So wrote naturalist Bernard Carp in his 1961 book “I chose Africa’. And it remains so. This swathe of desert loveliness has a rich and fascinating history. Once bustling with human activity, it is now left to the birds and jackals and the whistling wind.
Positioned in the Namib-Naukluft Park, approximately 50km south of Walvis Bay, the name of Sandwich Harbour is misleading. It is not a commercial harbour at all and has nothing to do with sandwiches, except perhaps for the grit that remains in your teeth after attempting a picnic in this windswept realm. Rather, it is a natural bay, edged by sand dunes and sea; a desert jewel of sparkling blue and green, an auspicious spot where fresh water from the Kuiseb River’s aquifer trickles through the dunes providing a feast for the eyes and an avian paradise.
Once a safe harbour with fresh water.
Constantly changing over the years, the bay, which comprises a northern freshwater wetland and southern mudflats, was at one time accessible to ships and attracted entrepreneurs and industry. ‘It was once an enormous lagoon, five fathoms deep, where seagoing ships found a safe harbour,’ Carp wrote, ‘but the channel to the sea was closed by a great barrier of sand thrown up in the course of Atlantic storms.’ Being the only accessible ‘port’ along the Namibian coastline with a supply of fresh water, it became the first trading post between the local Topnaar people and the outside world. Local people traded cattle for supplies and glass beads.
Portuguese explorer Diego Cão called it Port d'Ilheo (Point of the Island) when he sailed into the bay in 1486. At the time, ‘strandlopers’, ancestors of the ≠Aonin or Topnaar people, wandered along the coast, surviving on the ocean’s bounty, and myriad bird species gathered at this propitious place of fresh water.
Whalers began to travel down the West African coast in the late 1700s exploiting the Atlantic’s marine life, followed in the 1840s by guano-collectors who flocked to offshore islands like Ichabo to harvest nitrate-rich bird droppings valued in Europe as fertiliser and dubbed ‘white gold’. Sandwich Harbour attracted various industries from the 1850s such as fish-processing and later, beef-canning. It also proved to be a lucrative guano site. Birds found a safe retreat on an island in the lagoon, protected from the hyenas and jackals. When the island merged with the mainland, the birds left to find safer nesting sites.
In 1890, the sand spit protecting the natural bay broke off, making the harbour too shallow for ships to enter, forcing people to make their way overland across miles of desert from Sandwich Harbour to Walvis Bay.
Sandwich?
Why the natural harbour became known as Sandwich Harbour is uncertain. It is thought that the name either stemmed from the German word ‘sandfisch’ meaning sand fish or sand shark or, more probably, that it was named after the ship HMS Sandwich, which is said to have visited the bay in the late 1700s.
When Bernard Carp visited Sandwich Bay, as he called it, in 1959 the caretaker of the guano company, Hans von Broen, and his family still lived there and he stayed in a guest cottage built by the guano company. From the cottage he watched the pelicans, flamingos and waders in the pools. ‘There are thousands of birds, and the air is filled with their calls, night and day; there is the wide blue sea, the lagoon, the series of sweet-water pools, the soft rumble of the breakers on the beach; all this at the foot of the towering, shifting sand-dunes.’
He learned that Hans had become the caretaker of the guano company in 1939. His wife died from heart failure while giving birth to her sixteenth child and Hans stayed on. Wooden crosses marked the graves of his wife and three of his children. Initially, he made occasional journeys to Walvis Bay to get supplies on foot with mules, and when the mules ran away, with pack donkeys. At times the animals got caught in the quicksand and had to be abandoned. Later on, he was able to get a ride with a local fisherman.
Hans told him that when he came to Sandwich Harbour there was a layer of guano nine feet high, that between 800 and 1500 tons were harvested every year and that the guano industry had ceased in 1947.
A tricky trip of quicksand and tides . . .
The trip from Walvis Bay then, as now, was tricky to negotiate in the soft sand, and through the mudflats, sand drifts, quicksand and the narrow strip between sea and sand that is only accessible at low tide. Carp writes that ‘At intervals along the track are the grim relics of cars which have been lost in the sand or the mud.’ Hans told him the story of a Chevrolet truck and tractor belonging to the Namaqua Diamond Company that were returning to Walvis Bay after diamond operations on the coast had come to a halt. First the tractor got stuck in the sand on the beach as the tide was rising and within two hours it had vanished beneath the sea. Only the hood of the truck remained visible, but by the time the rescue operation with mules arrived the next morning, it was almost completely buried and only the tyres could be salvaged. Today, a permit is needed from MEFT (Ministry of Environment, Forestry & Tourism) to visit the area as well as four-wheel drive expertise and a great deal of caution. It is also imperative that old tracks are followed, not only to avoid the trickier sections, but to protect the sensitive desert ecosystem. As an increasing number of tourists are visiting the site, it is advisable to select a tour operator that offers environmentally-sensitive trips in order to leave as small an impact as possible on this desert wonderland and to preserve it for future generations.
Not much from the days of old is visible today, nor from the days fifty years ago when Carp visited when fragments of the old settlement remained and the wreck of a ship that was stranded when the sand barrier closed the entrance to the sea. The beauty, however, is ever-present.
A place of harmony & day dreams . . .
And Carp’s description of it is just as relevant today as it was then. ‘It is a most lovely peaceful scene; in the foreground the little pools and birds; and beyond them the great smoking sand dunes. Across the coastal flats there is the deep blue glimmer of the sea. And there is no noise, just the call of the birds and the soft murmur of the breakers on the beach. This is a place of harmony and daydreams.’
‘It is a place of great peace, a place of dreams, of quiet meditation and feeling in touch with the Infinite.”
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(Daytrip kindly provided by Turnstone Tours: www.turnstone-tours.com)