Hout Bay Harbour

This guide to Hout Bay Harbour, near Cape Town, opens with a puzzle: why a French-born businessman named Lucien Plessis paid to have a wrecked British sailing ship towed around the coast and beached here around the turn of the last century. It follows what he built out of that hulk starting in 1903, turning a quiet former Dutch timber stop into South Africa's first rock lobster cannery, shipping crawfish to France, Britain, the US and Australia. Best heard looking over the working harbour, where the boats still unload their catch.