Page 81 - Bulletin 7 2003

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Snoek. Hence their very natural predilection. On the whole, they have a distinct
aversion to talking much about themselves, their takings, or their doings. They seem
suspicious to a degree when questioned about their outlays or their profits. One old
patriarch, for example, when asked if it was true that the Malay fishermen, one and
all, live almost entirely on the fish-products of the sea, shrugged his shoulders, in the
most approved courtly fashion, as he answered “I can’t tell what the lower classes
do, but – no fear! – I and mine want something better than fish for our meals!”
Amongst them all, specially among those that have long years ago graduated and
handed down to posterity, their honours gained as fishermen, there are some grand
specimens of heads to be picked out that would form not an inapt study even for
those who have an eye for character. Character there is then on the beach, and that of
a most striking and unmistakable quality, that could well bear transferring to paper.
Taken together, they are a fairly peaceable, quiet lot of people, that claim the right to
grumble like other folk when wind and tide and fish are against them.

For the rest, we may add that while False Bay presents great present and greater
future possibilities in the matter of oysters, - a most important factor in the well-
being of our Fish Industry – haulage expenses, as now existing, constitute a serious
bar not only to the development, but, what is worse, to even the present existence of
the trade that might be done in them. Those, too, who should know, claim that
shrimps and prawns, in plenty, can be found at Salt River, and that this enterprise
too, only needs a little careful nursing to be made to blossom into a real full-blown
industry. Indeed, a little enterprise, coupled with a determination to travel outside the
well-worn grooves of past custom, seems all that is necessary to make the Cape
Fisheries what they ought to be, and what they would speedily become in other
lands, a fertile source of profit direct or indirect to all concerned.

W. R. Colbeck (1891: 43, 45 - 46)