Tales of the Cape

There was a certain Cape character around in the last century called Mac.  Now Mac had a girl called Dot, and they had an on and off relationship for many years.  While it was in one of its on stages, Mac went out, alone to a party in the Loader St area.  This area had been established as homes for veterans of the Penninsula Wars and had later been used as accommodation for dock workers.  It was here that the Great Plague of Cape Town had broken out - but I disgress.

So this party, as were most there in those days, for this was the heyday of the Loader St, Jarvis St. area, was an hell of a party.

By late the next morning Mac had not returned.

Eventually Dot went looking for him.  She found him.  Still in the house where the party had been held. In Flagrante Delicto.  Or as we would say on the West Coast, "Doening it".  Not prior to, working one's self toward, possibly about to or suspisciously like having done.  In the act!  Currently active in.  Taking part, actively participating in, engaged in and just generally "In".

"Well!!!!!!" she said.  And she said that "Well" so well that she managed to encapsulate all the scorn born of women's mistreatment at the hands(and other parts) of philandering, unfaithful and misbegotten cheats since Eve was a spare rib.

With this she stormed out and down Jarvis St. "Sunday morning storming out" as the song will one day go.

Showing courage, resilience and a misplaced strength of character that hasurious derision not glowed in the Scots soul to such a degree since Robbie Burns himself was rhyming and two-timing and with the same faith that motivated the engineer on the Titanic to say "She'll be alright as soon as we can get the pumps working"  Mac wrapped a towel around his nethers and ran down the road after her watched by the bleary-eyed hung-overites of Sunday morning.o his

"Dot wait, let me explain" he cried.  Dot turned and fixed him with a steely eye, summoning all the scorn which has been generated by her sex to his ever since the the first hominid that could speak invited the female of the species out for a banana in a quiet little place he knew,

"Explain" she spat out with furious derision, "how on earth can you explain, what can you possibly explain.  You are covered in come, you reek of come, what could you explain?"

And thus she strode forcefully out of the scene, whether permanently out of Mac's life I know not for women are strange creatures.

But not having given him an opportunity to utter, for knowing Mac, if anyone could have risen to such an occasion it was he, mankind has lost for ever what would have been one of the most stirring utterences ever to sally forth from the lips of man.  Who knows what honeyed words, what gilded phrases would have insinuated themselves into the still summer air.  Loader St., the very world hung on his lips for words that never were spoken.  And for that we are for ever poorer.

In 1870, Carel Stephan who was known as the "Corn King" due to the fact that he moved so much wheat from the West Coast to Cape Town, was having his hair cut at Stuttafords on Adderley St.

The Sicilian barber was telling him that cutting hair was his fall-back profession because actually he was a fisherman but there was not much call for fishermen in Table Bay at that time.  Carel took him up the West Coast to St. Helena Bay and asked him what he thought of the fishing prospects in these parts.

Francisco Carosini, for such was his name, cast an experienced eye on the sea, the thousands of Gannets and Cormorants, and said that he thought the prospects for fishing were enormous.  How right he was!

Having the world's largest upwellings off Stompneuse Point, where the South-Easter blows the surface water out to sea and water from below comes up bringing nutrients which feed the plankton which in turn feed the surface feeding (pelagic) fish, which in their turn feed the carnivorous fish, the West Coast is truly a fisherman's paradise.

Carosini was sent back to Spezzia, his village in Sicily and returned with many compatriots, among them the Violas, Carosinis, Dipolas, Fioravantes and many more. Francisco Carosini was Stephan's foreman for the rest of his life.

Thus the local fishing industry, which had been started by MacLachlan Fisheries (now St Helena Bay Fisheries) who took over JC Smit's licence in 20th October 1866 and subsequently sold out to Stephan in 1899,  was boosted by a chance encounter of Stephan and Carosini.  Chance favours a prepared mind.

Stephan prospered and ruled like a lord from an old French Barque called the Nerie, which had been wrecked at Rogge Bay in Cape Town in 1878.  This boat was bought and sailed to Rooibaai at Laaiplek, (then called The Loading Place) and served as Carel Stephan's headquarters.