The growth of coastal shipping
EARLY residents of Port Shepstone, Port St Johns and Port Alfred watched small vessels running the gauntlet of swell, current and sandbanks to enter the respective river mouths, bringing cargo from other ports.
Sugar baron CG Smith chartered a vessel – which he later bought – to move sugar cane from the Port Shepstone area to Durban. The service grew and was extended to Port St Johns.
When the railway reached Port Shepstone, the sugar cane was railed to Durban, and with southbound trains carrying consumer goods, once the lifeblood of the coasters, the river port closed in 1901. Determined to succeed in the coastal trade, Smith sent his tiny ships to East London, Algoa Bay and Knysna, but only later, did the company come into its own as its steamers traded as far as Cape Town.
Another coasting company (that later would absorb Smiths and Thesens that had been the main operator along the west coast) began as Frontier Steamship 1922 Company when its first ship was bought while she was ashore on Durban’s breakwater! Salvaged and repaired, Frontier operated to Port St Johns at the mouth of the Umzimvubu River. Because of the largely uncharted river mouths, groundings were frequent; when the 31-metre coaster Border stranded at the mouth of the river, she was dragged into deeper water by a team of oxen! Frontier was not so lucky and was wrecked there in 1927. Badly silted from serious erosion in its catchment area, and suffering from road competition, the Umzimvubu River mouth closed as a commercial port in 1946.
From that beginning grew African Coasters, morphing into the largest of the three coasting companies.
Small ships anchored at Port Beaufort at the mouth of the Breede River to load; as late as the 1930s, some tiny vessels steamed over 25 kilometres upstream to Malagas to discharge drums of water, household goods and agricultural implements, and to load grain, wool and skins for Cape Town.
In the post-war years, the coasting companies struggled. Most of their ships were older steamers. Their owners were unable to buy more modern vessels as they were struggling against the inhibitive sea-competitive railway rates, introduced by the Cape colonial government in 1908 when special freight rates were used for items railed between Cape Town and other Cape ports.
Expanded by the post-Union government to include freight railed between all ports, that railway rating policy became one of the most contentious issues undermining the development of coastal shipping. The system, the railways argued, was merely to prevent coasting companies applying monopolistic tariffs, yet anomalies abounded. For example, it was cheaper to rail cargo from Cape Town to Durban than over the shorter distance from Worcester to Pietermaritzburg! The coasters had little hope of competing with these low freight rates.
As the railways formed part of the quasi-government South African Railways & Harbours Administration, it was not entirely profit-driven and ironically, the coasters paid harbour dues to the same organisation that was undercutting their freight rates. Thus the coasters helped to fund the ports whose profits went into SAR&H’s kitty that subsidised the unfair railway rates! And the coasters also competed against Union-Castle whose mailships had plenty of space for coastwise cargo during their South African coastal passage.
A commission inquiring into a coal shortage in Cape ports reported that a major reason for the shortages was that trains carrying coal from Witbank to the Cape were delayed because of the number of other trains on the railway system. The commission recommended that the sea competitive rates be abolished so that the coasters could carry a larger share of the interport cargoes, relieving the pressure on the railway system. In response, the railway rates were revised in 1954, giving the coasters the edge over the railways, and coastal shipping began to grow.
Directly across the Victoria Basin from the Table Bay Hotel, South Arm today is a different place from the busy cargo hub that I knew as a kortbroek. Rather than the trawlers and other fishing craft now using that part of the Victoria Basin, I watched Smith’s coasters Induna and Monita, or Barrier and Boundary discharging cartons of detergents, rolls of newsprint, car tyres, and, destined for the canneries, sweet factories and drinks manufacturers of the Cape, masses of sugar in hessian bags with cotton liners.
One of those hessian bags of sugar I would see later at Mr Harnekar’s small general dealer store close to my home in Mowbray. “Two pounds of sugar, please,” my mother would ask the ever-courteous Mr Harnekar who, using an ancient metal scoop, would dispense the sugar from the hessian bag into a brown paper packet. Then, holding the two top corners of the packet, he would twirl it around to close the packet, with no sugar spilling on the floor of his tiny shop. At that stage in my young life, I knew nothing about centrifugal force, but simply marvelled at Mr Harnekar’s magical dexterity that kept the sugar in the twirling packet.
Smith’s Coasters was the first local coasting company to modify its fleet of ageing vessels. From German owners, they bought several near-sea ships that were redundant in Europe where trucking systems were on the ascendancy. Soon, quaint coasters, like Ingane, Intombi, Inkosi and their consorts, brought the usual cargoes to Cape Town, returning with canned fruit, liquor and fish products. On their German routes, sisterships Ingane and Intombi had carried passengers who had a very well-appointed lounge with large windows. As Smith’s ships carried no passengers, officers enjoyed the lounge with a great view.
Initially plying the DurbanEast London trade, the 1947-vintage Voortrekker and her successor Voorspeler ran the “Mossel Bay mail”, the service that moved sugar to Mossel Bay for the cannery at Voorbaai.
As part of a fleet renewal programme in the early 1960s, African Coasters bought three ships from the Ellerman group. At the time, the trio were the fastest local coasters, but their reciprocating main engine, plus an exhaust turbine fed by two boilers, consumed 30 tons of fuel per day, a factor that affected their profitability and shortened their careers. Their passenger accommodation – six twin-berth cabins – was invariably filled, especially when they were switched to foreign trades.
Three major events in the mid-1960s transformed the coasting sector. An injection of funds from Union Corporation into African Coasters in 1964 revitalised the company that became Unicorn Lines, which then absorbed rivals Smith’s Coasters and later, Thesens, the west coast specialists, about whom I wrote last month. The third and extremely significant event was Unicorn ordering from Durban yards of the first of 11 ships, boosting local shipbuilding and expanding the employment base.
The 4454-deadweight Tugela was the first of three similar Durban-built ships. With comfortable accommodation for their crew, these were natty little ships, well designed to carry local cargoes of newsprint, palletised sugar, household detergents and canned products. That they lasted more than 30 years was testimony to the standard of local shipbuilding and meticulous maintenance by Unicorn.
These ships, however, were not designed to carry many conventional containers. With the containerisation of the South Africa-Europe trade on the horizon, Unicorn ordered two geared Trampco vessels for the coastal trade, followed closely by another slightly larger pair, each with a special deep tank to carry fish oil from Walvis Bay.
As the coastal trade was growing rapidly and container feeder services would form an integral part of the containerised deepsea services, Unicorn needed these ships before the formal advent of containerisation in South Africa. Therefore, Unicorn was not impressed with delays in delivery dates of the second pair of Trampco ships, for which the Durban shipyard had to pay nearly R250 000 in penalties, a hefty sum 40 years ago!
But these were good ships, carrying break-bulk and containerised cargoes, and running in concert with the first South African-operated containership, Unicorn’s 104-teu Voorloper that moved containers between Durban and Cape Town from 1971.
Indeed, the coastwise containerised service forms its own story. Watch this space!
I wish readers a blessed Christmas.