜And what about Chinese triads?’ I asked.
“˜Ag, there’s always a Chink connection somewhere,’ he said. “˜They buy the stuff straight off the boats and export it chop-chop. It gets driven to Swaziland – no-one checks your truck when you enter Swaziland. Then out it goes to Hong Kong – no-one touches it ’cause it’s a Swazi product.’ He rocked back, chuckling. “˜It goes SAA, marked as abalone nogal! I mean, like they’ve got freshwater perlemoen in the dams up there! Ha ha ha.’
An elderly German couple entered the bar and sat down at the far end of the counter. They ordered a bottle of wine. The barman said something I didn’t quite catch about whales and they all laughed.
My conversation with André turned to the ships that have gone down along the coast. “˜The Johanna was a famous treasure ship,’ he said. “˜Me and my diving buddies found her in 1983 the other side of Quoin Point in shallow water. She sank in 1682, an English East-Indiaman carrying Spanish coins bound for the factories in Bengal.’
“˜Did you find any?’
“˜Coins? Ja, ja. We found a lot,’ he said quietly. I pressed for more.
“˜Officially, we ended up splitting fifty-fifty with the government. We divided it so that both sides had half of the artefacts and half of the money. But government wanted most of the artefacts. So we’d say for instance swap one of those old onion-shaped wine bottles, which are worth about R1 000, for 250 silver coins worth R100 each. It was a damn good deal.
“˜The wreck was hard to find. The guy who originally salvaged the ship made a map. But it took us a long time to figure it out. In the old days, you couldn’t see things like we would today with an aircraft. Nothing was left of the hull. She had a lot of cannons in cargo, lying kop-en-gat, you know, head to toe. There were 49 of ’em.
“˜Hell, we had bad viz on that job. I found silver bars and coins beyond the first bit of reef in a gully. Silver has a dull colour if it’s been underwater for a long time. I came across these little grey things with crosses on them. They were worn pretty bad. But then we dug under the sand and found perfect coins with the date and mint-maker marks.’ He smiled at the memory.
André looked cagey when I asked about the worth of the wreck. “˜Officially we pulled up about 500 kay-gees of silver bullion and about 40 000 cob coins. But some were very worn so their value comes right down: we melted those. Each of the divers got his share. In the end many of my best coins, the dated ones with the crown of Spain, were stolen. But so what? It was the find that was great.’
“˜And the rest? Did you sell them?’
“˜Ja, some, a few hundred bucks here and there. It kept me alive. I knew a guy in Stellenbosch who had a bottle store. He’d come to me and ask for a coin, then he’d give me a box and say, “Fill it with any drink you want,” and I’d get some whisky and some rum and some brandy. Twelve bottles for one coin. He’d sort me out with hard tack for the next six months. Good fun.’
“˜Did you use the money to search for other wrecks?’ I asked.
André looked uncomfortable and shifted on his bar stool again. “˜Ag, man, my first wife caught me sleeping around, divorced me, and I ended up marrying a gogga, you know, a drug addict. She got stuck into my best silver coins. They’re worth R2 000 each and she fucking sold them for R20 to score, one button per coin. I left her once I’d got her cleaned up. Took me ten years. Now I’m back with my first wife, who in the meantime married my best friend, but he drank himself to death.’
“˜And other wrecks?’ I tried again.
“˜Oh. Ja.’ He looked sideways at me over the rim of his spectacles. With his right hand he began to spin a perlemoen shell that served as an ashtray.
“˜Like?’
“˜Well, we did the Birkenhead, which went down not far from here.’
I’d read a fair bit about the wreck and the many unsuccessful attempts to get at her treasure. The sinking in 1852 was a notorious maritime disaster, made immortal by the order “˜women and children first’. HMS Birkenhead was a paddle-wheel transport ship carrying reinforcements to the Eastern Cape for the Eighth Frontier War between the British and Xhosa. The vessel struck a submerged rock off Danger Point in the early hours of the morning. Three lifeboats were launched and the soldiers stood on deck in ordered ranks as the women, children and some sailors made for the shore. Drummer boys rattled out the time as the ship sank beneath their feet and the sharks moved in. Not a single soldier, the legend goes, broke rank. Only 68 men and a few horses made it safely to shore; 445 souls drowned.
“˜We spent a lot of time searching her bones and finally salvaged about 180 coins,’ said André. “˜She’s reputed to have gone down with £280 000 in gold and silver. But the only stuff we found was personal money: £60 here, £20 there, £1 here – just quarter-ounce coins that people had in their purses. We’ll never really know what happened to the ten thousand gold coins in her treasure box.’
Later, in his research, André read about the SS Clyde, an ammunition ship that went down near Dyer Island. He came across a document that said the British Navy took her gattling guns off at “˜the same time they were working the Birkenhead’.
“˜That probably explains it, hey,’ he said, scratching his beard. “˜We sank a lot of our own money into the damn Birkenhead. But anyway, you win some, you lose some.’
Were there any other wrecks in the area he still wanted to have a go at?
“˜Well, there’s the Brederode,’ he said, “˜a Dutch East Indiaman that sank in 1785 on her homeward voyage from the Far East. Christie’s put the value of her cargo of Chinese porcelain at about £10 million. The government is giving us shit though. They say we can salvage her but mustn’t sell the cargo. So what’s the point?’
The loss of the Brederode was a typical story. The captain thought he’d rounded Cape Agulhas, but then the lookout let out the dreaded cry, “˜Breakers ahead!’ So he brought her about and tried to tack away from the shore, but the vessel hit a rock and lost her rudder. She kept going for a while, leaking badly and unable to turn around. The following morning, the crew abandoned ship when water started coming through the gun ports.
“˜Finding the wreck was helluva difficult. It’s like this: there’s a big bay with a point and another point.’ He used my beer bottle and his empty glass. “˜The lookout saw the coast here, turned and ran, hit the rock here.’ He marked the spot with a salt cellar. “˜The rudder broke – we found the big rudder pins – and she kept creeping out another seven miles before sinking here!’ He smacked the bar counter. “˜I’d read the story many times but never properly figured it out. Then a fisherman gave me the position where he’d hooked his drag nets on something. I looked at the chart and thought, Holy Shit, it’s the Brederode! That’s how we found her, but we still need to convince government to give her to us.
“˜I’ve dived her once or twice. It’s deep: 65 metres. There’s brass cannons, there’s everything. The porcelain is lying in boxes. Oh man, so tempting, just sitting there.’ He ran a finger along his eyebrow in irritation. “˜Can’t take it out, can’t touch it.’ There was pain in his voice, as though the treasure were a bad tooth needing extraction.
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