Western Cape

The Governor Sir Philip Wodehouse imported an engineer of repute, Mr John Bourne, whom he had encountered in his previous posting in Demerara (now Guyana), where Bourne had saved the colony a large amount of money. The intention was to appoint him as Colonial Railway Engineer, but until there was a public railway for him to control there wasn't much for him to do. He toured the Colony to check out possible opportunities. His most far-reaching recommendation was that the government should plant forests of bluegums to provide timber for fuel, instead of importing Welsh coal to run the locomotives.

The obvious major route was to extend the Wellington line to Tulbagh and Worcester, and this alignment was informally approved by a select committee. Some work on the grading was done to keep the navvies from the original works employed, but in 1866 the government changed, and the Responsible and the Anti-Progressives Parties put a stop to railway construction - mainly because they felt that if country developed, they would lose their seats. Bourne's job opportunity was abolished and he returned to England. His lasting contribution to the Colony was a project he took on while kicking his heels - he stabilised the new lighthouse on Roman Rock which was about to collapse. The granite skirt which he suggested has ensured that the light is still in service today.

However there was steady pressure to extend the Wellington line and an 1868 governmental select committee recommended that railway construction be...

1845... The railway age is in full swing in Britain. Robert Stephenson is completing the line between London and Edinburgh. Brunel is extending his line into Cornwall and is tinkering with the atmospheric railway. New railway companies are springing up, and contractors are working all over England. There is money to be made, directly and indirectly from building new lines. In America the network east of the Mississippi is growing and there is talk about accessing the harvests of the prairies with railways.

If there is a railway boom in England, and there is money to be made by exploiting the agricultural potential of America, are there not opportunities for investment in other parts of the world? What about that backward little colony at the foot of Africa? It’s apparently bankrupt, but it does produce wheat and fruit and make wine, and could perhaps trade in wool and meat as well, and it's comparatively well placed for trade with Europe. Pity about the lack of a proper harbour, and the appalling roads, though. But it might be worth the investing one of these new-fangled railways to solve the transport problem!

And so in 1845 a committee met in London to form a company to promote railways in South Africa.

Things were looking up in the colony. The new Colonial Secretary, John Montagu, had sorted out the financial mess and was turning his attention to roads. He even had a plan to solve the labour problem by putting convicts to carry out...

Maps are designed for a variety of purposes; they may reflect our history, visual perspective of earth, seas and skies; scientific and technological developments and even our social history and culture. They are, therefore, important heritage artefacts.

In 1755 a small map by the French astronomer, Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille (1713-1762), dramatically changed the representation of the shape of the coast of the Cape (of Good Hope) on printed maps.

Background

Lacaille is best known for his pioneering charting of the southern skies in 1752 and 1753, from his observatory in Strand Street, Cape Town. After completing this project, he had to wait some time before a French ship could take him to Mauritius, his next destination. So, he set about the first quantitative experiment in southern Africa. He tested an hypothesis on the symmetry of the shape of Earth; this required a trigonometric method that involved accurate astronomical determination of longitude and latitude, careful measurement of the length of a baseline using calibrated rods and calculation so he could determine the terrestrial distance of one degree of latitude at the Cape. His measurements were accurate, and his trigonometry correct. The results were a surprise, however: the distance was longer than expected. So, he remeasured the length of his baseline and checked his calculations. He could find no error in his measurements or calculations, so he came to the ineluctable conclusion that the southern hemisphere bulged relative to the northern hemisphere: a pear-shaped Earth!

Almost a century later, Thomas Maclear took...

Until the middle of the 19th century, few authorities worldwide bothered about safety at sea and more particularly about the provision of lighthouses. The sea was a demanding mistress and was entitled to claim vessels, cargoes and lives, and the ruling classes who governed nations and held the purse strings were unaffected and unconcerned by losses at sea. And so the wrecks piled up on the treacherous coasts of Europe and North America, and in some numbers on the uncharted peninsulas and capes around the southern tip of Africa.

Photographing a shipwreck at Cape Point (SAHRA)

Certainly the Dutch East India Company was not prepared to spend its profits on maritime safety around the Cape of Good Hope, and left any efforts in this respect to the initiative of the Governors – to be funded from the normal budget. Van Riebeeck had a go at putting a bonfire on Robben Island, but soon gave up when the local supplies of wood were exhausted. Thereafter the Dutch did nothing.

At the time of the British takeover of the Cape, the authorities in Whitehall and their parliamentary...

Who was the first properly trained engineer to practice in South Africa? There is little in the history of the Dutch occupation to suggest that the minimal infrastructure they provided was carried out by competent officers. Van Riebeeck may indeed have built a primitive jetty and Wagenaar a water tank, but these no doubt were constructed by handy employees of the Company who succeeded by common sense rather than by formal training. Likewise Hendrik van Oldendaal, Simon van der Stel’s head gardener, who is sometimes touted as the first Town Engineer of Cape Town on the grounds that he constructed a “canal” to cut off water from the mountain from the Grand Parade. The Dutch were avid canal builders and imposed their homeland expertise on their colonies; Columbo, Batavia and New York all were blessed with canal systems, but again, these were no doubt constructed by workmen who had learn their trade in the polders. Undoubtedly Cape Town Castle was designed and set out by competent military engineers, but there is no record of their having stayed in the country.

The Castle (The Heritage Portal)

In about 1740 the Dutch East India Company (VOC) decided to lash out and spend money on a mole to protect shipping in the Table Bay...

Few engineers in the 19th century went to university and most were articled to an established practitioner, by which means they would eventually be admitted to Associate Membership of the Institution of Civil Engineers. But in the early years the profession was not established, pupillages were scarce and the Institution did not exist. Many gained experience as labourers and artisans and were recognised as engineers when they emerged from the pack to plan and execute their own projects.

One achiever who took the hard route was James Cameron, who joins our list because he became the second City Engineer of Cape Town.

James Cameron

He was born in the village of Murthly near Dunkeld, Scotland in 1800. After attending the village school he studied mathematics and chemistry at University in Perth, and he was then apprenticed to a carpenter. At the age of seventeen he became fascinated by the work of missions and missionaries, and especially about the need in Africa for "persons acquainted mechanical arts and industry" and he decided to improve his skills with a view to serving abroad. In 1824 he offered his services to the London Missionary Society. This organisation was only too keen to enlist artisan-missionaries who could bring enlightenment to darkest Africa not only by preaching, but by teaching practical skills.

James moved to Manchester to...

Allen Duff recently published the book The Story of the Millwood / Knysna Goldfield. It tells the story of the rise and decline of the goldfield through the lens of the people who lived and laboured there. We are very excited to publish the first chapter below. Click here to view details of the book.

Gold! Yes, Gold! In the late 19th century the word aroused a range of highly-charged emotions. Undoubtedly the greatest of these emotions was greed. Gold conjured up visions of wealth and grandeur. Gold was an open sesame to a world of prestige, well-being, acknowledgement and pleasure. Thoughts of gold fired the imagination. It roused the noble and the disaffected of society: the energetic and the lethargic alike. Eldorado was seemingly within every man’s grasp. Provided he had the physical and mental stamina to walk to and live in outlandish places like the Canadian Klondike which drew fortune-seekers in their tens of thousands. Gold was a rallying call.

In the 1880s there were rumours about gold emanating from the south-western part of the Cape Colony. Could they be true? Why not? Look at the diamonds which were found in the interior in the 1870s along the river banks. The huge open-cast mine being carved out of ancient volcanic rock at Kimberley. Diamonds and more diamonds! It fired the imagination. And now in the 1880s men spoke of Millwood and gold.

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Plattekloof Pass was the second oldest mountain pass in the Langeberg/Outeniqua mountain range used by European traders, travellers and farmers crossing from the southern coastal plains to Kannaland. Situated north of Riversdale and Heidelberg in the Southern Cape, it was in use from the early 1700s until 1841 when it was replaced by the Gysmanshoek Pass. Thereafter Plattekloof Pass fell into complete disuse, so much so that it was soon forgotten. From the 1960s up to the present day, several travel and history writers allege that Gysmanshoek Pass was built on the route of the old Plattekloof Pass, this in spite of the fact that there was some evidence that the Plattekloof Pass had been west of the Plattekloof River, a branch of the Duivenhoks River, while Gysmanshoek Pass is east of the river. Based on the history of construction of mountain passes in South Africa, records kept by 18th century travellers, the topography of the area and Google Earth views, and a report by researchers from BartoIomeu Dias Museum in Mossel Bay, the author shows that Plattekloof Pass and Gysmanshoek Pass are two separate passes. The first follows a route over the mountain west of the Plattekloof River, the latter is east of the river. Both are of historical significance, and add to the interesting history of the Southern Cape.

1. Introduction

Attaquaskloof Pass north of Mossel Bay is the oldest mountain pass in the Langeberg/Outeniqua range used by European travellers to travel from the coastal plains to the...

Pondoland (Mpondoland) is a geographical area on the mid-east coast of South Africa (Indian Ocean side) and is part of what was previously known as the Transkei. It borders Thembuland, the area from which our former president, Nelson Mandela, hails. His second wife, Winnie Madikizela, was actually born in Pondoland.

Map showing Pondoland

Originally, the hunter-gatherer San and Khoihoi people inhabited the region in scattered nomadic groups for thousands of years. Around 500 AD, Xhosa speaking Ngunis settled in the area as a consequence of the indigenous population’s expansion to the south.

Contact with Europeans occurred when sailing ships from Europe began to circumnavigate Southern Africa. From the 1500s onwards, ships were wrecked on the Pondoland coast, resulting in some of the castaways permanently settling there and later being absorbed into Mpondo communities. For instance, when the Grosvenor, an East Indiaman, ran ashore on 4 August 1782, the survivors met up with a European girl named Bessie. She was the wife of Tshomane, the paramount chief of the Mpondo, who herself had been shipwrecked there 40 years earlier.

Oil painting...

In present times the prospect of Bus Rapid Transit may be exciting the imagination, but the concept, and the public interest it has created is scarcely something new: in the 1850's there was a flurry of activity in the Cape Colony as tram transport became a definite possibility. The taxis of the time were the "omnibuses": horse drawn carriages, usually overcrowded, plying indefinite routes to irregular timetables in cutthroat competition with one another. To be fair, many performed a very useful function, providing a link with the outlying districts over unmade tracks in all kinds of weather. But the local services were less admirable. The Southern Suburbs of Cape Town were ripe for expansion, but the advantages of living in the countryside were offset by wage-earners having to travel daily to town in the uncomfortable, dusty and unreliable 'buses. The citizens, it was felt deserved something better. There were talks of railways but these required considerable capital investment and thus an extensive customer base.

Strangely for the times, the first campaigner for tramways in the Cape was a woman, Mrs Jane Silberbauer who edited a local newspaper, The Cape Chronicle. In 1860 she wrote glowingly about the benefits of the new form of transport recently introduced in England. Carriages on rails, she pointed out, could carry many more passengers, required fewer horses and provided a much more comfortable ride than the omnibuses. Her article was read by well-known businessman and public benefactor Henry Solomon. He was one of the...