Today it is hard to imagine that for forty years the mouth of the Kowie River was the site of a successful harbour from which small boats sailed as far afield as Mauritius and St Helena, important staging posts on the Cape and Indian trading routes. In 1884 a total of 86 ships entered the harbour, including 30 steamers and 12 sailing ships, and moored at what is now Wharf Street in Port Alfred. But this ‘success’ was short-lived and involved a massive assault on the river's integrity, a challenge to T.S. Eliot's image of rivers as ‘strong brown gods’. According to an environmentalist, the harbour development involved ‘a few men's blind pursuit of personal fortune’ and ‘triggered the steady decline of the Kowie estuary’. One of these men was my great-great-grandfather William Cock, who was among the four thousand British settlers allocated land in the Zuurveld (renamed Albany in 1814) after it had been cleared of the Xhosa. While William Cock is best known for his attempts to develop the harbour, he also played an important role as a supplier to the military establishment, a member of the colonial administration and a pioneer of settler capitalism.

Before human intervention the estuary of the Kowie consisted of a number of channels and sandbanks which were exposed by the retreating tide. The estuary was about 600 metres in width, bounded on each side by steep hills covered with indigenous forest (now known as the East Bank and West Bank). According to a sketch by the first harbour master, the mouth of the river was at the foot of the hill which formed its left bank and was partially closed by two sandbars, which meant extreme variations in the level of the water depending on the changing tides. The main channel ran down the west side, crossed over at the first sandbank and then carried on out to sea by way of the east bank. The main channel of the river in the lower reaches flowed in a straight line past what is now Wharf Street before entering the sea approximately 300 metres east of the present mouth.