A Brief History Of Kalk Bay

Of all the towns and villages in South Africa there must be few, if any that have a more interesting and fascinating history than Kalk Bay. Its modern day history started when the Dutch East India Company proclaimed Simon’s Bay a winter anchorage for their ships From May 15th to August 15th each year from 1742. The difficulty of getting supplies to these ships in Simons Bay and the building of Simon’s Town was severely hampered by the less than adequate road, especially at Clovelly and Sunny Cove where the mountains reached down to the sea and The quicksand’s of Fish Hoek and Glencairn halted oxen transport. Kalk Bay became a mini-port for the Dutch and all victualling requirements, as well as anchors, masts and sails, were sent by ox wagon to Kalk Bay; thereafter goods were loaded on to barges, which took the goods to the ships in the bay, as well as construction materials needed for the building of Simon’s Town. Returning ox-wagons took lime (kalk) and fish, the staple diet of slaves, back to Cape Town.

This mini-port boom, during which warehouses were built to store the goods, lasted from 1742 to 1795, where after the British took over the Cape and the Royal Engineers built a proper ‘hard’ road to Simons Town. Kalk Bay fell into disuse, but not for long, and by 1820 it was again the hive of activity as the whaling boom brought much needed enterprise. This happenend because whaling was prohibited in Simons Town due to complaints by the residents and the garrison, that the smell of burning rubber and rotting whale carcasses was repugnant, unhygienic and unacceptable.

Whaling was the third biggest industry in the Cape Colony behind agriculture and winemaking and three of the biggest whaling stations were in Kalk Bay. The whaling boom was short-lived, however, as killing female Southern Right Whales, which had come to calve in the warm waters of False Bay, soon resulted in almost total extinction of the whale population around these shores. Around 1835, Kalk Bay became a ‘backwater’ again. This stagnation did not last for long because in the mid-1840s, a Filipino crew that was shipwrecked at Cape Point settled in Kalk Bay. They found the climate most favourable but above all, the abundance of fish in False Bay was almost to good to be true. They persuaded fellow Filipinos, who crewed on Yankee sugar ships that lay at anchor in Simon’s Bay, to desert their ships and join them in Kalk Bay, where their leader, Felix Forez, would provide them with shelter and fishing gear. The Filipino population of Kalk Bay slowly grew and the anti-Spanish riots in the Philippines in the 1850’s resulted in thousands of refugees fleeing the islands. Their number in Kalk Bay was somewhat reduced when the Americans took possession of the Philipines in 1898, and many refugees returned home.

Of the 60 odd families that stayed, many still have descendants in the village to this day and the names of de la Cruz, Fernandez, Menigo and Erispe still appear on the St James Roman Catholic Primary School register. The population of Kalk Bay was further augmented when many emancipated slaves in the Cape, who originated from Batavia, Java and Malaysia, decided to settle in the village. Fishing was their life-blood and it was not long before they played an important role in the community. When the railways arrived in 1883, the population of the Kalk Bay grew rapidly and the way of life in this small fishing village changed dramatically. It was now possible to work ‘up the line’ in Wynberg or Cape Town and live at the seaside, a phenomenon previously not possible. This population growth resulted in more homes, boarding-houses, hotels, schools and shops and the Kalk Bay municipality successfully created an economic infrastructure between 1895 and 1913.

The Kalk Bay fisherman survived the abhorrent Group Areas legislation, but they could not survive the dramatic reduction of fish in False Bay, which occurred steadily from about 1955 onwards as ‘over fishing’ reduced fish stocks considerably. Today, the village has once again changed its character and although the harbour and the fishing still operate at a low key, the village has become the centre of antique, art and bric-brac shops with many outstanding restaurants that offer excellent food and maintain the unique and special character of this historic harbour village.