Chavonnes Battery Blog - Chavonnes Battery Museum

Year End Waterfront Experience

Chavonnes Battery Team — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0200

We offer an exciting V&A Waterfront Experience that is very popular with groups of 40 - 60 people. It includes a Tour of the Museum or the Waterfront, the choice of a Sunset Cruise, a ride on The Cape Wheel, Djembe Drumming Circle or even the option to fire a real Muzzle Loaded Cannon,.... (Under supervision of CAOSA)

This is followed by an Awards Presentation or Secret Santa before either a Themed Cocktail Party or Three Course Dinner served Buffet style with refreshments.

Your event occurs with in the Heritage Site among the Archaeological Ruins of the Chavonnes Battery that has been buried for 140 years on the original Cape Town shoreline.

Our Year End Waterfront Experience is from 5 pm to 10 pm and the costs range from R 350 pp to R 800+ pp depending on the activity options selected and menu choices. All meals are Halal.

Please note: The Chavonnes Battery Museum is rated THREE STAR by the Tourism Grading Council as a Historical Venue with Universal Access (Wheelchair Access). We do not have a liquor license. You are welcome to provide your own liquor, we will happily provide glasses, ice etc.

Send us an email of what date you have in mind, what your group would enjoy and your budget, we are confident it will be a unique and fun experience.

Chavonnes Battery Cannons

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0200

The Chavonnes Battery Cannons from the entrance to the Museum to the Ramparts....

24 Pounder at the door:

This is a French made 24 pounder registered as Durr No. 14. The trunnion ends show a Fleur de lis and the large letters “SG” for the foundry at St Gervais, France. The estimated the date of manufacture to be around 1740.

8 Pounder between the flagpoles:

This gun was cast in Sweden more than two centuries ago, and despite its long period of partial burial and minimum maintenance, it is so well-preserved that the markings on its barrel and trunnions are clearly visible, and provide a good deal of information about its age and origins.

It was cast at the Overums gun-foundry in 1782, and on its breech are the markings “N XXI” (“21” – its original number), and the numerals “VII : VIII : XVII“. These are the original Swedish weight markings in Skepspunt (1 Skepspunt = 136 kg), Lispunt (1 Lispunt = 6.8 kg) and Punt (1 Punt = 0.34 kg). This means that the barrel weighs approximately 1 012 kg in all.

The fact that it has Swedish markings but not VOC ones indicates that it was part of a batch of guns bought directly from Swedish stocks during a time of crisis when the VOC did not have enough time to place an order for its normal pattern of gun.

It is a historical fact that the early 1780s was a time of great tension between England and the Netherlands, so much so that in 1781 there was an abortive attempt by an English naval force to capture the Cape.

The gun is also remarkable for the fact that it has been “spiked” or rendered un-serviceable by driving a special metal spike into its vent or touch-hole, after which the head of the spike was knocked off to make it harder to remove. The stump of the spike can clearly be seen protruding from the vent.

Guns were spiked if they had to be abandoned, making it impossible for a victorious attacking forces to turn the captured guns on their former “owners”, since removing a spike took some time.

6 Pounder between the flagpoles:

Dating from the 1680s, this gun is a “Finbanker” (the VOC designation for cannon cast at the Finspång foundry in Sweden), and a marking on the breech – two crossed anchors with an “A” on either side – indicates that it was manufactured either for the VOC or for the Admiralty of the city of Amsterdam, one of the major shareholders of the VOC.

On the top of the gun’s base ring is the marking “2070A “, the weight of the gun in Amsterdam pounds (one Amsterdam pound = 0,494 kg, giving the gun an original weight of 1 022 kg).

This gun has an unusually large vent or touch-hole, indicating that the original vent became enlarged as a result of erosion caused by long use, so that it was necessary to drill it out and tap it before inserting a threaded plug with a vent-hole of the right diameter.

12 Pounder Exploded Gun:

This 12 pounder was one of the flanking guns at Amsterdam Battery, by far the largest of the string of batteries which guarded the Table Bay coastline in the late 18th Century. The Amsterdam Battery was almost totally demolished in the 1890s - but the gun remains to tell a gruesome tale of the day it nearly killed no less a person than the Governor of the Cape!

Built by French military engineers (one of them Louis-Michel Thibault, later one of Cape Town’s greatest architects), the Amsterdam Battery was completed in 1787, and on 23 February that year the magnificent new battery’s guns were test-fired for the first time, one of the spectators being the Governor, Colonel Jacob Cornelius van de Graaff.

On being fired, however, this particular gun exploded, the entire rear portion of the barrel from the trunnions to the breech being blown off. Two gunners were killed and five other men in the vicinity were wounded, one of them being none other than the Governor himself.

Rescued years ago from a municipal roads depot whose workers had excavated it after more than two centuries underground, the barrel was saved from an ignominious end in a scrapyard. Now it has been restored and is on display at the Chavonnes Cannon Battery Museum – its first public appearance since that calamitous day in 1787 - so that today’s generation of Capetonians can be told its grim but unique story.

Three Cannons on the ramparts:

All three are “Finbankers” – manufactured at Sweden’s Finspång foundry – which were supplied to the VOC and the Amsterdam Admiralty in the early 18th Century. They are a 36-pounder (the one nearest the BoE Building) a 24-pounder and an 18-pounder.

All were deployed at the Chavonnes Battery when it was completed in 1726 and served there till the battery was partly demolished and buried under buildings after 1860 during the construction of what is now the Waterfront.

The guns were sold to the Table Bay Harbor Company for use as bollards, and when they were no longer required for this purpose they were removed from the docks and stored at Lion Battery on the slopes of Signal Hill for many years till 1999, when the Chavonnes Battery was excavated and converted into a unique museum by the new occupier of the site, the Board of Executors.

Then the guns were returned to their “home” they had occupied for almost century and a half, after being painstakingly restored and mounted on exact replicas of their original carriages…

18 Pounder on wooden platform:

This is a Swedish 18 pdr registered as Durr 244. No markings are visible.

36 Pounder in the center:

A Swedish 36 pdr registered as Durr 32. The gun has a confusing overlap of numbers and letters on the base ring which defy deciphering. The “D 2” on the cascable was the bollard number.

24 Pounder at the window:

A Swedish 24 pdr registered as Durr 245. The trunnion end has the date of manufacture as 1670. The other trunnion end shows the remains of a large “W”, the initial for “Wattrang” who was the foundry master at the Finspang foundry in Sweden at that time. The gun was delivered to the Enkhuizen chapter of the VOC and the VOCE mark can be seen on the first reinforce.

Home to the Cannon Association of SA, to see the Cannons that are able to still fire a shot of black powder, please visit the Museum.

Rest in Peace our beloved Vuyo

Chavonnes Battery Team — Sun, 07 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200

Vuyo was a very determined young man. Within six days of joining the team in September 2016 to do his Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) Tourism Management internship he had already learned the script and did his first trainee Museum Tour. Being a Tourist Guide was his passion and he was a natural at it.

He continued to work part-time in 2017 and joined the team full time in March 2018 securing his badge soon after. He enjoyed leading the school group excursions so much that he returned to study a Teaching Diploma full time this year working half day Monday and Wed, and full day Fri-Sun.

He was always on time (public transport permitting), always with a smile and eager to learn, diligently attending to his duties, thoughtful and very respectful, trustworthy, resourceful and well able to articulate his thoughts.

He was always willing to do whatever needed to be done, he would say “I don’t know what's wrong with these guys, I don't mind doing the dishes, one day I will do the dishes for my wife”

In his portfolio he lists some of the highlights as:

Getting his first tip of R 100 which motivated him to improve his narrative and technique (not do more - do better),
Attending various industry events and training workshops and meeting successful Tourist Guides and Tour Operators and getting tips from them,
Visiting Robben Island on a team incentive and again for the Madiba and Ma Sisulu Night Vigil in December 2018 where he got to stay overnight on the Island,
As a huge soccer fan he was very excited to take a photo with the original Nedbank Cup which was on display in the building,

He attended the Indaba training last week and was scheduled to represent the museum as a SA Tourism: Hidden Gem at the Tourism Indaba on the 2-4 May 2019 in Durban. It would have been his first time on an aeroplane.

We will be hosting a memorial for Vuyo at the museum in the coming days.

Justin Sullivan Photography

Chavonnes Battery Team — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0200

Sullivan's image of a policeman who shot a boy during a Hout Bay protest in September, 2017, called Stand Off, won first prize in the hard news category. And his series of pictures depicting the heroes combating wildfires was placed second in the Planet category. "It's really amazing. I was very excited when I heard. It's the first time I'm recognized on an international platform," the photographer said.

Few people know that Sullivan himself got shot with rubber bullets while photographing the boy who got shot with a rubber bullet. "I got hit once in the back when I ran away. Then I sat down and got shot twice in the leg," he said. Sullivan's picture shows the policeman pointing his gun at the boy's face moments after shooting the boy, 14, hitting him in the tongue, while the child was hiding under a table during a protest over fishing rights.

The incident caused widespread condemnation of police brutality. But the photographer is careful not to judge the police officers. "It's an important debate: Yes, police are accused of using excessive force. But why is the child in the protest? Why do we as adults allow that?

"Police were trying to disperse a crowd and people were hiding under tables to launch an attack on them. He would never have shot if he knew there was a child under the table," the photographer said.

His true passion is fires. Sullivan said he started his professional career three years ago during major fires that roared across the South Peninsula in Cape Town in March, 2015, which, at times, saw him "running around in the vineyards of Constantia".

"I posted pictures on Facebook and it went semi-viral. I saw the powerful impact these pictures have, helping to conserve nature and leading to so much praise for the firefighters".

What makes his pictures unusual is he's at the heart of the fires operating alongside the fire crews and sometimes positioned only meters away from the flames. This is demonstrated in his picture of a huge fire in Imizamo Yethu in Hout Bay in March, 2017, when about 2 500 shacks burnt down. It's a close shot of a fireman with an empty hose when the water ran out while shacks burn behind him.

On that day, Sullivan was confronted with the moral dilemma of whether to support victims of a tragedy or document the tragedy. "Do you help? Or take a picture?" he asked.

As the shacks burnt to the ground in front of him, he chose to help more and take fewer pictures.

"That was the hardest day of my life," the photographer reflects. Sullivan spent nearly five hours at the fire, mostly helping people move their belongings out of shacks before they became engulfed in flames. In all that time, he shot 50 frames only. Yet those pictures provided an inside view without which "people might not have known the extent of that fire and what it was really like," he said.

Fires in informal settlements are especially difficult to contain, said Sullivan. "Not only is there a lack of water, but the spaces in between the shacks are too narrow as well, the shacks are too close together," he said.

The reason why he's got such good access is because of years of building relationships with firefighters and undergoing wildfire training up to the level of crew leader. This means Sullivan has become used to spending nights on the mountain, sometimes sleeping on the top of the mountain like the other firefighters. "You cut a bush down and use it as a blanket," the photographer said. He acknowledges how dangerous it is and that he's exposed to "exactly what the firemen are going through. I've done the training so that I can be just as clued".

Sullivan is a volunteer who has offered most of his pictures for free, whether to media organizations, local government or companies. His reward is to raise awareness of fires and encourage more support for firefighters. Sullivan funds his fire assignments with money he makes from corporate work, including events photography. He recently travelled to Namibia, Botswana and the Kruger National Park on behalf of various companies.

The graduate in Development & Environmental Studies from the University of Stellenbosch, who was born in Eshowe, KZN, is currently working on a 45-minute long educational documentary entitled Walking With Fire. Filming will take place over the next three months, mostly in Cape Town and George.

"I enjoy being in nature and I have developed such a love for photography," he said.

For Sullivan, covering wildfires across the world is an important goal for the future. Next year, he plans to go to California and for 2020 he's set his sights on Australia. Justin Sullivan Webpage CLICK HERE

The Andrei Stenin International Press Photo contest was established on December 22, 2014. The contest is run by Rossiya Segodnya under the auspices of the Russian Federation Commission for UNESCO. It is an annual contest for young photojournalists aged between 18 and 33 years old. It is Russia’s only platform for discovering new photojournalists and for allowing them to make a name for themselves on the world photojournalism stage.

Ajay Kumar

Chavonnes Battery Team — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0200

Describing the drama, Kumar, who works for The Times of India, said: "When I reached the house where the leopard had tried taking shelter, I started following the police officer who had shot at the animal. As it lunged at the officer after being shot thrice, I aimed my camera at it from behind the officer, aware that I could be the animal’s next victim. However, I did not flinch and continued taking pictures. It was only when I left the room a few moments later that fear, and the enormity of what could have happened had anything gone wrong, hit me".

Immediately after taking the picture, the photojournalist retreated from the house, but needed to get back in again to follow the injured leopard. "Knowing that I was in danger, pursuing a wild animal, the adrenalin rush ensured that I continued the chase," he said.

However, residents had blocked the entrance to house. Kumar climbed onto an adjoining house, from where he jumped back into the yard of the house where the leopard was.

"Even as I reached the roof of the adjoining house, I could hear the leopard crying in pain. Minutes after I was able to re-enter the house, its painful cries subsided till there was absolute silence and the animal was dead. The moment was one of deep anguish for me. Here was an animal that, for no fault of its own, strayed into an urban area.

"Without having injured or even attacked anyone, even though it found itself threatened, the animal was killed. There were no attempts to capture it alive or give medical assistance once it had been shot. Ensuring that it remained alive was nobody’s concern. The few minutes that I spent in the adjoining room, listening to the animal cry in pain, felt like hours and have been some of the most helpless moments for me".

Having strayed into a crowded village in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in Northern India, the leopard caused panic among residents. Urbanization and developments are increasingly encroaching on leopards’ territory in forests in India, pushing them closer to the villages. However, Kumar said interactions between humans and leopards were rare in Lucknow. Leopards were spotted once or twice a year on the outskirts of the city, the photojournalist said.

His photograph was taken on the last day of a three day long mission to capture the animal.

"Its attempted rescue was a tragic, three-day long clumsy and half-hearted operation which ended with its death," said Kumar.

The picture led to a criminal complaint being laid against the officer because "no attempts had been made to tranquilize the animal," but he was acquitted.

The photographer said his main aim that day "was to get the best pictures of what had turned out to be a disastrous rescue attempt. It was clear by then that other than killing the leopard; authorities could do little else as they did not have either equipment or experience to capture it alive.

"An assignment like this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for a photographer like me, posted in a city where routine assignments range from political affairs to urban infrastructure."

When Kumar heard his picture was among the award-winners, he felt "a rush of pride and excitement. Not only was this my first international competition, I was also the only Indian to have won any award in this contest. For a young photojournalist like me, it has been an incredible honor to have my work recognized. It has also instilled a sense of confidence in me and I know that I can trust my instinct and take even better photographs".

The photojournalist, a stringer at the Lucknow edition of The Times of India since 2014 and founding member of India's The Youth Photojournalist Association (TYPA), believes "a photograph has the power to bring change, highlight a wrong or point out something good".

*The Stenin International Press Photo Exhibition features photographers from the following countries: India, South Africa, Egypt, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Bangladesh, Turkey, Germany, Italy, Spain and Belarus. Entrants competed in four categories: Top News, Sports, My Planet and Portrait: A Hero of Our Time.

Cannon firing at the V&A

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0200

This Saturday (7 October) is one of those occasions: the guns will make themselves heard far and wide once more at a sail-past by the Royal Cape Yacht Club to mark the opening of the new yachting season.

The proceedings will start at the RCYC marina in the eastern docks, with all participating yachts dressed and ready to depart by 13h00, following Royal Cape II to the muster-point at Granger Bay, north of the Breakwater.

In line astern the yachts will follow Scarlet Sun into the V&A Waterfront, through the Clock Tower Cut and into the Alfred Basin, entering to starboard and moving in an anti-clockwise direction around the basin before heading out to sea again.

As they pass in review, each participating yacht will salute RCYC Commodore Vitor Medina by dipping her club burgee while her crew shout: “Three cheers to the Commodore!”, and the guns lined up outside the battery will return the age-old greeting with the traditional gun smoke and noise.

And that’s not all: if visitors would like to find out more about the Cape’s fascinating history they can visit the beautifully preserved remains of the battery in the Chavonnes Battery Museum, with its sturdy walls built of Table Mountain rock and cement made from burned sea-shells.

Inside, visitors can enjoy dioramas, illustrations of the early Cape, detailed models and displays that tell them all they need to know – and never knew – about old-time cannon and the different types of ammunition they could fire. Captain Jack Sparrow, eat your heart out!

They can marvel at the items found in the battery’s fresh-water well (or just make a wish), and get in personal touch with history by feeling the sand of the original Cape Town shoreline that has been buried for 300 years … and if they wish, they can wear a tricorne hat as they time-travel to Cape Town of the 17th and 18th Centuries.

Entrance to the Chavonnes Battery includes the Underwater Photographer of the Year 2017 photo exhibition, with 50 large and remarkable images from the oceans, rivers and seas of 27 countries, including two from South African waters. The exhibition is presented in 10 categories, three of which are life on British waters exclusively.

The battery is wheelchair and pram friendly, with FREE WIFI

Location: Chavonnes Battery Museum, Clock Tower, V&A
Date of Firing: Saturday 7th October 2017
Time of Firing: 2 pm

Opening Hours:

Fri – Mon: 9 am to 7 pm
Tue – Thu: 9 am to 4 pm

Cost:

FREE for KIDS 16 and Under
R 100 Adults
R 70 Wild Card / Red Bus
R 50 Seniors / Students {SA}

Meet the Winners: Underwater Photographer of the Year 2017 Compact WINNER

Fri, 15 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0200

Jenny and her partner Rupert run a boutique dive center, Back to Basics Adventures, in Ponto do Ouro in Mozambique. Jenny has a passion for nudibranches, interweaved with a natural talent for underwater photography. She can help you become a better underwater photographer or give you advice on choosing the right gear based on experience and focus.. Look at the research page for more details on her work and what she is giving back to the community through her passion for photography and the ocean. .

This is what Jenny had to say about her winning image...

I have shot many whip gobies but this particular shot was taken with the Inon compact bug-eye lens, which added a lot of character to the goby’s eye. The trick was to get close enough without the goby moving away. I was fortunate enough to find a very forgiving goby that allowed me into his private space. I knew I had to get down low and shoot up to include the surface of the water. I shot this scene many times before getting the image I was after. Jenny Stromvoll

For me this was an instant first place. The compact bug-eye lens is not easy to use but Jenny got the better of this tool. I think it was important to create some depth within the image and this has been done so well by opening-up the background water column. Try to imagine this image with a black background! There would have been such little depth, it would have been all about the goby and nothing else. Instead, the blue water background situated towards top left of the frame allows the eye of the viewer to wander back and forth again and again. Martin Edge {Judge's comment} Underwater Photographer of the Year 2017

Jenny has a blog in which she shares her experience of Diving the Magical Cape of Good Hope. It is a wonderful way for the armchair adventurer to get a glimpse of what it is like,.. Click Here

Arizona / Mexico Border by Simon Norfolk

Chavonnes Battery Team — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0200

A long camera exposure captures the flight of moths as they destroy themselves against the hot security lights, from Arizona/Mexico Border (USA) 2006 by Simon Norfolk (INSTITUTE)

Defence manufacturer Boeing has been given what could be a $2 billion contract to install a massive system of fibre-optic fencing and radar systems to keep out the wetbacks. Night-vision cameras networked to motion detectors buried in the desert sand will form an electronic barrier that will make the Berlin Wall and even the Israeli/West Bank Fence seem like so much Lego.

For now, the border fence is constructed from large, corrugated, clip-together metal panels up-righted into the earth – actually re-cycled first Gulf War, clip-together “instant-airstrip”. And until the cyber wall is built, the National Guard and Border Patrol are using large industrial lighting units dotted across the rolling hills, like a Christo installation.

In the evening, from the Mexican side, come the sounds of dogs barking, laughter, children’s games and the warm spill of orange street light. On the US side, nothing but eerie green light of mercury halide lamps, the endless, growling sound of their diesel generators and the quiet crunch on gravel of the Border Patrol’s SUV’s. (This work was commissioned for the New York Times Magazine) [Simon Norfolk]

(b. 1963, Nigeria) Norfolk is a landscape photographer whose work explores the “battlefield” in all its forms. He has photographed the world’s worst war zones and refugee crises. He has won Le Prix Dialogue at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the ICP Infinity Award, and two World Press Photo Awards. He has work in major collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the J. Paul Getty Centre Museum, and Tate Modern.

The photograph above is one of the forty thought provoking images on show by thirty three of the world's leading photographers.

1%: Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality
Chavonnes Battery Museum Clock Tower, V&A

Opening Hours:
Mon - Wed: 9 am to 4 pm
Thu to Sun: 9 am to 6 pm
Tickets available at the door and WEBTICKETS

FREE WIFI

The High Line by Jesse Chehak

Sat, 10 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0200

Above 34th Street Eastward from The High Line by Jesse Chehak (USA) 2004

The High Line is a conservation project to restore an old elevated rail line and turn it into a park. The middle section of the High Line is currently under construction, but for it to become a public park all the way up to the rail yards in Hell's Kitchen; the city must acquire the rest of it from the railroad. What started in the year 2000 as a fanciful project by passionate observers, with no urban planning experience, to save an abandoned New York rail line from demolition, has found itself as the city’s number one tourist attraction – and an inspiration to councils and cities around the world.

Little is careful to point out: "I don't think that all wealthy people are villains, at all. This is why I included the image of the Highline Park in New York City, which was built with huge donations from wealthy individuals. It's just a wonderful addition to the city." [Sarah Jacobs]

Some of the photographs are more ambiguous, such as Jesse Chehak’s image of the High Line Park, built partially thanks to the contributions of wealthy New York patrons, which inadvertently spurred real estate development and brought tremendous value spike to the neighbourhood that forced many to leave. [Myles Little]

(b. 1979, US) Chehak studied photography under Joel Sternfeld and Frank Gohlke. His encounters with the physical and social landscape of the American West have been exhibited widely. He also executes assignment work for clients ranging from Ogilvy & Mather to Newsweek, collaborating with creative’s worldwide. Jesse Chehak’s photographic practice is underpinned by collaborations with NGOs that he supports, and the development of his long-term independent projects.

The photograph above is one of the forty thought provoking images on show by thirty three of the world's leading photographers.

1%: Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality

Chavonnes Battery Museum Clock Tower, V&A

Opening Hours:
Mon - Wed: 9 am to 4 pm
Thu to Sun: 9 am to 6 pm
Tickets available at the door and WEBTICKETS

FREE WIFI

The Heavens by Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti

Sun, 04 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0200

What do Tax Havens look like and what do they mean?

From Delaware to Jersey; from Singapore to Panama; from the British Virgin Islands to the City of London, passing through Cayman, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, a secretive world that is quite different from what you imagine. It has been estimated that as much as $32 trillion are sheltered in tax havens worldwide, largely out of sight. That is 13 times the GDP of the United Kingdom.

Much of this money is stashed offshore by very wealthy individuals. But a growing share is owned by companies that use tax havens, often legally, to escape financial regulations or to reduce their taxes, draining the resources countries can spend on education, health care and security.

Tax havens are not an exotic tropical eccentricity, but have become a structural instrument of the globalized economy. They confront us with fundamental moral issues, involving the relationships between public and private; between companies and states; and between the haves and the have-not's.

About the photographers:

Paolo Woods (b. 1970, The Netherlands) is devoted to long-term projects that blend photography with investigative journalism. Woods has been recognized twice by World Press Photo awards and has had solo exhibitions in more than ten countries around the world. His work is in private and public collections.

Gabriele Galimberti (b. 1977, Italy) is known for his typological portrait series shot around the globe. He began his career as a commercial photographer, but has gone on to exhibit his documentary projects at venues such as Festival Images, Les Rencontres d’Arles, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The photograph above is one of the forty thought provoking images on show by thirty three of the world's leading photographers.

1%: Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality
Chavonnes Battery Museum Clock Tower, V&A

Opening Hours:
Mon - Wed: 9 am to 4 pm
Thu to Sun: 9 am to 6 pm
Tickets available at the door and WEBTICKETS

FREE WIFI

Comment by Myles Little:

“That image of the apartment with an infinity pool is from a project that photographs tax havens all around the world, which are legal as you know; places where the wealthy corporations and individuals can stash their money to avoid the taxes. And Singapore is one of the capitals for this and that's the Singapore skyline in the background.

And what I find interesting about it is that there are a couple of layers in this, as you say it is just simply beautiful and luxurious, infinity pools have sort of become one of the markers of luxury for whatever reason, and for the second layer as I just said, the tax haven element. And a third layer, in my reading of it, I can't speak for the photographers, is a sense of complacency in the face of impending doom, or catastrophe.

The way I see it is this sort of strong diagonal line created by the edge of the pool, gives a sense of motion, gives a sense of flow of this water as it's about the cascade over, seemingly over the side of a river, with the man in it. Of course that's not going to happen but within the logic of the image, there is risk in this image and the sense of complacency in this guy enjoying himself and easily floating and when you put that within the context of finance, it takes on a new meaning.” [Myles Little]

Hedge by Nina Berman

Chavonnes Battery Team — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0200

"In 2014, the highest paid Athlete in the world, Floyd Mayweather, made $105 million. In the same year, the highest paid Hedge Fund Manager in the world, Kenneth Griffin, made $1.3 billion. And yet Mayweather is world famous, while for most people Griffin doesn’t register at all. And while we may think we understand inequality, in fact we don’t at all."

"Harvard Business School asked Americans how much they think major CEO's earn relative to ordinary workers. The median respondent thought the ratio was perhaps 30 to 1. The reality? It's over to 350 to 1." Myles Little (Curator 1%: Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality)

According to Bloomberg:The Best and Worst Countries to Be a Rich CEO "If your life’s goal is to be a highly paid chief executive officer, the U.S. is the place. But if your dream is just to be richer than society, South Africa and India are great bets too." South African CEO's are among some of the best paid in the world, and earn over 500 times more than the average South African.

Photographer Bio: (b. 1960, US) Berman is a member of NOOR (a collective uniting a select group of highly accomplished photojournalists and documentary storytellers focusing on contemporary global issues), an associate professor at Columbia University, and author of Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq and Homeland. Her photographs and videos have been exhibited at more than 100 venues, including the 2010 Whitney Museum Biennial. She has received awards from the Open Society Foundations, New York Foundation for the Arts, World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year, and Hasselblad. Her photographic series, Marine Wedding, exhibited at the Whitney Biennial 2010, is considered an iconic work on the Iraq war.

The photograph above is one of the forty thought provoking images on show by thirty three of the world's leading photographers.

1%: Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality
Chavonnes Battery Museum Clock Tower, V&A
Opening Hours:
Mon - Wed: 9 am to 4 pm
Thu to Sun: 9 am to 6 pm
Tickets available at the door and WEBTICKETS
FREE WIFI

Opera by David Leventi

Chavonnes Battery Team — Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0200

Opera records the interiors of world-famous opera houses. Architecturally meticulous, this body of work serves to historically document these national and cultural landmarks. The opera houses in Opera stand as symbols of their nations’ wealth and grandeur, their dedication to the promotion of the arts and to bringing communities together.

..." I have photographed each house systematically from the spot at centre stage where a performer would stand. In the same manner as which the voice of each famous singer projects and bounces off ornate private boxes and resonates under painted trompe l’oeil ceilings, the light in the opera house strikes each of these features and returns to the camera, affixing them to film. The photographs in Opera freeze for eternity the instant before a performance takes place.

Viewers are invited to pour over details, to feel the potential energy in a space where it is all just about to happen. The actual performance is just a part of the overall awe-inspiring experience of going to the theatre – I believe that the space itself can be the event."... [David Leventi]

(b. 1978, US) Leventi is a fine-art photographer based in New York City. He received his BFA in Photography from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and has been published in TIME, the New York Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, FT Weekend Magazine, and Condé Nast Traveller. Leventi is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art in New York, Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, Bau-Xi Photo in Toronto and Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta.

Why 1%: Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality... Little aimed to choose work that spoke the same language as the wealthy. "The show is about exclusivity; it's about privilege, and so I'm using that language of privilege and wealth to critique privilege and wealth," he said. Aside from its incredible decadence, Little loved the idea that this opera house in Monte Carlo was also located inside a casino, a place of "high risk and lots of money." [Myles Little]

Soldiers and Sailors...

Willem Steenkamp — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0200

The Chavonnes Battery soldier ... by Willem Steenkamp

Much has been written about the Cape’s fortifications such as the Chavonnes Battery during the VOC’s rule, but surprisingly little about the soldiers who manned them. Yet this is a fascinating field of inquiry. Even so, enough clues exist for us to form a reasonably accurate picture of the soldiers of the Cape garrison.

First of all, he was probably illiterate or at least just literate enough to be able to scrawl his name on an official document. He would be very likely to be a Protestant of some kind, Dutch Reformed or Lutheran, say.

Secondly, he could have come from any of at least a dozen nations in from many different parts of Europe and further afield; at various times the garrison had Dutchmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Flemings, Scandinavians, Irishmen, Danes, Scots and even Englishmen in its ranks. Since the Company did not concern itself much about racial origins, it is also very likely that at least some of the soldiers were full-blooded Asians or people of mixed descent who had served in the Company’s Eastern forces.

The one thing they had in common was that till very late in the Company’s rule they were not Cape men, because the VOC recruited only trained soldiers for its full-time garrison, although all its part-time soldiers were, of course, locally born.

The indications are, though, that most of them were either Dutchmen or citizens of the various small German-speaking states (Germany as we know it only dates from the 1870s, when almost all of the small states were united).

There were at least two reasons for this.

Firstly, the Company did not quite trust all its mercenary soldiers to fight if there was a foreign attack (one must remember that the strongest of the East India trading companies – the Dutch, English and French companies – were all in the habit of hijacking one another’s outposts, and the Cape was a very important one because of its position as a replenishment station on the east-west trade route).

Secondly, in those days there were very close cultural ties between the Dutch and the Germans. In border areas which are today officially German, such as East Friesland and the Lower Rhine the two cultures were so blurred that some regional dialects were as much Dutch as German.

This had another advantage – soldiers (and sailors) from areas where the first language was a dialect like Platdeutsch (Low German) would have no difficulty in understanding or speaking Dutch.

No doubt this is why Commissioner Rijckloff van Goens directed as early as 1657 that only Germans and Dutchmen – which naturally included Eurasians from the VOC’s other outposts – should allowed to serve in the garrison.

This does not mean that people of other origins did not serve in the garrison, so your gunner manning the ramparts of the Chavonnes Battery in the VOC days more than likely answered to “Schultz” or “Van Dam” - but he might also have been called O’Neill, Smith, Bourrasse, Andersen or Macnab.

Was he a reasonably happy man? Probably. The work was not too hard; although his pay was miserably low, food was plentiful and cheap, the climate was better than at home, wars were far less likely than in Europe, and there was a permanent skills shortage so that if he was a sail maker, carpenter, cobbler or something similar he could always make money on the side during his off-duty hours.

Then again, he might become a farmer when his contract had expired, or if a farmer in need of skills could ask the Company to release him (Knecht). More than one garrison soldier ended up marrying the widow of the recently deceased farmer for whom he had been working.

In De Chavonnes time all free males – including freed slaves - within the jurisdiction of the outpost were liable for some form of part-time military or paramilitary service. The indigenous Khoina were not liable for service, although many served voluntarily for a number of reasons.

See link below ... The Khoekhoe soldier at the Cape of Good Hope. How the Khoekhoen were drawn into the Dutch and British defensive systems, to c 1809. By V C Malherbe

The traveler Carl Peter Thunberg noted that:…”sailors and soldiers, are in many respects treated worse and with less compassion, than the very slaves themselves. With respect to the latter, the owner not only takes care that they are clothed and fed, but likewise, when they are sick that they are well nursed and have proper medical attendance. The former go as they can, viz. with naked torsos or dressed in tattered clothes, which, perhaps, after all, do not fit them; and when one of them dies, it is a common saying, that the Company gets another for nine guilders.”

The narrative of the early Cape history and the authentic setting creates a unique opportunity for Tourism Graduates to gain work experience. Today you can join guides from local communities dressed in period costume of a VOC soldier who will enlighten and delight with authentic narrative, stories and anecdotes. Time travel to the 17th and 18th Century Cape Town,...

Why Chavonnes Battery?

Willem Steenkamp — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0200

Battery = Collective of large artillery, a formidable force of 16 large cannons with 24 – 32 pound cannon balls,round, bar, chain shot and hot shot to prevent ships getting close to shore.

The famed Cape chronicler Otto Mentzel – himself a soldier in the Castle garrison from 1733 to 1741 – later wrote that it... “is best situated for a bombardment of enemy ships. It is built upon rocks and surrounded by them, while its guns are placed low down over the water. If the gunners did but train them in a directly horizontal position on their carriages … it would scarcely be possible for them to miss an enemy ship, while the holes that the balls would make would be close to the water-line, and therefore very dangerous”.

The battery could dish up multiple other miseries. In addition to ship-killing solid round shot it could fire bar shot or chain shot to destroy sails and rigging, or grape and canister shot which fanned out in a deadly shotgun-like spray after leaving the muzzles of its guns. Two shot-ovens also allowed its gunners to fire round shot brought to red heat – a terrible threat to wooden ships with their huge spreads of highly inflammable sails.

With the largest selection of Muzzle loaded cannon, the Chavonnes Battery has returned to active service firing off muzzle loaded cannons at events and for annual salutes in October.

Chavonnes = It was variously known as the “Grote Batterij”, “Water Casteel”, “Water Schanz” (Breastwork) and “Mauritius Battery”. It was officially dubbed the “Chavonnes Battery” in 1744, a long-overdue honor, but one which has lasted for more than 270 years.

Maurits (or Mauritz) Pasques de Chavonnes was born in The Hague in 1654. He was the grandson of Joachim Pasques, marquis de Chavonnes, who fled from France after the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572. Mauritz de Chavonnes was in charge of the infantry regiment during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713). After the Treaty of Utrecht, he joined the Dutch East India Company, as the Cape Governor in 1714.

Within the first few months after arrival he regulated the responsibilities of the garrison and for the first time in the Cape's history allowed the soldiers to wear uniforms and drafted instructions for the use of weapons and ammunition.

(See Military History Journal Vol 6 No 2 - December 1983 Governor Mauritz Pasque de Chavonnes and the First Military Uniforms at the Cape by D. Sleigh)

His military innovations included the organisation of so-called Free Black and Asian citizens in Table Valley into a military unit called Companie Vryswarten (Company Free Blacks) in 1722 under the command of their own officers. This company, together with others, took turns in the night watch of the company's barracks.

He died on 8 September 1724 in the Cape after a day's illness and was buried with military honours on 14 September.

FREE entry 1st & 2nd May 2016, Celebrating Workers Day

Dale Dodgen — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0200

We invite you to spend an hour with us this winter, maybe two,...

Marvel at the 41 spectacular images from underwater,
Emerse yourself in the slideshow of 100 of the 3 000 entries,
Enjoy the NSRI Kiddies Area with color in and activity competition, color in sheets of the exhibition panels available for all ages to indulge,
Have fun being a diver and take photos at the cut out boards,
Absorb and relax in the ample seating areas, wear a Tricorn hat,
Explore the Archaeological ruins buried for 140 years,
Discover the displays, dioramas and information panels in the Museum,
Make a wish in the Well on the shoreline of the Cape of Storms,
Buy a postcard or Bid to Donate (All proceeds to NSRI)
FREE Wifi, visitors are encouraged to take and share pics!
Direct undercover access via stairs from Clock Tower P2 Parking, R 10 for 5 hours on Weekends. Follow the logo with the cannon in the left lane,
Perfect when the weather is bad. Next door to CT Fish Market (Watch our social media for specials and discount vouchers),
Exhibition runs 1st May - 30th September 2016. Tickets are available at the door and at Webtickets from 3rd May 2016.
R 70 Adults, R 50 Students, Seniors, Wild Card holders and Red Bus tickets, R 30 Kids (Under 16) FREE under 6, R 200 Family of 4!
Museum Tour + R 50, V&A Waterfront Historical Walking Tour R 150,
Enter the Monthly Draw to stand a chance to win a case of delicious Painted Wolf Wines,
Venue available for hire for Presentations and "Old Cape" theme events.

On your own or in a group, you are Welcome!

CPUT Graduation 2016 - Chavonnes Battery Interns 2014

Sat, 16 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0200

Well done to the Chavonnes Battery Learners 2014, we know some of the challenges you have had to overcome, we are confident in your continued success and wish you everything of the best in your future career development. Those that couldn't make it to the ceremony, we acknowledge your achievement as well.

WPY2015 People's Choice Award Winner

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0200

KING OF THE SWINGERS

Thomas Vijayan's image of langurs in India's Bandipur National Park has been crowned winner of this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year People's Choice Award.

Vijayan travelled from Canada to India to photograph tigers and leopards. After a day on safari in Bandipur with no sight of the big cats, his attention was caught by a group of gray langurs playing on a nearby tree.

With the evening light descending, a small langur lowered itself down on the tails of two adults, using them to swing beneath a branch.

'Big cats are my favorite subjects in photography,' said Vijayan. 'But on this particular day, when the safari was almost over with no sighting of any big cats, everyone was looking around hopefully.

'I saw a few langurs playing on a tree, and it struck me that there was a chance for a good photograph. While everyone else was waiting for the tigers, I came back with this mesmerising moment.'

The top five images are just some of the images now on display at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.

They can also be seen in the Natural History Museum: Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2015 online gallery.

Circle of Saints - Macassar

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0200

"Stories for Freedom: Re-imagining Macassar Township" is an initiative by Proudly Macassar Pottery to host a day of storytelling in Macassar township to help community members tell and record their stories. CLICK HERE to support this project.

The Chain of Safety by Willem Steenkamp

If you are a resident of Lion’s Hill, any Muslim will tell you that are fortunate indeed, because you live in the very shadow of a beautiful little kramat or shrine, easily visible on the left of the road along the Lion’s Rump to Signal Hill, in which lie the bones of Sheikh Mohamed Hassen Ghaibie Shak al Qadri, an “Alliyah”, or Friend of Allah.

Not only that, but the kramat is an essential link in a holy chain which, by ancient tradition, protects the entire Cape Peninsula from famine or plague. Who could possibly ask for more than that?

Muslims started arriving from India and today’s Indonesia in the early years of the little victualling and ship-repair outpost which later became known as Cape Town. Some were slaves, while others came of their own volition and followed various occupations and trades, and yet others were exiled here for greater or lesser periods.

As a result the Cape Muslims were able to retain and maintain the essential elements of their religion and culture, while other groups of incomers who arrived as solely as slaves – Guineans, Angolans, Madagascans, Mozambicans and a great many Indians – entered the religious and cultural mainstream of Cape society within one or two generations.

Not everyone realizes that “Slams”, a common colloquial Afrikaans term for the descendants of those early arrivals from Indonesia, is actually a corruption of “Islam”.

Sheikh Mohamed’s story is intertwined with that of the exiled Sheikh Yusuf of Macassar, a deeply learned man and the most famous figure in Cape Muslim history – a man who “was not only of noble birth but of unusual piety, a great warrior, a great prince and also a priest deep in the knowledge of holy things,” as the historian Ian D Colvin wrote.

Near the end of the 17th Century Sheikh Yusuf was living at Banten in western Java, where he was the chief religious judge and personal advisor to the ruler, Sultan Ageng, who was also his father-in-law. In 1680 Sultan Ageng’s son, Pangeran Hajji, rose against his father. Sultan Ageng rallied and in 1683 besieged Pangeran Hajji’s fortress.

Pangeran Hajji got himself out of this tight spot by asking for – and receiving -Dutch military aid, and eventually Sultan Ageng was defeated and the 57-year-old Sheikh Yusuf was made prisoner.

Initially he was held at Ceylon, but was a man of such influence that it was decided to exile him to a place remote from the East Indies. He arrived here in 1694 on the ship Voetboog, accompanied by Sheikh Mohamed and 48 other followers, wives and children.

The Dutch East India Company spent considerable sums to maintain Sheikh Yusuf and his entourage in some state at its farm Zandvliet, which was well away from Cape Town. The idea was to minimize any influence he might exert on the local Muslim slaves and free men, but the stratagem failed.

The practice of Islam was tolerated at the Cape, but its adherents lacked spiritual guidance. Sheik Yusuf filled that gap till he died in 1699 and was interred near by. His followers were given the option of staying on at the Cape or returning to Banten. Most of them went home, but his daughter and two very learned teachers who had been among his most devoted protégés elected to stay behind to continue ministering to the Cape community.

One of them was Sheik Mohamed; the other was Tuan (“Mister”) Kaape-ti-Low, who is buried in a much smaller kramat further along Signal Hill, near the scout camp.

Cape Muslims like to relate that more than 250 years ago it was prophesied that one day there would be “a circle of Islam” around the Cape which would protect it from harm; and in due course this came to pass.

The circle starts at the Tana Baru, the old Muslim cemetery at the top of Strand Street just above the quarry, goes up to the kramats on Signal Hill, and then carries on to Oudekraal, Constantia, Macassar and Robben Island.

The most notable of them is empty, because Sheikh Yusuf’s remains were later re-interred at Macassar (today’s Ujung Pandang), but its spiritual force is as strong as if the hero of Banten still rested within its walls, and the Zandvliet area was renamed “Macassar” many years ago in honor of the holy man’s place of birth.

Non-Muslims do not always realize what sacred ground a kramat is. For Muslims, visiting Sheikh Mohammed’s kramat or any other is not a casual spur-of-the-moment thing. They are expected to arrive purged of profane thoughts, and to recite from the Quran and pray.

So if Lion’s Hill residents visit Sheikh Mohammed’s kramat they should remember to observe some small decencies. They should remove their shoes when entering, and should not sit on the actual grave, put their feet on it or lean on it; and they should avoid loud conversations and refrain from such worldly indulgences as smoking.

The name of the game is “respect”, the very oil of civilization. That is surely what Sheikh Mohamed and Sheikh Yusuf would have wanted.

For more information on the cover picture, Click Here

The ghost that lingers

Willem Steenkamp — Sun, 09 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0200

LORD CHARLES’S STRANGE FRIEND by Willem Steenkamp

If Lion’s Hill had existed some two centuries ago, a resident out taking a long walk up Signal Hill might have met up with a very strange sight: a tiny man in military uniform, complete with cavalry Sabre and cocked hat, shading himself with a parasol as his horse toiled up the rough wagon-track which would later be Kloof Nek Road in the company of a manservant and a French poodle called Psyche.

This would have been none other than Major James Barry, a doctor of the military garrison, on his way to a shooting lodge called the Round House on the other side of Vlaggemans Kloof for some blood sport in the company of his good friend, Governor Lord Charles Somerset.

Dr Barry was surely one of the most peculiar of the many strange individuals whom the currents of destiny washed up on the Cape’s shores in the earlies.

Shrill of voice, he was so short and frail that he wore three-inch soles on his shoes and reputedly padded his shoulders with cotton wool, the result being that the Malays gave him the nickname of “the Kapok Doctor".

In the exceedingly macho British Army of the time he should have been a figure of fun, but his fellow-officers kept their comments to themselves because the little red-haired medico was not only known for flirting outrageously with women – married or otherwise - but was also notorious both for his ferocious temper and his skill with the rapier, the deadly dueling sword.

His reputation for ferocity was cemented by a famous pistol duel he fought with another officer named Josias Cloete at the Alphen estate in Constantia, now the Alphen Hotel. Neither suffered any injury, so Barry was either a bad pistol-shot who couldn’t hit what he was aiming at, or a very good one who made sure that he missed Cloete.

Why? Possibly to avoid unduly embarrassing his good friend, one of the few he had, since dueling was forbidden in the British Army.

Just how good a friend he had in the Round House (and, it was rumored, further a field as well) can be seen from the fact that although both were equally guilty, Barry got off unscathed while Cloete was sent off to a dead-end posting on Tristan da Cunha island – although this clearly was not a total career disaster for Cloete, since he was eventually knighted.

One of the reasons for the strange friendship apparently was the fact that Somerset credited Barry with saving the life of one of his daughters. This might well have been the case, since the little doctor was a very clever and experienced medico who had graduated from Edinburgh University when just 18 years old and had then served in Spain, Belgium and India before being posted to the Cape.

Barry is best remembered today for his personal oddities, but he was also an outspoken campaigner against ill-treatment of the poor and ill by corrupt or incompetent officials, an advanced thinker on such things as urban sanitation and a skillful surgeon who is said to have performed the first Cesarean operation in the world at the Cape in 1826.

It is hard to visualize the Round House as a shooting lodge today, but two centuries ago the country on the other side of Kloof Nek was almost completely undeveloped and teeming with game. Somerset had already acquired a luxurious and pleasantly isolated holiday residence called Marine Villa at Camps Bay, and in due course also got the use of the Round House, a mere 15 minutes’ ride away along a pleasant oak-lined track which exists to this day.

Contrary to popular legend, it did not belong to him but to a shrewd Cape Town merchant named J C Horak, who probably saw the opportunity for some serious ingratiation by leasing or lending it to Somerset.

The Round House was more than just a shooting-box. It had store-rooms and slave quarters underneath, and several outbuildings. But Somerset, a famously extravagant spender who liked his creature comforts, naturally made some improvements. It is said that this included constructing a high veranda with French windows which looked out over the sea.

Barry’s star began to wane, though, when Somerset’s lavish spending landed him in trouble. While Somerset was visiting England his temporary replacement, Sir Rufane Donkin, slashed government expenditure on maintenance of Somerset’s properties, including the Round House, threatened to horse-whip his son Henry and initiated a campaign to remove him from office.

Somerset was acquitted on all counts, but resigned in a huff in 1827. No doubt this left Dr Barry rather vulnerable, given his talent for making enemies, and in 1828 he left as well after a final run-in with the Fiscal, then one of the Cape’s most powerful officials.

Barry went on to serve – as irascible as ever - in places like Mauritius, Trinidad, St Helena, Malta, Corfu, the Crimea (where he reportedly quarrelled with and insulted Florence Nightingale), Jamaica and Canada. Then he retired to England in the rank of Inspector-General of Army Hospitals, the British Army’s highest medical post.

He died the following year, after which it was reported that his distinctly effeminate appearance was no genetic anomaly but resulted from the fact that he was actually a she, which many people now claimed they had known all along. And so Dr James Barry exited this world, as controversial in death and in life … although it is just possible that residents of Lion’s Hill might still meet Dr Barry if they venture over the Nek.

The Cape historian Eric Rosenthal wrote that “the shade of the mysterious Dr. James Barry has been observed on many occasions" at the Round House, and in 1944 Napier DeWitt noted that once upon a time a ghost was said to haunt the woods in the shape of “a small-statured man in the undress uniform of an officer of a British line regiment of the Georgian period … (with) a thin ascetic face (and) large protruding eyes”, who carried a heavy cane.

According to DeWitt the ghost, who usually appeared on windy moonlit nights following heavy rain, was gradually seen less and less, and finally not at all. Well, perhaps. As recently as the 1970s one Cape Town journalist was drinking tea at the Round House one Saturday afternoon when he spotted the wraith-like figure of a very small man in a long-tailed coat and breeches, sitting quietly on an equally insubstantial high-backed settle near the front door …

Could it have been the ghost of Dr James Barry, taking a breather after dodging the heavy modern weekend traffic heading over the Nek to Camps Bay?

Dr James Barry spent time at the Chavonnes Battery where you can find out more about her, to book a tour CLICK HERE

Kyk-in-die-Pot aka Fort Wynyard

Willem Steenkamp — Mon, 27 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0200

FORT WYNYARD: A BRIEF HISTORY

Fort Wynyard has a very distinct historical persona because for more than 200 years it has played an intimate, if often fairly low-profile, role in the Cape's history.

Its story is interwoven with such a colourful array of famous and interesting personages, events and regiments that it is amazing how few people know anything about it - if they even know it exists; even its name - which many think is of Dutch origin - is deceptive.

The Fort started off as the small Kijk-in-de-Pot Battery, which was built in 1795 - just before the first British invasion of the Cape - at the personal insistence of Colonel Robert Jacob Gordon, last commander of the VOC garrison and a heroic but tragic figure in Cape history; its whimsical name, deriving from the blubber-pots of the whaling station at Granger Bay directly in front of it, was probably bestowed on it by Gordon himself.

In a very real sense Kijk-in-de-Pot, along with the Chavonnes Battery and the Amsterdam Battery, was the keeper of Cape Town's front door. The Castle and its attached Imhoff Battery were designed to protect the Table Bay anchorage; but the other three were the guardians of the approaches to that anchorage, where guns of the Castle, as well as the small adjacent Rogge Bay Battery, could not reach.

As such they were the “fist” at the end of several other defensive works further out along the coastline – two batteries at Mouille Point, large ships’ anchors embedded in the sand at Three Anchor Bay to hinder any landings there, and guns at Camps Bay (during World War II, of course, this line was strengthened by the construction of Apostle Battery at Llandudno).

The battery saw action only once, two days before the first British invasion in 1795, when a British naval squadron entered the roadstead, probably while scouting Table Bay’s defences. The battery was the first one whose guns could bear on the British ships, which sheered off after several shots. One would like to think that this had some bearing on the British decision to attack overland from Muizenberg and Simon’s Town.

After the Cape's surrender it was kept in service during the first British occupation (1795-1802) and was then handed over the Batavian government of the Netherlands in terms of the Treaty of Amiens. It saw no action during the second British invasion in 1806 - although its garrison must surely have heard the thunder of the guns at Blaauwberg across the bay.

Kijk-in-de-Pot served on till 1827, when it was dismantled (i.e. its guns were removed but the structure stayed intact), but it was too well-situated to be disposed of, and the military authorities retained the site. The little battery lay gunless till the early 1860s, when apprehensions about the American Civil War brought about the decision to resurrect it.

Relations between the United States and Britain were poor at the time, because the British, the main importers of cotton grown in the American South, supplied the breakaway Confederate States with weapons, military weapons (including ships) and civilian goods.

Under the supervision of military engineers, 100 convicts from the near-by Breakwater Prison turned the old earth ramparts into a substantial stone construction, armed with massive 68-pounder guns and named after Lieutenant-General R H Wynyard, commander of Cape forces and Lieutenant-Governor of the Cape Colony.

In its new guise it carried on with its original function. Of the early batteries which guarded the coastline immediately east of Cape Town Fort Wynyard is the only one to survive almost intact.

The Chavonnes Battery was dismantled and covered over, and its remains have only recently been excavated and turned into a museum. The Amsterdam Battery was almost totally demolished in the 1890s, only a portion of its seaward wall surviving; and the remains of the Rogge Bay Battery vanished with the construction of the Foreshore in the late 1930s and now lies buried under Thibault Square.

But Fort Wynyard soldiered on, guarding the approaches to Table Bay through two world wars and various smaller conflicts, not only as a gun battery but also as a reporting station for all ships entering the bay, as part of an integrated coastal defence system which linked it with Lion Battery on Signal Hill and the De Waal Battery on Robben Island. Unfortunately, at some time during the early months of World War II the barrel of its 9.2-inch Armstrong “disappearing gun” – one of a very few left in the world – was removed, allegedly to be melted down for scrap for the war effort.

When coastal batteries were phased out as active installations in the 1950s it was used for other things, inter alia as the regimental headquarters of Skiereiland Kommando. It was eventually handed over, along with Lion battery, to the South African Navy, and turned into a museum of coastal artillery. The rare 19th-Century rifled muzzle-loading heavy guns and some later weapons displayed on the Castle’s Ravelin up to that time were then shifted to Fort Wynyard. The SAN also manufactured a glass-fibre replica barrel for the disappearing gun.

After the coastal museum was closed down for cost-cutting reasons in the late 1980s Fort Wynyard became the regimental headquarters of the Cape Garrison Artillery, with which it has a historical link dating back to the 19th Century, and which was first raised only two years before Fort Wynyard arose on the bones of Kijk-in-de-Pot. Fort Wynyard also has a special historical link with the Cape Field Artillery, whose gunners were the first to fire its armament when it was completed in 1862.

Fort Wynyard also has other historical links. At various times in its history it has been manned or used by most of the other old Cape regiments, including the Cape Town Highlanders, the Cape Fortress Engineers (which later became part of today's 3 Field Regiment SA Engineer Corps) and, during World War II, coastal gunners of the Cape Corps. During World War II It also had the unusual distinction of having female gunners of the Women's Auxiliary Army Service in the garrison.

Almost miraculously it has remained basically unchanged since 1862, in spite of all these vicissitudes, although there have been one substantial addition and many small ones, the armament has been up-dated several times and some of its parade-ground walls bear genuine World War II camouflage paint schemes.

In a sense it is still the watchdog of Table Bay. The world has changed to an almost unimaginable extent since 1795 and coastal artillery has been superseded by missile batteries, but its guns still grin sombrely at passing ships and it remains an active military installation as the RHQ of the Cape Garrison Artillery. Although no longer used for its original purpose, it is the oldest coastal battery still in active use at the Cape except Simon’s Town’s Lower North Battery, which was first constructed as the Zoutman Battery in the 1780s.

Disappearing gun pics courtesy of Up-close Tours.

Fools Gold by Willem Steenkamp

Sat, 25 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0200

FOOL’S GOLD AT THE LION’S FEET by Willem Steenkamp

It would be difficult to visualise it now, but the restful slopes of Lion’s Head on which Lion’s Hill now stands once resounded to the clink of pick and shovel as a horde of hopeful Capetonians staged a genuine gold rush … such as it was.

Stories of hopeful prospectors hoping to strike it rich on the slopes of Lion’s Head or its environs go back almost to the birth of the Mother City. The search for precious metals started as early as 1654, when the Cape outpost consisted of little more than the cramped clay-walled “Fort de Goede Hoop” and the fruit and vegetable gardens.

No doubt this was partly due to the firm belief, held by Jan van Riebeeck and several of his successors, that somewhere in Southern Africa’s completely unknown interior there existed a fabulous African empire called Monomotapa, in which gold was said to be as common as lead.

The Dutch East India Company being strictly a commercial operation, the discovery of gold or silver would have added great value to the Cape outpost. The Cape itself had cost and was costing large sums which were regarded as a necessary investment because of the need to supply fresh food and ship-repair facilities for travellers to and from the Far East, but it could not pay for itself.

Alas, Monomotapa did not exist. There was gold to be had, but only far inland, and the tribes who mined it were well aware of its value, although two centuries would pass before the later Witwatersrand yielded up its riches … although, strangely enough, Van Riebeeck’s examination of the all the available “evidence” indicated that Monomotapa’s alleged capital city, Davagul, was located in the later Johannesburg-Pretoria area.

Pure co-incidence, or the result of secret knowledge that was subsequently lost? No-one will ever know, and it is likely to remain one of those great South African mysteries.

And so there was great excitement in 1654, when a soldier of the garrison who described himself as a former silversmith claimed to have found a lode of silver near today’s Kloof Nek. Sadly for all concerned, however, the silver – if, in fact, it was silver - proved so scanty and difficult to dig out that, as the commentator Gijsbert Heeck later wrote, “it could not cover the costs and for that reason was not further developed”.

The VOC did not give up, however. In 1687, under Simon van der Stel’s governorship, shafts were dug on the Steenberg, but this also proved fruitless, although the place-name “Silvermine” and the old prospecting shaft remain to remind us of those early blasted hopes.

Gold remained the main attraction, though, and it would appear that the VOC continued to persevere. In 1676 Jan van Riebeeck’s son Abraham stayed over at the Cape for about a month while travelling out to the Far East as a newly appointed “assistant merchant” (this title was used for everything from an actual merchant to an official), and mentioned in his diary that he went out to “inspect the mines behind the head of the Lion Hill, the Upper Merchant finding there some good stones”.

But these efforts, too, were doomed. In a book published 12 years later, Pére Tachard, one of six Jesuit priests who called in at the Cape while on a mission to the King of Siam, commented that “some affirm that there are gold mines at the Cape. They showed us stones found there which seemed to confirm that opinion: for they are ponderous, and with a microscope one may discover on all sides small particles that look like gold”.

Interest in possible gold-bearing ores was not confined to the Kloof Nek area. In January 1825 there was some discussion of ore samples found during the making of a road between Sea Point and Camps Bay, but when samples were analysed it was concluded that “they had very much the appearance of being interspersed with golden specks; but on examination they proved to be nothing but mica”.

More than three decades later, in 1859, a certain Captain Glendinning caused a brief stir when he claimed that he had found gold on his property, but hard reality soon pricked that bubble as well.

It was a different matter altogether in 1886, when Capetonians brushed aside the fact of more than 200 years’ worth of failed attempts and launched themselves into the sort of frenzied gold-rush which had taken place along the Witwatersrand.

The hastily-formed Lion’s Head Gold Syndicate dug several shafts on what seemed a promising site on a farm on the slopes of Lion's Head, and amid great expectation rock samples were taken to Wilkinson’s Mill in Kloof Street to be pulverised and assayed. Small quantities of gold were extracted, but the project quickly proved to be uneconomical.

In 1887 Dr P D Hahn, Jameson Professor of Chemistry at the South African College, a famous character of his time who was known far and wide as “the Klip Doctor”, took samples of his own at the site, and in a report dated 4 May of that year claimed that 39½ grains of gold had been extracted from an 80-pound rock sample

Dr Hahn opined that “the contact-zone between granite and slate from Sea Point to the neck between Devil's Peak and Table Mountain is auriferous, and … gold will be found everywhere in this zone".

That was enough to send scores of gold-crazy locals swarming up the slopes, no doubt reassured, like the good smug Capetonians that they were that the Almighty would not strew His largesse over the barbarous Transvaal and ignore God’s own country on the southern side of the Hex River.

Not all Capetonians succumbed to the craze, however, and cooler heads evidently began to worry about their beloved mountain being turned into a claim-pocked wasteland. One Mr Thomas Roberts asked that Dr Hahn be kind enough to indicate the extent of the gold-bearing zone to give prospectors some guidance and "thereby save the Lion from having his poor old hide scratched all over its surface".

In the meantime the Lion's Head Gold Syndicate carried on prospecting. By the end of the year, after 18 months of hard work, it had sunk a shaft 145 feet deep which had yielded results encouraging enough for the formation of the Lion's Head (Cape Town) Gold Mining Company to be advertised in December 1887.

A local analyst declared that the quartz from Lion's Head contained a small amount of gold – “one pennyweight to the ton, or something like it", as a contemporary account put it – but the syndicate wanted the assurance of a totally independent firm of analysts, so several tons of quartz were carefully sealed in bags by a government official and sent off to Germany for assaying.

The sealing up of the quartz was carried out in ceremonious occasion, champagne corks popping all round, but there wasn’t much to celebrate when the results came back and stated that “there was not an atom of anything resembling the precious metal in the whole of the quartz”, according to an account of the time, “and …it was only so much common rock which had not paid the cost of its shipment".

That burst the bubble in no uncertain terms, and the syndicate was liquidated. The last doleful act in the gold-rush drama that wasn’t came in 1891, when the Cape Town Public Works Committee instructed the Gold Syndicate to fill in the Lion’s Head shaft or fence it off, on the grounds that it was a source of danger to passers-by.

Another shaft, dug on the Sea Point flank at the same time, likewise failed to produce anything worthwhile, although it managed to kill someone when a prospector called Jacobus Vlok of Kloof Street fell down it and suffered mortal head injuries.

In 1951 a fire-fighter narrowly escaped the same fate as the unfortunate Mr Vlok, and the shaft was filled in with such thoroughness that all knowledge of its location was lost. Mona de Beer, author of that marvellous book “The Lion Mountain”, wrote in 1987: “I have searched the slopes above Fresnaye, around the neck between Lion’s Head and Signal Hill, but have never found remains of the shaft, so good luck if you seek to verify this!”

There was to be one more bit of excitement for treasure-seekers at the beginning of the 20th Century, when loads of Kimberley’s famed “blue ground” was brought in during the construction of a golf course near the Glen. But a local geologist soon deflated all hopes by inspecting the “Kimberley gravel" and reporting that all it consisted of was … well … gravel.

The irony of this feverish pursuit of mineral riches was that there was treasure to be found everywhere on the slopes of Lion’s Head; it was just that nobody recognised it.

All around those gold-seekers in the earlies – literally under their feet, in fact - was one of the handful of great floral kingdoms of the world, a unique natural asset which was to become famous throughout the world.

CLICK HERE for more info

The Voice of Time by Willem Steenkamp

Willem Steenkamp — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0200

The daily official V&A Waterfront Historical Walking Tour covers some of the 30 Historical Points of interest at the V&A including the Time-Ball Tower, providing a strategic vantage point to watch for the puff of the Noon Gun! Visit at the Chavonnes Battery for guided tours, cannon firing and lots of fun in any weather...See our recent Trip Advisor reviews and BOOK A TOUR.

The Voice of Time by Willem Steenkamp

One advantage of living in the city is that you will never fail to hear, very loudly and clearly, the true voice of Cape Town … which is not the howling of the south-easter, as some might think, but the boom of the Noon Gun from Lion Battery, on what used to be called the Lion’s Rump.

Some visitors laugh at what one once called “the Cape Town twitch” – Capetonians’ habit of automatically checking their watches when the gun makes itself heard. … just as they have been doing for more than 200 years at different times of the day.

What you might not realise, though, is that if your watch is dead on the hour when you hear the gun, it is actually several seconds slow because of the time it takes for the sound to travel to your ears.

The Noon Gun owes its origins to the increasing sophistication of maritime navigational instruments during the 18th Century. Up to then navigation had been anything but a precise science because it required a fairly accurate idea of the ship’s longitude.

This was not really possible till one a ship’s chronometer appeared in the late 18th Century which told navigators the time with acceptable precision. But the early chronometers were not always dead on, and during long voyages tended to gain or lose small amounts of time which would not concern a landsman but could mean the difference between life and death for a seafarer.

The only way for navigators to keep on track was to check the chronometers whenever they could, and sooner or later most major ports acquired resident astronomers who could provide accurate time-readings for the navigators of visiting ships.

Cape Town did not get an astronomical observatory till 1820, but soon after the second British invasion in 1806 the authorities instituted the practice of firing a time-gun daily from the Imhoff Battery, the Castle’s seaward defence work till its demolition around the turn of the 19th Century.

According to Commander Gerry de Vries in his and Jonathan Hall’s seminal book “The Muzzle-Loading Cannon in South Africa”, the Imhoff gun’s time of firing varied over the next few years till it was finally fixed at 1pm.

The construction of the Royal Observatory in 1820 finally provided shipping in Table Bay with the accurate time-signals they needed. The system used was simplicity itself. A little before noon the navigators on the ships anchored in Table Bay would stop their chronometers and set them precisely on the hour. Then they would keep a sharp eye on the Imhoff Battery.

Precisely on the hour the observatory would signal the Imhoff Battery by dropping a time-ball, or, at one stage, firing a flare (some say a bell-mouthed pistol) from its roof. This would be the cue for the Imhoff Battery to fire one of its guns, and as soon as the navigators saw the puff of smoke from the 18-pounder’s three-metre-long barrel they would start their chronometers.

Around 1864 the system was improved upon by the introduction of electrical signals from the observatory which detonated the gun’s charge – the method used to this day - and about three years later the gun’s time-notch was finally shifted to 12 noon, where it has remained ever since.

Not many people realise that the firing of the Noon Gun is part of Cape Town’s living history in more than one sense. The time-guns (there is always a second gun standing by, loaded and ready for action in case of a last-minute mishap) are the very same ones that were used to set the chronometers ticking on board the sailing ships in Table Bay in the first decade of the 19th Century.

When the British conquered the Cape for the second time in 1806 the Imhoff Battery’s armament consisted of Dutch and Swedish 18- and 24-pounder guns, seven cast of bronze and the others of iron. The British re-deployed all the iron cannon in the battery and replaced them with 27 new 18-pounders, known as “Blomefield guns” after their designer, Major-General Sir Thomas Blomefield, Inspector of Artillery at Woolwich Arsenal from 1780 onwards.

All these years later the Blomefield guns are still doing their duty, the oldest smooth-bore muzzle-loading guns in daily use anywhere in the world. And it has been a long stint. A few years ago it was calculated that as of 1 August 2002 the time-guns had been fired 61 760 times, making that daily dull boom from Signal Hill a truly dynamic link between Cape Town’s past and present.

All that has changed in that time is the venue. In 1902 the time-guns moved from central Cape Town to Lion Battery because after most of a century the Mother City had grown to the point where they made uncomfortable bed-fellows, even though the 18-pounders only fired blank charges.

Cape Town was much larger now, and its pivotal role during the just-concluded Second Anglo-Boer war had swollen its population of both residents and transients. As De Vries notes, “the undignified and sometimes painful parting of unsuspecting visitors and their horses when the gun was fired may have contributed to the decision … to move the time-gun up to Lion Battery, where it would rattle less windows and nerves”.

So the time-guns were laboriously transported up to Lion Battery, and on 4 August 1902 the first noon signal was fired from their new home.

The guns themselves could tell some interesting stories. No 85 served from October 1904 till June 1925, and was then retired when its vent or touch-hole was damaged beyond repair. No 388 served from June 1924 to October 1926, then disappeared and was found decades later at a crèche in Somerset West, with no clue as to how it had got there. Gun 35 has been going strong since 1910 and No 36 since January 1948.

Gun 11’s story is the best of all. Proofed at Woolwich in 1793, it served as Noon Gun from December 1941 to December 1944. Thanks to World War II shortages no electrical detonators were available, so it was fired by the simple but dangerous expedient of hitting a percussion-cap with a hammer on receipt of the observatory’s signal!

The gun then went out of service and somehow ended up mounted outside Fort Wynyard, near today’s Waterfront, when the fort became a museum of coastal artillery in the 1980s. But when the museum was wound down in 1997 it was rescued and taken back to its old home at Lion Battery.

Noon Gun stories abound, some of them true and others probably not. One tenacious but unproven urban legend from the post-World War II era has it that Lion Battery’s resident cat crawled up the time-gun’s barrel just before midday one day and refused to come out in spite of all the gunners’ cajoling. Then the hour of noon arrived …

Another oldie but baddie which goes back to the 19th Century is the one about the day the gunners allegedly forgot to remove the ramrod from the gun’s barrel after loading it; when the gun fired, the sturdy wooden pole shot out like an arrow, curved gracefully down towards the city and killed a donkey (another version says it was a horse) stone-dead as it stood peacefully in Greenmarket Square. The donkey’s (or horse’s) owner then sued the City council for compensation.

This one is an outright lie, says Gerry de Vries, because among other things “none of the noon guns has ever been aimed in the direction of Greenmarket Square, partly because a wooden rammer would be shattered by the firing, and partly because a broken wooden missile of that shape and sectional density could not travel half that far”. So there.

A Noon Gun story which indubitably true used to be told by that distinguished soldier, Brigadier P F van der Hoven, who as a young lieutenant was in charge of firing the Noon Gun in 1937 and 1938. One day there was a deathly silence at noon, followed by an immediate complaint from the municipality. Van der Hoven made inquiries and was told that the battery mascot, a young baboon, had leapt up on to the breech and stolen the electrical interceptor which was responsible for relaying the current to the gun’s charge.

Van der Hoven found this hard to believe, but next morning he went up to Lion Battery just before noon and stationed himself next to the gun. Sure enough, the malefactor leapt from a tree and straddled the gun, reaching for the interceptor. Van der Hoven thwarted several attempts at theft by rapping the baboon on the fingers with his swagger-stick.

Then it was noon and the gun fired with the baboon still sitting astride the breech, trying to snatch the interceptor tube. As any witness will testify, the Noon Gun produces an awesome amount of noise and smoke when it is fired, and the baboon “gave a mighty scream” and toppled over in a dead faint.

“The gunners came out of their lecture-room, ran and picked up their mascot and threw water over his head. He opened one eye and then the second eye, and then jumped out of the gunner’s arms and (fled) up the hill … He didn’t return to the battery for a week.” And, according to Brigadier Van der Hoven, “he never rode the time-gun again.”

One of the most intriguing Noon Gun stories concerns Gun 54. This gun, according to a letter unearthed years ago by the renowned military historian Commander MacIan Bisset, was moved from the then Castle Ditch in 1923 to replace Gun 17, which had become unserviceable due to an accident while work was being done on its vent.

There it served valiantly for years till … when? All that is known is that at some stage it ended up as one of the two Blomefield’s guarding the Castle’s Lion Gate. Then in 1980 Mr G H Morton, Lion Battery’s commander in the rank of lieutenant in 1945, told Commander Bisset an amazing story.

According to Mr Morton, Gun 54’s barrel-vent was accidentally damaged beyond repair while being refurbished. Being possessed of a guilty conscience, like any junior officer, he decided not to tell his superiors; instead he decided that he would secretly switch Gun 54’s barrel with that of one of the Blomefield outside the Lion Gate. This was duly done at dead of night without anyone being the wiser, he recalled.

True or false? Gerry de Vries is skeptical and thinks the story acquired a few twists and turns in the 35 years between 1945 and 1980. And it is certainly a stretch of the imagination, given that unshipping an 18-pounder’s barrel and replacing it with another is an arduous and highly visible business – and the fact that the Castle then housed a top-secret operations room which ran 24 hours a day in the Kat, where the William Fehr Collection is now located.

On the other hand, desperate men sometimes accomplish unlikely things. And the fact is that Gun 54 stands outside the Lion Gate to this day … and that its inspection report has vanished without trace.

But the myriad stories are a trifling matter to the old guns at Lion Battery. Their ancient task is to mark the arrival of noon, and so they boom away every day under the fascinated gaze of parties of tourists.

The day the lion blinked by Willem Steenkamp

Willem Steenkamp — Sat, 11 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0200

The day the lion blinked - by Willem Steenkamp

The first man to set up a regular lookout system was the hard-driving Governor Isbrand Goske, who took office in 1672. Goske’s main task was to speed up construction work on the Castle, which had been proceeding by fits and starts since 1666, but in 1673 he also gave Lion’s Head an eye of its own by established a signal station on its summit.

This was easier said than done. Whoever lived in those days in vicinity of the vale where Lion’s Hill now stands and went to watch how it was done must have had his mouth hanging open.

Several wagons drawn by spans of wheezing oxen would have battled their way up to the as yet un-named Kloof Nek and then to the foot of Lion’s Head, laden with items which included kegs of gunpowder, food supplies, various large flags, a powerful telescope and two bronze breech-loading guns with their swabs, rammers and linstocks. Possibly the load included a tall flagpole, although this might have been made on the spot from one of the many trees on the slopes.

That was the easy part, however. Everything had still to be hauled up the near-vertical sides of Lion’s Head by dint of hard labour and, no doubt, much bad language, but hauled up it was, because Governor Goske was a man who insisted on getting his own way.

A hut was built on the Nek, which became known as “Vlaggemans Kloof”, for the signallers who took turns manning the lookout post during the daylight hours. Their duties were simple but important. When they sighted a sail they were to hoist the flag and warn the Castle by firing one shot for each vessel. Then, when the ships were near enough for the signallers to make out their ensigns, they would hoist an identical one to inform the Governor about who was coming to visit.

Since the signallers could spot ships out to about 48 kilometres on a clear day, this gave the Castle plenty of time to prepare. The great guns on its battlements would be made ready either to fire round shot at invaders or blank charges in a salute, whichever was appropriate; a guard of honour would be assembled in case some high dignitary was on board, while shopkeepers and near-by farmers would prepare to sell their merchandise to the visitors.

Most importantly, a boat would be made ready to meet the newcomers in Table Bay, one of its occupants being a surgeon who would check to see whether any of the ships had a contagious disease on board. This was a vitally important precaution in an era which predated vaccines or antibiotics, and the return-fleets heading for Europe were particularly dangerous because the East was rife with deadly diseases.

Lookout duty must have been a pleasant task in some ways because the “flagmen” were free of the perennial grind at the Castle, where each strictly regulated day started early and ended late, with hawk-eyed non-commissioned officers ever on hand. On the other hand, it was anything but a picnic.

In the dark small hours of every morning one of the signallers would roll out of bed in Vlaggeman’s Kloof and climb to the foot of Lion’s Head, laden with food, water (and probably something a little stronger to keep the cold out), warm clothing and such extras as fresh gunpowder for the two breech-loaders.

If he had timed it right, he would reach the steepest part of the climb at first light, so that he could see what he was doing as he hauled himself up with the aid of a thick rope whose other end was knotted around the base of the flagpole. Then he would spend the rest of the day on the summit; near last light, while it was still possible to see where he was going, he would come down again.

If all went well, that is. Commander Gerry de Vries writes that “there were occasions when the weather changed for the worse too rapidly for the lookout to return to base, and he had to spend a miserable night or two on the mountain”. Small wonder that eventually a shelter was built for the lookouts on the summit, as well as a waterproof magazine for the gun-powder. It was a good system, but vulnerable to human error like any other, as was most horribly proved in 1713.

A return-fleet arrived from the East Indies with an outbreak of smallpox on board. But the flagman on duty, so the story goes, was drunk that day, and he failed to notify the Castle that the fleet was approaching. The fleet anchored in Table Bay without being inspected, and before long a smallpox epidemic was raging on shore.

It is surprising that this had not happened at the Cape up to then, since ships had been calling there for two centuries, but now the time had come, and it was a catastrophe.

The horror of a 17th-Century smallpox epidemic is almost inconceivable to a modern person. Swift, virulent and highly infectious, it had spread from Egypt to Europe, China, India, Africa, and the Americas, and was one of the greatest killer diseases known to mankind; the warlike Inca empire, some believe, would not have fallen to a handful of Spanish soldiers in the 16th Century if it had not first been fatally weakened by smallpox.

The small Cape settlement suffered grievously, but the greatest devastation was visited on the Khoi population trading with or working for the VOC. Completely non-resistant to the disease, the Khoi succumbed in great numbers, and fleeing survivors took it inland with them. The result was a great dying before the epidemic burnt itself out.

The epidemic was a death-blow for the Cape’s traditional Khoi society. Inherently fragile because it consisted of a loose network of pastoral clans, it had been steadily breaking down for years, not through being crushed by the Dutch but because of a combination of factors which included the continual bartering of cattle or labour for European goods:

According to the authoritative academic Professor Richard Elphick, a Khoi who “sold his heifer to a Dutch bartering expedition, or his labour to a colonist … was exploiting the colonial situation for his own ends; but, though he did not know it, his immediate interests were incompatible with the continuing autonomy of his traditional society.

“These seemingly minor actions, and the processes to which in aggregate they gave rise, are less often witnessed by our documents than the episodes of conquest. Nonetheless, they were the fundamental determinants of Khoi-Khoi decline".

So the smallpox struck the Khoi at their moment of greatest weakness. Exactly how many died will never be known, but Elphick estimates that something like nine-tenths of the Khoi population in the VOC-influenced area and beyond had perished by 1715.

The Khoi came so close to total extinction, in fact, that according to the historian John Laband the DEIC’s small population of officials, free burghers, free workers and slaves actually outnumbered the remaining clan’s people by the end of the 18th Century. It was a vast demographic shift which drastically altered the Cape’s – and South Africa’s - future.

And it all started because on one particular day the Lion blinked. Debauchery has caused many disasters in the history of the world, but surely few as vast as this.

The lookout system stayed on as the century got older, evolving all the time. In 1741, for example, a second signal post was established on the Lion’s Rump to relay signals when a south-easter was blowing or Lion’s Head was shrouded by fog.

By the 1780s pairs of flagmen spent eight days at a time in the cottage at Vlaggemans Kloof, taking turns on Lion’s Head itself and received the same pay, rations and cash food allowance as skilled men like ships’ quartermasters.

Thanks to instability in Europe this was a time of especial danger to the DEIC, which, like its English and French opposite numbers, was closely allied to its national government. Thus the flag the signallers hoisted on sighting ships was of a certain colour which changed every year, so that captains returning from Batavia could check their written instructions to see whether the DEIC still controlled the Cape.

The DEIC’s lookouts on Lion’s Head and the Lion’s Rump served up to the first British invasion of 1795. Their successors of the Batavian Republic, to whom the Cape was handed back in terms of the 1802 Treaty of Amiens, witnessed a historic sight on the morning of 4 January 1806: the arrival of a massive fleet of almost 60 British warships, troopships and transports under Admiral Sir Home Popham.

The British ships rolled and pitched for two days in the grip of a monumental south-easter while the Cape’s chain of signal guns alerted outlying soldiers and Lieutenant-General Jan Willem Janssens feverishly organised his scanty military forces. Then the wind dropped enough for the Popham to start landing his troops and guns, and on 8 January the British victory at the Battle of Blaauwberg left the Cape firmly in British hands.

The institution of a regular mail service between the Cape and England in 1815 was the beginning of the end for the Lion’s Head lookout post, and in 1821 a permanent signalling station was erected on the Lion’s Rump, which had been re-named “Signal Hill”. This was less of a hardship post than the one on Lion’s Head, but it was no sinecure either.

Everything the signalmen and their families needed had to be dragged up by way of a tortuous track cut out of the rock and bush of the slope.

And so, after almost 150 years, the great stone lion’s vigilant eye closed forever. The flagmen’s square stone cottage survived for another half-century or so, however. At first it served as a convict station, but by the 1850's it had become a small hostelry known as the Strangers’ Inn.

Some time in the 1870s it vanished, although the Kloof Temperance Hotel was still functioning on the same spot in the 1890s, its proprietor being one Jas T Higgo, whose address was given as Upper Kloof Road, in the area now known as Higgovale. Two more generations of Higgos were to run the hotel.

All traces of those flagmen have vanished. But next time you drive over the Nek from Lion’s Hill to Camps Bay and pass the spot where the flagmen’s little stone cottage once stood, drink a mental toast to those hardy, weather-beaten and occasionally drunken fellows who were the Lion’s eye for so many long years.

Willem Steenkamp, historian, storyteller and author is the curator of the Chavonnes Battery. For these and many more stories of the early history of the Cape, visit the Chavonnes Battery. Book a Tour

How Lion's Head got its name

Willem Steenkamp — Sat, 04 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0200

WHY “LION’S HEAD"? by Willem Steenkamp

Lion’s Head and its surrounds are Cape Town’s most historic area – or perhaps “pre-historic” would be a better description, because its name dates back to well before Jan van Riebeeck landed on the shores of Table Bay in April of 1652.

The locals had names for the mountains looking down on the bay and its approaches long before the first ships from Europe began calling in at what is now the Cape of Good Hope on the long haul to and from the Far East. But nobody else paid much attention to little details like that.

Among the early visiting place-name enthusiasts was the 16th-Century Portuguese seafarer Antonio da Saldanha, who sailed into the future Table Bay one day and, like visitors ever since, was impressed by the great flat-topped mountain with its buttresses and flanking peaks which overlooked everything.

The locals called it by the logical name of “Hoerikwaggo”, or Sea Mountain – but Saldanha gave it a new one, the equally logical “Table Mountain”.

This might have been pure high-handedness, which was in fashion in those days, but most likely it was at least partly the result of more practical considerations. Seafarers needed descriptive names to assist them in finding out where they were, and personal communication must have been hampered the language problem. Whatever the case, Hoerikwaggo became “Table Mountain”, and Table Mountain it stayed.

Table Bay nearly ended up being named after Antonio da Saldanha. For about a century after his visit the area was known to the Portuguese as “Agoada do Saldanha”, or “the watering-place of Saldanha”. But then the Dutch seafarer Joris van Spilbergen made landfall about 100km up the west coast and mistakenly thought that he had reached Agoada do Saldanha.

As a result the then nameless dent on the west coast acquired the appellation of Saldanha Bay, making it one of the Cape’s oldest recorded place-names, and the original Agoada do Saldanha ended up as “Tafel Baai”, or Table Bay.

Exactly who started calling today’s the former Hoerikwaggo’s pointy left flank “Lion’s Head” has been lost in the mists of time. Some of the earliest maps of the Cape of Good Hope show the “Leeuwenberg”, or Lion Mountain, consisting of the “Leeuwenkop”, or Lion’s Head; the “Leeuwenromp”, or Lion’s Rump, which we now call Signal Hill, and the “Leeuwenstaart”, or Lion’s Tail, with today’s Granger Bay forming its tip.

Lion’s Head and the Lion’s Rump nearly lost their names in 1620, when two squadrons of ships under Humphrey Fitzherbert and Andrew Shillinge called in at the Cape on the way to the Far East to give Table Bay the once-over on behalf of the English East India Company.

The EEIC was then was locked in fierce competition with its French and particularly its Dutch equivalents for domination of the Far Eastern trade, and all three had the same problem: getting to the Far East and back in one piece.

The journey eastwards was particularly arduous, not to say time-consuming and expensive, because to get around the Cape ships from Europe had to sail almost to the coast of Brazil and then double back. By the time they reached Table Bay both ships and crews were usually in poor condition for the months at sea that still lay ahead.

Lying where it did, the Cape was ideal for a sort of maritime truck stop where fresh food could be taken on board and ships repaired, and whoever set up a permanent outpost would gain a great prize in the trade war.

The Dutch East India Company believed strongly in the bottom line and avoided money-wasting pastimes like colonising, annexation, converting local inhabitants to Christianity or making war on them except in the line of business (in fact all these were on a list of “don’ts” Van Riebeeck brought with him), but Fitzherbert and Shillinge evidently were not men who thought small.

They took, in Shillinge’s words “quiet and peaceful possession” of Table Bay and “the whole continent near adjoining” in the name of King James I of England and Scotland. They re-christened Lion’s Head and the Lion’s Rump “Ye Sugar-Loaf” and “King James his Mount” respectively, while the future Devil’s Peak (then known as Windberg”, for obvious reasons) became “Prince Charles his Mount”.

Having planted a large flag with St George’s cross on the new King James’s Mount, they continued on their journey, no doubt in high good humor at stealing a march on their rivals and helping themselves to a new piece of territory for England.

What happened to the flag is not known – presumably the frugal locals soon made good use of it for domestic purposes – but King James’s reaction is a matter of record. Or perhaps “lack of reaction” would be a better word.

It was Shillinge’s and Fitzherbert’s bad luck that James had more pressing things on his mind by the time the news finally reached England, many months later, since he had just been dragged into the Thirty Years’ War because the Emperor Ferdinand II of Spain had invaded the Rhineland in 1620 and dethroned Frederick V, the ruler of Bohemia.

This unfriendly intrusion required some action by James, since Frederick IV happened to be his son-in-law, and the only way to do that was to ask Parliament for enough money to mount a rescue expedition.

The problem was that just then there was no Parliament. James and the politicians had been squabbling for years about his bad money management, and a while earlier he had dissolved Parliament and sent its members home. But now there was nothing for it but to recall them to Whitehall.

It did not go well, since passions had not cooled on either side. The Commons not only proved unwilling to cough up enough for a serious military operation but called on him to declare all-out war on Spain – the last thing he wanted - because its members fondly recalled the vast amounts of gold and silver British ships had hijacked from Spanish convoys coming back from the New World in the time of Elizabeth I.

As if that were not enough, the parliamentarians petitioned the devoutly Catholic James to allow Prince Charles to marry a Protestant and also to enforce the long-established anti-Catholic laws he had inherited. James told them to mind their own business, and when they protested about the infringement of their freedom of speech he dissolved Parliament again.

So it is hardly surprising that James had little enthusiasm to spare for a new colony in the back of beyond, truck stop or no truck stop. As a result, the Leeuwenberg stayed on the maps, and the future Devil’s Peak stayed “Windberg”.

And so, for the first but definitely not the last time, events occurring far away made drastic changes to the Cape’s future.

All of which does not answer the question, of course, about how and why the Lion Mountain got its name in the first place, something about which people have been arguing for more than 300 years.

It was certainly once the happy hunting-ground of the black-mane Cape lions – now long extinct – which preyed not only on its plentiful game but also on the people and livestock in the vicinity, first the Khoi clans and later the Dutch East India Company.

Van Riebeeck’s daily journal makes mention of lions leaping into the livestock enclosure next to the Fort of Good Hope and creating mayhem among his small, precious breeding-herd, and in 1659 the remains of one of his soldiers was found at the tip of the Lion’s Rump with great bite-wounds to the skull that were clearly the work of a lion.

In 1705 the visiting astronomer Peter Kolbe wrote: “Some say the Lion’s Head receives its name from its being formerly a great haunt of lions. About 30 years ago a grim one took up residence on this hill and, for a considerable time, made woeful Havoc among the cattle”.

But Lion’s Head also seems to have captured people’s imagination from the earliest times, and inspired all sorts of fanciful thoughts and even pictures.

In 1673 Willem Ten Rhyne noted that the name derived from “the shape that resembles the beast”, and not from “the roaring of the winds (like a Lyon) as Mercator would have it, who affirms that this Cape is subject to such frequent and terrible tempests that nobody, unless in case of the highest necessity, dares to cast anchor here.”

And the fancies endured through the centuries. In 1853, 180 years after Ten Rhyne’s observation, the Russian novelist Ivan Alexander Goncharov passed through Cape Town en route to Japan and wrote: “Lion’s Head is said to be like a lion lying down; the oblong hill indeed does recall the backbone of some kind of animal, but the conical peak by which the hill joins with Table Mountain is quite unlike a lion’s head.

“However, the very crown of the peak does form the quite regular figure of a sleeping lion … it could not have been carved out better on purpose; one wanted to take it down and out it on the table as a paperweight.”

Two decades after Goncharov, the prolific early Cape journalist William Layton Sammonds, whose nom de plume was “Sam Sly”, wrote that from Table Bay “his forehead, nose, mouth and chin, seemed well-defined and his position natural and majestic; but as a symmetrical figure, of course, he looked out of all proportion …

“I thought, woe betide the high gentleman at the flagstaff if he should at any time (being sick of lying so long) arise and shake his mane and whisk his tail, and then crouch again in his old, stately and solemn position”.

But with any sort of luck the great stone lion will not rise to shake himself any time soon, since Cape Town – unlike San Francisco – does not lie on a major tectonic fault-line.

Willem Steenkamp, historian, storyteller, author of 19 published books and mentor and coach of the Chavonnes Battery site-specific Tourist Guides, also a registered Tourist Guide who offers in-depth Social and Military History Tours including The Castle of Good Hope, Fort Wynyard, Chavonnes Battery, V&A Waterfront Historical Walking Tour and tours of the Battle of Blaauwberg.

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School group enjoy History of Cape Town

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0200

With great excitement the group of grade 7 learners arrived at the museum after a bus trip to the V&A Waterfront. They were welcomed and provided a briefing of what to expect, cautioned to not run and informed that all staff at the Chavonnes Battery are passionate about sharing the history of Cape Town and have undertaken First Aid Courses so they are in good hands, should anything happen.

While tucking into hot dogs and a Minute Maid juice, they enjoyed a storytelling session with Willem Steenkamp, historian, storyteller and author of 19 published books. He shared with them the story of the famous pirate Van Hunks who settled at the Cape and held a smoking competition with the devil. (Hence the cloud on Table Mountain). He also told them the story of why the baboon has a kink in its tail. One of the learners had been delegated to thank him and shared that they heard stories like these during "Volks Verhale" and they were very happy to have two stories they could now go and share.

In small groups with their guides dressed in period costume, they then enjoyed a tour of the Chavonnes Battery where they learned all about life at the Cape during the 17th and 18th centuries, about the VOC Fort, cannons and how to load and fire a cannon, about shipwrecks and lifesaving and about the people, who they were and where they came from.

After a Q&A session where each child won a prize for answering the questions correctly about what they had learned, they were allowed time to visit the bathroom before being given a goodie bag which included an NSRI magazine, a few sweeties and a small toy.

They then enjoyed a leisurely stroll highlighting some of the 22 historical points of interest at the V&A Waterfront on the walk back to the bus.

The Chavonnes Battery team are very thankful for the opportunity to share the experience with the learners and for our Tourist Guide trainees to get more experience in guiding groups of all ages. Sincere thank you to PenBev for their sponsorship. We look forward to hosting our next school in the near future. (Click here for pics of previous schools)

All pictures courtesy of Craig A Wilson