I tucked the well-known author’s book ‘So few are free’ under my arm while I walked from Lüderitz’s Felsenkirche (Church of the Rock) with its expansive view of the town to find the old magistrate’s house that he mentioned, located on Diamantberg. The street sign that I recalled from previous years was no longer there. To me, it had always added intrigue - and wonder - to this southwestern Namibian town with its century-old houses that spoke of the opulence of the 1908 diamond rush when the sparkling stones attracted people to the waterless sands of the Namib Desert.
Diamantberg & the land of sand blast
Green described how once the magistrate’s house was one of the finest, built when the German Crown Prince was expected to visit. It had a well-tended garden, set against the parched Diamantberg, that was a marvel in the town where people ‘despairing of the aching, sandy wilderness’ had been known to send to Cape Town for earth to grow plants in tubs.
I walked up the stairs and knocked on the large door of the grand old house. The sound echoed. No-one was home. Looking down onto the multi-coloured houses in the streets below, I made my way back to the rock church. I paged through the book, reading the words that ‘shone a brief and bright light on Lüderitz’s history with captivating tales,’ as was the style and forte of the popular writer, Lawrence Green.
Green had arrived by ship in the 1940s, visiting the town after a twenty-year absence. Through the porthole he watched the white finger of the Diaz Point lighthouse come into view. ‘This is a land of sand blast,’ he wrote, ‘one of the windiest coasts in the world. Violent south-west winds, raging almost incessantly for seven months of the year, drive the sand with such force that huge rocks are scored and honeycombed into queer shapes . . . Yet this is also the wind that distributes the diamonds along hundreds of miles of coastline. This wind still uncovers layer after layer, throwing up wealth with roaring generosity.’
In his day the town still depended on the water distillation plant that converted 2300 gallons of sea water into 1300 gallons of fresh water every hour, to be pumped up to tanks on Diamantberg. ‘Fresh water costs seven shillings for 100 gallons,’ he noted, ‘and you can have a bath for 1s. 6d. at the hotels.’
While he sat on a bench on the rocky koppie above the town where trolley lines and mules hauling freight and passengers from his earlier visit had been replaced by cars, he reflected how the diamond fields of Kolmanskop were no longer in operation, the machinery rusting in the sand, and how the industry had moved further south to Oranjemund. ‘Down in the harbour are the crawfish cutters which help to maintain the town that has lost its diamond industry. Yet the diamonds are still there. Everywhere you go outside Lüderitz are noticeboards marking areas which you cannot enter without a permit. They tell a true story of a visiting schoolteacher who went for a short walk on the edge of the town. She shook the sand out of her shoes when she returned. Out fell a diamond.’
Traders and explorers of old
Before his ship was due to sail at daybreak, Green sat on Diamantberg and recalled the dramatic interludes that gave the old harbour of Angra Pequena its rich background of history. In the middle of the previous century, there were already a few white traders and prospectors living in wooden shacks on the shores, trading with Nama from the interior who arrived with cattle, ostrich feathers and the skins of wild animals. Most famous of all the early settlers was David Radford from Colchester, Essex, who arrived in 1861, made friends with the local San, who gave him venison and fresh water that they carried in ostrich eggshells. ‘He rode an ox far into the Namib. A shipmaster sold him a whaleboat, and he caught sharks and boiled them down in the iron pots that still remain on the beach at Radford’s Bay. He sent oil, sealskins and cattle to Cape Town by schooner, receiving trade goods in exchange.’ Although Radford was a lonely trader in no-man’s land and was routinely robbed, he would not leave. During a visit to Cape Town in 1878 he married a Miss Powell and took her back to Radford’s Bay. While he was inland trading, she ran the fishery, salting and smoking the catch. The couple had eight children. Things changed for Radford when Herr Lüderitz, a Bremen merchant, who had heard tales of mineral wealth in the desert, arrived in Angra Pequena in 1883 and Germany claimed the country a year later.
Adolf Lüderitz made a daring trip in an open boat to the Orange River mouth. On the return trip on the ocean the boat capsized and he drowned. His sixth sense would prove correct, the area held untold mineral riches. According to Green, the story of modern Lüderitzbucht (Lüderitz Bay) began when the sparkling stone was picked up in 1908 and news of the diamond rush spread like wildfire. Green recorded: ‘So now all this country beyond my perch on the Diamantberg is ‘Sperrgebiet’, forbidden territory where police on camels and in cars are for ever patrolling from waterhole to coast in search of fresh footprints.’
As I drove to Diaz Point, following Green’s route, I thought of how I would like to tell him how things had changed since then, how the Sperrgebiet is the Tsau //Khaeb National Park and how water is now channelled to the town from the Koichab depression.
Treasure seekers & diamonds in the sand
It’s an older history that Green related about the windswept point, 20km from the town. On the rocky point he saw in his mind’s eye Bartholomew Diaz and his scurvy-stricken sailors landing with the stone pillar they set up there in 1488. They called it the ‘Pillar of Santhiago’ and named the harbour Angra Pequena (Little Bay), a name it retained until German occupation four hundred years later.
‘The old harbour of the Portuguese explorers has given shelter to pirates and gun-runners, American whalers, to many famous ships. For a long period . . . the place was a no man’s land, a lawless little settlement where vivid characters lived and died.’
Green had heard a tale about the Pillar of Santhiago, of how the whalers had overturned it to search for treasure beneath its base. It was also reported that Captain Parker of the brig Kirkwood had dug beneath the broken pillar, through a layer of bird guano and excavated a box. The box, rather than holding any treasure, held a man with his arms across his heart who looked terrifyingly straight at them. The preservation of the body was said to possibly be due to the properties of the soil and the phosphates in the guano.
Before the road was built from Lüderitz to Diaz Point, the point could only be reached by sea. In 1914 some South African soldiers nearly died there when they were forgotten. They finished their rations and hoisted a distress signal which was luckily seen by a British cruiser that came to the rescue.
Green recounted how a white steam yacht called Xema, chartered by a famous Irish treasure hunter, Lord Fitzwilliam, anchored off Halifax Island in 1906. Although it was two years before the famous diamond discovery, some men seemed to already have an inkling that the sands harboured stones. Stories abound of how they knew. One story tells that a sailing ship was loaded with ballast that held diamonds. Another story recounts how a Cardiff shipmaster, Captain R Jones, had filled a pickle-bottle with diamonds while loading guano at Halifax Island. The arrival of Xema had been observed and the ship was intercepted at sea by the HMS Terpsichore and warned against making a landing. But the speedy Xema gave them the slip and the men were soon on the shore with spades. Xema’s charterers tried to secure a prospecting permit for the guano islands. It was denied and Halifax Island was left to the penguins.
He also visited Sturmvogel Bay and the ruins of the whaling station. ‘Every bay on this coast seems to have been used by the Norwegian whale hunters at some time or another,’ he explained. ‘Here at Sturmvogel, where the flamingos stalk the beach, you can still see the cement slipway built in 1913, and corroded tanks still holding tons of whale oil.’
Leaving the book with all its tales of treasure seekers behind in the car, I walked up to the replica of the original Diaz Cross and looked out to sea as the wind whipped my hair into an unruly halo. Back in the warmth of the car, I drove past the small bays that Green described, looking at the flamingos dotting the shore and the old ruins still visible in the distance.
The land of great thirst & riches
As Green’s ship made ready for the open sea, he wrote: ‘Diamond raiders have come by air, land and sea into this land of the great thirst and riches . . . But as I gaze round this sinister landscape I am not tempted. Always there are the dunes.’
‘Night falls on the old harbour of Angra Pequena. Now there is the light on Diaz Point again and the dunes of death are covered by the kindly darkness.’
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