Page 108 - Bulletin 7 2003

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THE HISTORY OF THE HOUT BAY FISHERIES

Lance van Sittert

Introduction

The history of the Hout Bay fisheries can be usefully divided into three overlapping
periods: the pre-industrial, industrial, and current post-industrial fishery.

The pre-Industrial Period

The pre-industrial Hout Bay fisheries were closely tied to agriculture, both in the
valley and the wider colonial world.

Local farmers owned boats and beach seine nets to provision their labour force with
dried rantsoenvis, while Cape Town merchants used the Bay as a base to line fish

and cure snoek for export to the Indian Ocean sugar plantations in Mauritius,
Reunion and Natal. Here it was a cheap staple for the new indentured Indian work

force recruited in the wake of the abolition of slavery.

The completion of Victoria Road in 1887 (Fig. 3.18) provided direct access to the

Cape Town market and encouraged some Hout Bay farmers and traders to expand
their beach seine fishing operations. The commercialisation of the beach seine

fisheries in the 1900s was marked by conflict, as local farmers sought to monopolise
fish shoaling close inshore by excluding more efficient gill and purse seine nets from

the Bay, and by deploying “super seines”, double the size of the ordinary net and
requiring teams of twelve men to operate.

Commercial beach seine fishing co-existed with a new fishery for rock lobster begun
in 1903 to provide raw material for the Hout Bay Canning Company (HBCC) factory

operating out of the barque, Morrow Maitland, beached in the lee of the Sentinel.