Database for peerless underwater heritage
Jeffrey Slater thought his eyes were deceiving him. An ancient, 4m-long ship’s anchor had washed up like a piece of old seaweed just a few metres from a public walkway in Kommetjie, Cape Town.
“It seemed important enough to try to get further information and not let it just sit there to rust away and be forgotten about,” said Slater.
In fact the anchor was anything but forgotten; when he asked for advice on a shipwreck Facebook site, posting a photograph of his find, Slater received an emphatic “hands off” reply: “You will definitely be prosecuted/arrested if you try to remove it,” said one reply.
“In terms of the legislation it is the property of the state and it is an offence to interfere with it in any way,” said another.
It turns out the anchor is a landmark, the remains of a French whaling ship that ran aground in 1847. Two crew members who perished are buried nearby beneath a gravestone in the dunes.
Slater’s find illustrates a new government-backed citizen science programme aimed at protecting — and building — SA’s impressive underwater heritage.
Rather than just gawk at interesting titbits tossed up by the sea, beachcombers can now log their discoveries with the South African Heritage Resources Agency (Sahra), which is developing a database of curious jetsam and flotsam — anything that tells us something about ourselves.
Lesa la Grange, the agency’s marine underwater cultural heritage unit manager, said the aim is to identify historical artefacts for inclusion in a national inventory.
“We have noticed that many people do not necessarily know the correct process to follow when they come across shipwreck archaeology along the coast and so these resources are often disturbed or lost without the opportunity to record them or conserve them properly,” La Grange said.
“Interesting things are always washing up or being uncovered as sands shift — from shipwrecks or parts of shipwrecks, to anchors, cannon and other artefacts that can tell us about South Africa’s history.”
Another case in point is Diaz Beach in Mossel Bay, inch-for-inch one of the most shipwrecked sites in the world due to the combination of a treacherous coast and the volume of ships rounding the Cape, particularly in the days before the Suez Canal and modern navigational equipment.
SA’s coastline has been described as an underwater museum, with about 3,000 known wrecks representing 30 countries — so far.
Last month, Mossel Bay resident Rudy Maritz submitted a picture to her local newspaper of a “new” shipwreck in shallow water at the beach. It turned out to be the remains of the Rosebud, one of 46 known wrecks on a relatively short stretch of coast between the Gouritz River mouth and Glentana. The Rosebud sank in 1888 on its way to Cape Town from what is now Kolkata, India.
Mossel Bay Heritage member Nick Walker said a citizen science initiative aimed at expanding a heritage database could help protect vulnerable sites.
“You can’t really police these sites,” he said.
Open bays like Table Bay and Mossel Bay provide rich pickings for beachcombers due to having sheltered — and occasionally failed to shelter — countless ships over the years.
One of these, which turned up in a geoscience survey several years ago, is believed to be SA’s oldest wreck — a Portuguese caravel that visited the Cape in the late 1400s in the time of Bartolomeu Dias.
Sahra is also co-operating with the Netherlands government in an oral history project “to gather first-hand information on Dutch shipwrecks in SA by interviewing divers who were involved in salvage operations on those sites”, La Grange said.