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At around 24h00 he wriggled out of his long, shiny boots and hung his uniform on the pegs in his cabin, before snuggling down into the warmth of the sheets. Almost immediately he was asleep, lulled by the gentle rocking of the ship.
The course was steady south-southeast, the steam-powered paddle pushing the iron bow through the night at a satisfactory eight-and-a-half knots … plain sailing in the conditions. The officer on watch stared into the night, bored at the featureless continent slipping by to port.
A little after 02h00, Colonel Seton was tossed from his bed. The deck had taken on an alarming angle. Shouts echoed from above as the lookouts and duty crew raised the alarm. Always conscious of decorum, Colonel Seton hurriedly pulled on his uniform and boots before presenting himself above deck. His worst fears were quickly confirmed … his ship, HMS Birkenhead, was sinking. A few moments later he’d ordered the women and children into what lifeboats were available . . . .A maritime graveyard
The Cape south coast is littered with shipwrecks. “It’s a $*&# graveyard out there man,” boomed Ruud van der Werf in a voice powerful enough to drown out the vibrant background of the Espresso Café in Gansbaai. Ruud is a big guy, with greying hair and a mischievous glint in his eye. He’s also one of the people involved in marine salvage - or if you prefer, treasure hunting - along this bountiful coast. Somehow I couldn’t help feeling he was the sort of character whose smile brings angels to tears.
“It’s a diver’s paradise … well, as long as you don’t mind the conditions. Maybe it would be better to say it is a salvor’s paradise,” he laughed. I nodded, mindful that outside the cosy surroundings of the café the wind was whipping the ocean to a frenzy, and there was simply no way I’d be able to dive anywhere near Gansbaai for the rest of the week.
Ruud is the kind of character who really make towns such as Gansbaai. We met by accident, through his daughter who, it turned out, ran the coffee shop. He was a mine of information and enthusiastically regaled us with tales of salvage, treasure, lost millions and the double dealing which lurks in the murky world of salvage diving.
Eventually exhausted by the energy exuding from the man, I escaped and headed in search of a guesthouse. Conversations with Ruud, it turned out, had a way of evaporating afternoons. Mind you, with the weather as bad as it was, it proved a welcome distraction.
Conditions the next morning were little different and so I headed towards Danger Point Lighthouse, which stands guard over this infamous point close to where the Birkenhead went down. It was Sunday and hence, the large signboard informed me, the lighthouse was closed. Refreshingly indicative, in some way, of how little tourism has effected some of the towns along this coast. I could only peer over the fence in frustration and had to make do with glimpses from afar of the rock responsible for the Birkenhead’s demise. In the bad weather, it was wrapped in foam as the swells crashed over it. Ironically, if the weather had been like this all those years ago that ill-fated ship would have sailed right by the clearly visible danger.
Back in town I met up with André Hartman, who’s not only a legendary figure in the shark-diving community but also an old hand in the salvage world. More importantly, I’d heard he’d dived the wreck of the Birkenhead.
“Rumours were that the wreck was carrying a pay chest, but we never found it,” André told me. “We did find a few coins though, but they were likely the private money of one or two of the officers. No more than that.
“There’s quite a bit of the wreckage left - you can still see parts of the huge, single-piston engines lying in roughly 30-metres of water at the base of Birkenhead Rock. But it’s a tricky dive … when the weather’s like this you don’t stand a chance. You should head up to Bredasdorp - their shipwreck museum is well worth a visit.”Flotsam and jetsam
Bredasdorp, a small farming town located in the centre of the Overberg district, roughly 30 kilometres from Cape Agulhas, is festooned with churches and tractor showrooms - and boasts a statue of a merino sheep.
The Shipwreck Museum is housed in a Cape Dutch cottage near the imposing Dutch Reform Church. It houses a wonderful collection of artefacts, furniture and information on numerous ships which have sunk along the nearby coast. Best of all though were the explanations of what went wrong. This ship thought it was somewhere else and turned north too soon. That ship was lured ashore by people - veritable terrestrial pirates - who would move signal fires to confuse pilots. There were stories of cold-hearted greed, calamitous navigation, life and death struggles for survival … and often, simply, tales of death.
These days the coast is more forgiving on visitors who happen to wash in. A stop at the tourist information bureau next to the Cape Agulhas lighthouse had me inundated with things to do, places to see, to sleep and, more importantly, to eat.
This wasn’t my first visit to Cape Agulhas, but always previously I’d been en route to somewhere else. It made a pleasant change to hang around the foot of Africa for a while.
The next morning the weather had improved sufficiently to allow for a quad-bike tour along the coast to the southernmost point of Africa and then on to the wreck of the Meisho Maru 38, a relatively recent marine casualty. For some inexplicable reason this fishing trawler steamed straight into the shore at full speed. At the time the words ‘insurance scam’ were bandied around, but this was never proved. Mind you it’s hard to understand, given all the modern technology, how the skipper could make such a devastatingly bad navigational blunder. Then again, think Exxon Valdez . . . .
Quad bikes are not the only way to see the coast. Another L’Agulhas local, Riaan Pienaar has a beach-driving permit, which allows him to offer ‘coastal safaris’ to the southern tip and beyond. Our group clambered aboard his Land Rover and were soon lost in a world of birds, shell middens - the historic rubbish tips of the ‘strandlopers’ - huge fish traps constructed out of boulders in the intertidal area and, of course, the inevitable shipwrecks.The town with two names
Arniston must rank as one of the prettiest little towns in the country. It’s also the only town with two official names: Waenhuiskrans being the other. This second name refers to the large limestone cave southwest of town.
A few kilometres northeast of town are the remains of the original memorial to the 372 sailors and passengers who died on a blustery night in 1815 aboard the Arniston. Travelling and dive buddy Bruce Anderson and I trudged up the coast to visit this and what are rumoured to be the remains of the Arniston. There is some dispute about this, however, as some experts place the ship a few hundred metres offshore and closer to town.
Nevertheless, protruding from the sand were the sad wooden remains of what was once some proud ship which graced the sea - even if they weren’t the remains we were looking for.
Upon our return to Arniston the fishing boats were pulling up the slip. It had obviously been a good day as there were broad smiles on the crews as they joked amongst each other. We negotiated for two geelbek and headed ‘home’ to fry them up for our dinner.
The next day we headed back up to the N2 and pointed our Golf TDI east towards Knysna and Plettenberg Bay. I wanted to visit the Sâo Gonçalo, near Plett, which is one of South Africa’s oldest wrecks, and Bruce and I were hoping to - finally - dive on the wreck of the Paquita, which lies in the Knysna Heads and is one of the best-known dive sites of the region.
Not that there’s anything left of the Sâo Gonçalo, which was wrecked off Robberg in 1630 - that’s 22 years before Jan van Riebeek arrived at the Cape - just its legacy and a viewpoint bearing its name. The survivors spent nine months building two new craft from the wreckage and what little wood they could find on shore.
Eventually they pushed the little boats into the water - one headed north destined for Mozambique, the other south to round the Cape and onwards to Lisbon. Although this second venture was seemingly over-ambitious, the crew almost made it. They were picked up by a homeward-bound Portuguese ship, the Saint Ignatius Loyola … but this tragically sank within a day’s sailing of Lisbon. The other crew made it.
Luckily for us, the weather had improved markedly and the water was eminently diveable when we arrived in Knysna. It was early and the sun’s fingers were only beginning to tickle the tops of The Heads, leaving the surroundings below in deep shadow as we entered the water. When the tide changes, water rushes through the narrow constriction at The Heads. This means currents in the area are severe, so you have to dive at slack water on the changing tides.
The water was relatively clean and from the surface I could make out the rough shapes of the superstructure below. We finned down into the water and swam along the heavily encrusted wreck. Every inch of it had been colonised by marine organisms; fish darted in and out of the portholes - how easily the ocean claims ships for itself. And, fortunately, how easily I could return to the surface for deep breaths of fresh morning air.
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