Bay Between the Mountains – Arderne Tredgold
I have an obsession with False Bay; our lives revolve around its moods, and we spend a lot of time around, under or on the waters of the bay. Tony’s business activities are affected by conditions in False Bay, but we also pay attention to the bay because it’s interesting to us. Life lived according to the rhythms of this beautiful body of water to me feels far more authentic and significant than a life lived according to the rhythms of my alarm clock and office hours.
I’ve been reading some things about the history of False Bay, and this book seemed to be the place to start. It was published in 1985 and is written a bit like a Lawrence G. Green book, but with (I think) slightly more attention to detail and accurate sourcing. There is a list of references at the back, but a lot of it is oral history that Tredgold gleaned from interviewing (then) elderly inhabitants of the settlements on the bay’s edge.
It’s essentially a colonial history of False Bay, with a view that history only started when the Dutch arrived in the Cape. There’s a brief section on the very early geological history of the bay, but not enough for my liking, and I would have liked to know more about the Strandlopers who frequented the area before the Dutch and British started stampeding around and shooting cannonballs at each other.
Tredgold devotes most of his attention to the history of Simon’s Town, Fish Hoek, Kalk Bay, St James, Gordon’s Bay and the Strand. False Bay was a very significant fishing resource right from the time of early Dutch settlement at the Cape, and up until about 1900 a significant amount of whaling was done in the bay, most of it from Kalk Bay. By about 1900 it wasn’t economically viable (too few whales) to run a whaling business inside False Bay any more. I found this remarkably sad – that already over 100 years ago humans had practically exhausted some of the marine resources available to them – but also heartening, given the generous numbers of whales that visit False Bay between June and November in the present day.
Despite the importance of the False Bay fishing opportunities, the focus in this book is on human history. The natural history of the bay is only mentioned insofar as it illuminates the activities of the humans in the settlements on its fringes. There are only two or three mentions of the False Bay white shark population: one is made as part of an account of Simon van der Stel’s visit to Seal Island in 1679. The men caught fish around the island, but sharks took many of them before they could be landed. Little did he know what a massive economic powerhouse the False Bay cage diving industry would be over 300 years later!
There are some interesting stories of some of the many wrecks in False Bay, but for more detail on the human aspect of those I’d suggest the Michael Walker books Hard Aground, Forgotten Shipwrecks of the Western Cape and Shipwrecks of the Far South.
This isn’t an easy book to get hold of – it’s out of print – but you can probably find a copy on Bid or Buy, which is where I found mine.
