Shorelines by Chris Marais

her own in any slanging match.”
    This quote – which would probably not win Robb any PC points in the New South Africa – was ferreted out by Lance van Sittert, writer of the excellent thesis Labour, Capital and the State in the St Helena Bay Fisheries (1856–1956) . Robb continues:
    “In South Africa too, fishermen have acquired a novelty value on a par with ‘Bushmen’ and other ‘primitives’ whose lives appear … intertwined with Nature. This association, in the case of fishing, sustains a thriving local tourist-, coffee-table publishing- and amateur art industry, dedicated to faithfully reproducing in curios, postcards, books, paintings and photographs the essentially timeless nature of fishing.”
    What I think he’s saying is that the tourist industry – for example, outsiders in general and populist hacks like me – buys into the myth of the Cape fisherman without giving a shit about his real life, his real problems and the question of who puts food on the table when his quota is retracted or the fish don’t run.
    There are also a couple of centuries of background to consider: alcohol abuse, labour abuse and the ever-present Company Store. You know how it goes. Work for me, here’s a tin shanty for you and your wife to make lots of little future fishermen in. Here’s a berth on a boat and a credit note for my shop nearby. If you run over your limit this month, don’t worry. We’ll write up a tab for you. And you’ll work forever to try to catch up with your debt to the Company Store. By the way, here’s some extremely cheap liquor to drink on that one day off when you’re not out at sea pulling in fish for me. Welcome to the family. Like any family, it will occasionally be hell on earth. But you will always get just enough to eat, just enough to exist on.
    In this way, the employer’s money never leaves the homestead. It just circulates from the boss to the fisherman to the Company Store and back into the boss’s pocket again. And they’ve been doing it all over the world for centuries now.
    But it wasn’t always a case of dronkverdriet (alcoholic melancholy) and hard times in the local fishing community. Robin Lees wrote the classic on the industry, called Fishing for Fortunes . She tells of the boom times of the late 1940s, when crews were making big money out at sea.
    “For the first time in their lives, the fishermen had money to spend, money to squander as recklessly as they wished. They spent it on sweets and sometimes on shoes for their children; on smart clothes and shiny gadgets. They spent it in the new cinemas and shops that had opened in every village … and in the bars, peppermint liqueurs and expensive whiskies were ordered in large glasses instead of cheap wine by the gallon.” They would buy a brand new car, crash it and walk back to the dealership for another one. Happy days. Briefly.
    In the St Helena Bay district, a mysterious tragedy played itself out – more than once. In 1936 nearly five dozen false killer whales beached themselves on the sands around the bay. It happened again in 1981, when 65 false killer whales came ashore. Of these, most were females, with worm encrustations around their ear holes.
    One of the theories explaining the bizarre beachings is that the whales had erroneously swum up the deep Cape Submarine Canyon, which runs perpendicular to the coast and ends near St Helena Bay. But the real question is why, once beached, the whales persistently refused to return to the sea – even when they lay exposed and literally cooking under the hot sun.
    “And let me tell you about another bloody tragedy,” I raved as we drove on. “It’s called Paternoster.”
    Back in the 1980s, my late friend the photographer Herman Potgieter came here and shot classic images of fishermen’s cottages around Paternoster, a sleepy little village. These photographs stuck in my brain and, a decade later, lured me all this way to the West Coast. When I arrived, I was