At dusk we walked along the shore to the village, and watched the fishermen setting off with lamps in their unstable canoes carved from hollowed-out tree trunks to fish for the teeming cichlids.
Mr. Dasch, who like the other saboteurs had lived in the United States for years before returning to Germany and spoke good English, convinced him that they were fishermen who had set off from Southampton, six miles west, and had run aground.
Today, on emerging exhilarated from a first dive into the beautiful waters at sunset, the twenty-first century sounds of the lake are of fishermen, singing as they set off to fling their nets out in the gloaming.
He said fishermen in the area commonly set off in similarly small vessels on one or two-day trips in search of shark or shrimp with no navigational equipment.
Only then does he set off for his day's work as a fisherman.
The discovery of these fertile fishing grounds set off a centuries-long struggle among Basque, Portuguese, French and English fishermen, and established a pattern of far-flung coastal settlements, called outports by Newfoundlanders, that ring the island.
We set off in a small boat past auspicious-looking shrimp nets rigged in the current by fishermen, most of whom come from nearby Senegal.
Besides devastating parts of Indonesian Sumatra, the quake set off sea surges that reached as far as the coast of Africa, where dozens of Somali fishermen perished, 6,500km (4,000 miles) from the epicentre.
Others set off fireworks.
