SPECIAL MILKWOOD TREES : Sideroxylon inerme

How does one describe trees?  They are a necessary aid to a clean environment, human beings and animals find them both familiar and useful. Their fruit forms part of the food humans and animals eat, they offer shade and relief from the sun. They enhance the landscape.  The following are very specific trees that have each played a role in human lives.

MILKWOOD TREES KOMMETJIE

The milkwood trees, Sideroxylon inerme,  that are to be seen at Kommetjie, Cape Peninsula close to the Atlantic Ocean, are flourishing and have obviously been well looked after by the local authorities and are certainly not the smallish to medium in size and rather twisted trees, seen some years back. The thickets in this neighbourhood produce white flowers and purplish black fruit. No milkwood can be cut down or trimmed, without a permit from the relevant authorities.  In other words they are protected trees. Growth patterns are along the coast, from the Cape Peninsula to Mozambique.  Sometimes they do grow inland and will reach a shape called “umbrella like”.

Four of these milkwoods have been proclaimed national monuments and form part of South African history.  The term national monuments has been used above because that was previously the correct terminology.  Today the term is  provincial heritage sites.

From around the late 1490s or early 1500 when the captains of Portuguese ships sailing along the South African coast needed to get information to their masters back home,  they  are said to have hung a shoe on a milkwood tree in which they left messages.  That tree, thought to be 600 years old, now known as the Post Office Tree  is within the town of Mossel Bay.    It was classed a national monument on 9 September 1938.  This form of early coastal postal deliveries would also include inscribed  padroes – “a pillar surmounted by a cross” - as well as messages inscribed on stone and would  be used  as well, in later years,  by the captains in charge of  British and Netherlands ships.                                                                                                            

 The Treaty Tree,  in the Cape Town suburb of Woodstock,  became  a part of history after the Battle of Blaauwberg 6-8 January 1806 when General Jannsens on behalf of the Batavian Republic signed the articles of capitulation.to the British. The handing over ceremony may have taken place in a small house (now no long in existence) close by with the signing, on the 18^th January 1806, under a milkwood tree. National monument status came about on 26 May 1967.  This tree was recently inspected and it too has been cared for and shows off an umbrella like shape. It is to be found at the corner of Treaty Road and Spring Street off Albert Road, Woodstock.  In 1806 the area would have had a clear view of the sea, today it is in a very built up industrial area.  As a matter of interest the tree is within an enclosed parking area of a commercial building.  However, the immediate ground around it has been  attractively landscaped.  Sadly though the plaque indicating its history has been stolen.

TREATY TREE WOODSTOCK

The third National Monument is the Fingo Milkwood Tree near Peddie in the Eastern Cape. It also has monument status. In 1834 several hundred Mfengu arrived near the British camp at Butterworth asking for protection.  This was agreed to and because of this act,  their loyalty to the British king was affirmed, in 1835, under this particular tree.  Back in the Western Cape in the Bredasdorp district and near the farm Rhenosterfontein is a milkwood tree possibly a thousand years old.  It too was granted national monument status on17 December 1993,  because of its age and size. The girth of its trunk has been stated to be  over 3 meters and its crown over 20 meters.  From a photograph seen, it too has an umbrella shaped crown.       

These four trees have been selected to reflect aspects of the past but which have a bearing on the present.

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ANIMAL HISTORIES

The city of Cape Town and suburbs are built on a long narrow Peninsula with animals having played a part in local history. Baboons, Cape otters, cerval cats, porcupines, tortoises, are to be found on the mountainous areas while various other larger animals are to be seen in more enclosed spaces such as the Cape Point Nature Reserve or on the Groote Schuur Estate. Bird species are popular members of suburban gardens. But certain individual animals have become legendary, details of their lives still being spoken about long after their demise. 

HOUT BAY LEOPARD

Just below Chapman’s Peak Drive at the Hout Bay end,  placed on a rock looking out to sea,  is a bronze statue of a leopard.   It was sculpted by Ivan Mitford Barberton in 1963.  In 1933 and 1936 leopards were still sighted near Hout Bay and the last one was said to having been seen in 1938.  The statue can be perceived as a memorial to those leopards who once roamed the nearby mountains.  It is certainly a phtographic image that many local and overseas visitors take home with them.

JUST NUISANCE SIMON'S TOWN

Simon’s Town, a naval town, had an animal that was often in the news, in this case a domestic animal.  He was a Great Dane dog named Just Nuisance who became a well known   “naval personality.”   Able Seaman Just Nuisance was enlisted in the Royal Navy during the second World War, 1939-1945. His role, according to reported events, seems to have been that of a self imposed protector of Royal Navy ratings.  He died on 1 April 1944 aged seven years and is buried on Red Hill, Simon’s Town with a headstone giving essential life details. This well known canine continues to be remembered by the town's residents as a former important “personage”. In recent years a statue of the Great Dane was positioned on the Town’s Jubilee Square.

Simon’s Town also had, in earlier years, an unusual ship’s mascot as a visitor.  She was Rifles the leopard.  The story goes that while the coal burning ship”Narcissus”  based in Simon’s Town and part of the Royal Navy  South Atlantic Squadron visited Mombasa, Kenya in 1914, an officer bought a young leopard kitten. The captain agreed to allow the small cat aboard. In time she wore a collar with her name on it, became very tame and very used to her fellow shipmates. In 1919 the ship was decommissioned and Rifles became a resident of the London Zoo.

Philly the white horse was another animal that was often in the public eye, particularly in Camps Bay. As a young foal he was, in 1932, bought or rescued by a Mr De Beer from a farm in Hout Bay.  At this time Camps Bay was not heavily populated nor were there many cars on the roads so Philly was able to roam about the area more or less as he wanted.  The Law seemed to have turned a blind eye to his comings and goings. Gardeners prized his droppings.  This did not mean that there were no complaints such as he was a “nuisance, an itinerant beggar, a vagrant and a won’t work.” By 1962 Philly, with suitable ceremony,  was made a Freeman of Camps Bay.  By this time he had a donkey companion named Nellie.  But times were changing. Camps Bay had grown so it was decided that the two would be confined at night.  But Philly was aging and died on 9 December 1967.  A memorial plaque was placed on a wall of the Camps Bay library.  There is also a mural in the Camps Bay High School which depicts details of Philly the white horse and Nellie his donkey companion.

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SHIP WRECKS OFF THE CAPE PENINSULA COAST

Not for nothing, particularly during winter,  was the Cape of Good Hope  known as the Cape of Storms. Of course not all shipwrecks took place during violent winter storms although these certainly added to the high drama of rescue if at all possible. The reasons for the disasters were many and varied.  Human error, weather, difficulties in reaching out of the way wrecks,  bureaucracy working at a slow pace to improve safety factors but even when improvements came, more lighthouses along the coast, ship wrecks still occurred

It is said that in 1698 heavy mist played a role in the wreck on the rocks at Oudekraal of the the Dutch ship Het Huis te Craijenstein.  Still, despite the mist sixteen of the nineteen money chests were salvaged.  There is a specific rock in the sea known as “geldkis” (money box) which it is thought to have been the cause of the ship foundering.  In the 1860s a 227kg brass cannon and a few silver ignots were salvaged.

In December 1794 the Sao Josene, a Portuguese slave ship carrying 500 slaves, was wrecked at Camps Bay.  Two hundred of those unfortunate people from Mozambique were drowned.  In June 1822 Fame, a British wooden sailing ship was disabled not far off Graaff’s Pool, Sea Point.  A north west gale was reported to have been blowing at the time the vessel was making its way from Madras to London.

In 1836 a French brig, La Camille, was wrecked at Strandfontein on a voyage from Reunion.  Her cargo consisted of tortoise shells, nutmeg, cloves, coffee, sugar.  Fortunately no lives were lost.  Another was Le Protie, a French whaling brig on a voyage from Nantes.  She ran aground in January 1839 while trying to enter Simon’s Bay at night.  No lives were lost.  The for sale notice appeared  less than a week later in the SA Commercial Advertiser.

A cargo of 839 barrels of sperm whale oil was the cargo of the Admiral Cockburn, a British whaling barque, when it was wrecked at Muizenberg in July 1839.  The ship had been built in Philadelphia in 1809.  The whale oil was saved and none of the 80 crew members were lost.

The Paragon was wrecked in April 1840 also during a north west gale while on the way from Mauritius to London with a cargo of sugar.  No lives were lost.

SA ADVERTISER AND MAIL

Great excitement must have been caused among the local inhabitants of Muizenberg when on 29 August 1862 the remains of the ship Johanna Wagner, a Prussian barque  wrecked at Strandfontein, was sold on the beach at Muizenberg.  With great enthusiasm the sellers invited shipwrights, carpenters, builders and lime burners to the sale to view and hopefully buy what had been saved from the ship: spars, riggings, sails, timber, ”an immense quantity of firewood, also a large lot of Rattans” and the remainder of the wreck and cargo –bales tobacco, baskets sugar, baskets India rubber etc.

Muizenberg was also the area where the Felix Vincidor ran aground.  This happened at night in July 1841.  It carried  a cargo of spirits and wine from Lake Ontario to Simon’s Bay.  No loss of life occurred.

SS Clan Monroe on route from Liverpool to Delagoa Bay was wrecked on 1 July 1905 near Kommetjie. This was sparsely populated rural area and it took a while to organise a rescue of the twenty crew members.

Approximately ten months later on 21 May 1906 the SS Oakburn from New York to Sydney was wrecked in the vicinity of Duiker Point.  The ship’s cargo included railway equipment, glassware, sewing machines, musical instruments etc.  To reach the area was not easy, the evening was foggy.  Two of the crew drowned. Two days later it was reported that the wreck had been handed over to the owners agents and the underwriters agents.  Not long thereafter an advertisement appeared in the local press calling for tenders to salvage the ship as well as cargo aboard. – oil in cases and barrels and general merchandise.

In November 1914 the British steamer the SS Clan Stuart ran aground.  The reason was that her anchors dragged in a south east gale.  Her cargo consisted of coal. She had just come from St Helena.  Many Capetonians have seen the ship’s engine block sticking out of the sands as one drives from Glencairn towards Simon’s Town.

Matters that come to mind when reading or writing about shipwrecks is that one can learn about world geography, commercial interaction between countries, the kinds of goods sold and how important the Cape of Good Hope as a shipping route was and still is.

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                                                                            Dawn.Gould1

                                                                            Phone:27 21:715 91 56

                                                                            e. topmarks@isat.co.za