Travel Tips

Every town, no matter how old, survives on its legends, they are the stories that we tell our children, that we relate and exaggerate, embellish and in doing so they are handed down, from generation to generation.
Port Alfred to-day, which is known as part of the "Sunshine Coast." is one municipality, and although the folk of this "Settler village" still refer to Kowie West and Kowie East, it is fast becoming a well known retirement town, which makes for a stable economy, and made famous by having the distinction of being the third largest "line fishing port" in South Africa. The amenities are all modern, and with the addition of the Royal Alfred Marina, which was first constructed in 1987, there are now numerous hotels, excellent restaurants, many B&B's, most forms of "medical facilities" or health care amenities, and shopping that defies going to the larger cities.

The following are just a few of the many stories .

The Angel of the Kowie.
In 1906 the proprietor of the Beach House hotel near
the entrance to the harbour of Port Alfred was building an
addition to the guesthouse when his son unearthed a
statuette. Some 17cm high, it was of material that
resembled meerschaum - the proprietor was an ardent
smoker so it was a natural comparison for him to make.

The figure was lifelike and beautifully carved. It was
dressed in a robe and had long flowing hair, he later
reported to the historian Professor George Edward
Cory. In its right arm it held a wreathed shield edged in
blue and emblazoned with a red cross.

Dubbed the Kowie Angel, the figure disappeared for
many years, recently resurfacing in the Albany Museum
in Grahamstown.

Its discovery in 1906 caused quite a stir. Some believed
it had been buried by Portuguese sailors and proved
that the navigator Bartholomew Dias had landed at the
Kowie River in 1488. Most authorities dispute this but
the myth was born. The novelist Ethelreda Lewis used
the legend in her first published novel, The Harp ,
building one of her key characters on the proprietor of
the Beach House (which later became The Cove and is
now the Ferryman's Hotel).

Myth and legend are very much part of the history of Port
Alfred and it is not always easy to untangle the truth in its
history.

But it was a different angel that brought me to Port
Alfred recently, an unlikely angel named Ronnie Samuel.

The proprietor of the Beach House was Johannes
Heindrich Samuel, from Altona, near Hamburg in
Germany, possibly the son of a Danish rabbi. Family
legend has it that one of the family was stepfather to the
Wild West outlaw Jesse James (whose mother was a
Zerelda Samuel).

Drifted wreckage often ends up in a port, and much of it
is human. Johannes Samuel, born in 1856, jumped ship
in Port Alfred and was naturalized in 1876. He married
Annie Jane Dowse-Smith, had 21 children and became
one of the doyens of the town.

In his footsteps walked one of his sons, Manning, the
idol of the youth of Port Alfred for many years. When
Samuel gave a boy a hiding, the boy's father would give
him a second one too, because he knew he deserved it.

There is a photograph of Manning looking out to sea on
the pier at the mouth of the harbour. His gaze is on the
tide some 400m out, watching the sea build. It is a
treacherous tide, as anyone will know who has read Eric
Turpin's Basket Work Harbour , about the futile attempts
in the 19th century to turn Port Alfred from a ship's
nightmare into a safe haven. Manning Samuel and
others were part of the crew of the lifeboat Maggie long
before the National Sea Rescue Institute came to town.

Unlike his father, Manning had only one son, Ronnie. He
worshipped him and Ronnie reciprocated. .

As a kid Ronnie loved the Kowie River. He fished there
a lot. As he got older the sea sang to him. His father
took him fishing at sea in his boat, The Risk. Ronnie
never got further than Standard 8 - he just wanted to fish.
He began training as a welder but never finished
because the fish were biting.

His training stood him in good stead, however. He built
his own boats from plywood: first the Bluefin, then the
Yellowfin, powered by a Seagull 4hp engine, then by a
Johnson 7½hp. Every return to harbour was a hazardous
one. The sea could change within an hour. The boats
made no more than five knots. The waves, treacherously
angled at 15 knots, always threatened to hurl them
against the pier.

But Ronnie had no fear. He loved the sea and the sea
loved him. He he felt he was too close to it for it ever to
hurt him.

Not that he didn't have close shaves. Many times his
boat was swept out to sea by gale force winds. On more
than one occasion he was washed overboard. Once,
famously, in 1961, he and 13 men on the 40-foot Mary
Anne went missing for 32 hours in a gale and were
eventually discovered 50 miles off course by a search
aircraft.

But Ronnie was best known for his rescues. He once
dived in to pluck a child from the bottom of the Buffalo
River in East London. On another occasion he saved
two men in trouble in a boat off Kowie - one of them was
paralysed but he got to shore wheelchair and all.

By 1965, at the age of 30, he had already made at least
30 rescues. He once said to his son Dicky that he had
rescued more people than he had had years of his life.

In 1956 he had two boats entirely manned by coloured
crews. When one day in a strong westerly wind one of
them failed to return, he went to the pier and anxiously
scanned the sea, exactly as his father had done before
him. When the boat finally drew near, it suddenly began
to drift out to sea again. It had run out of fuel.

Ronnie rounded up a relative, Pixie John, a rough man
renowned as a beachcomber, and braved the troubled
sea, taking out a supply of petrol. He swam with a line
between the boats and extricated the stricken craft from
the danger of nearby rocks. When he, too, ran out of fuel
he lashed the boats together and drifted 150km
eastwards, miraculously clearing Riet Point. They were
rescued only the next morning, but Ronnie had
undoubtedly saved his crew.

His most famous exploit came in 1965. A 73-ton fishing
trawler, the Cape St Blaize, ran aground 12km west of
Port Alfred off Glendower Beacon at 10.30pm. There
were 12 men on board. The police immediately called
Ronnie.

Heavy seas were running, spray dashed over the stern
and the early morning was cold. "I knew a rope would
have to be used," Ronnie said afterwards. "Unless the
men on board were strong swimmers they would not
have made the swim to the beach. The strong current
would not have taken them to shore but rather along the
coast."

Ronnie waded in and shouted to the crew to have a line
ready for him. The crew tied the line to an oil drum and
put it over the side as Ronnie made the hugely difficult
swim out (he claimed he was not a strong swimmer).

Holding grimly onto the drum, he began the swim back,
but the current swept him 90m down the beach. As each
breaker rolled over him he dived to avoid being hit by
the drum. Once he was too slow and the drum slammed
down on his head. His friend Albert Marais waded out to
help since he was by then very weak. The line was
secured and the lucky dozen were plucked from danger.
Half of the wreck can still be seen, a monument to the
bravery of Ronnie Samuel.

He was awarded the Wolraad Woltemade medal for
bravery - amid some confusion, as family legend has it
that he won it twice.

Then he became a hero twice over, disguised, for
some, as a villain.

Ronnie married young and soon had five or six children.
Then he left his wife for a coloured woman. It was the
height of the apartheid era and the police pursued him
relentlessly. Convicted under the Immorality Act, he
spent six months in a Port Elizabeth jail. His pregnant
companion was locked up too. The Supreme Court
overturned the verdict and Samuel had himself
reclassified as coloured.

A straight man who didn't care what people thought of
him, he was well spoken, capable and intelligent. He
knew his birds and he knew the stars, and he would
collect specimens for the Rhodes University
ichthyologists Fishy Smith and his wife, Margaret, or
report to them when he came across an albatross far
out to sea.

He was a quiet, easygoing man who drank little and did
not smoke. He would often intervene in a fight. Once he
shot a man's arm off with his .45. He read cowboy
books, like those of Louis L'Amour, a habit he passed
on to some of his sons.

But it was a hard life. In 1963 he lost two boats, St Peter
and Sea Hawk, within two weeks. He had 17 children by
at least four different women and found it difficult to
support them all. Crews were unreliable so he often took
his family to help him. His last wife, who was
Xhosaspeaking, spent 10 years fishing with him.

He kept his dignity, though, and handed on his instinct
for fearless service to one of his youngest sons,
Richard, who became an ambulance man.

It was probably the hard life of fishing which killed
Ronnie Samuel in the end - his heart gave in in January
1997. By the time of his death, the sea had allowed him
to save more than 40 lives.

Often his catch was small -- he fished by hand line - and
his families would suffer. But when he had a fair catch of
kob, redfish, silvers, geelbek or hake, he would say with
his characteristic wry smile: "Ah, the sun always shines
on the righteous!"