Harpoon at a Venture

by Gavin Maxwell

  The rain had stopped, and a pale golden sunset was beginning when we had finished; the air was full of the desolate music that is Lochmaddy’s own sound of summer, the calling of the Red-throated Divers as they fly inland from the sea. When the sun had almost set, laying a shivering pencil of light across the surface of the harbour, the water was yellow, with shifting purple shadows against the dark background of the land, and on its almost unruffled surface floated mosaic patterns of white gulls, crying continuously.

  We carried our catch to Soay next day. The factory was making heavy weather of our last killing; there were still three inflated sharks in the now scum-covered harbour, the concrete was swimming in oil and blood, and littered with gigantic piles of offal. At one corner someone had accidentally slit a shark’s stomach, and about a ton of pink semi-liquid plankton was adding to the confusion. Rain during the past two days was given as the reason for lack of progress, a reason with which I grew very familiar during that and the following season.

  The fragments of offal in the harbour had attracted quantities of scavenger fish, and I remember a huge conger eel, not less than six feet long, weaving his way lazily between the uprights of the pier. The gulls were in thousands, and among them was a rarity, a mature Glaucous Gull, asleep on the roof-ridge of the store house. On the heather slope behind the factory building were scattered over a wide area the cartilaginous vertebræ, drying for future use as fish manure (photograph 65), and among them scuttled and bobbed innumerable Pied Wagtails, hunting for the fly-grubs that hatched in the crevices of the cartilage. Many of these must have come over from Skye, for there was not a fraction of that number resident on Soay.

  At Soay we picked up a second visitor to the Sea Leopard, a friend whom I had not seen for some years, and who was on leave from the Far East. He must bitterly have regretted his visit, for it had precisely the effect that our last guest had had: we saw only one shark during the whole week. I was the worst possible host; I was by now really worried about finance and the factory’s failures, and as the days went by I grew more and more morose and shorter in temper. After he had left I sent him some sort of apology, but I never saw or heard from him again, and the actuality of his leave must have been very different from his anticipation.

  The one shark that we did see during his stay was a piece of pure comedy, had I been able to see it as such. It was off Eillean Glas Lighthouse in Scalpay. We had been cruising for five days without sighting a fin, and the Gannet was being towed with no crew aboard her.

  A big shark surfaced not more than thirty yards away on the starboard bow and on the same course as ourselves. It was the first Basking Shark our guest had ever seen, and appropriately enough he saw it first. There was a tremendous bustle and confusion as the five days of frustration found outlet in action. The Sea Leopard hove to and began to haul in the Gannet, but before we were properly aboard her the shark had turned and was swimming straight for us. He came right up to the gun while we were still putting the caps onto the nipples, his huge gaping mouth not a yard from the harpoon head. He had passed under the boat by the time we were ready. Then he circled the Gannet again and swam straight up to the gun. We were prepared for him this time; it was a shot at point-blank range into the open mouth, the first we had ever had. The gun misfired. The caps blew, but not the charge, and the shark swam leisurely away. We fitted two more caps, and inside three minutes we had another perfect chance, with exactly the same result. The shark seemed to get bored, and submerged gently. We could not see anything funny about it; we were all practically in tears of rage and frustration, and the Gannet echoed with every known and unknown obscenity in English and in Gaelic. We decided to test the gun once more before withdrawing the charge and reloading. We took out the harpoon, put on fresh caps, and fired into the air. It went off with a roar that brought out the lighthouse crew with telescopes. The shark did not re-surface, and after waiting two hours we abandoned him. What a memory of shark-hunting our guest must have taken away with him.

  These inexplicable misfires dogged us periodically for two whole seasons, and were only finally cured by converting the actions of the guns to fire a sizeable blank cartridge in place of the caps. I felt, and still feel, that the gunmaker responsible should have found that solution earlier.

  We were no more fortunate when our visitor had left. Only one ring-net boat reported seeing sharks, at Canna. The weather was impossible, a strong southerly wind blowing from a bleak sky, and we spent two days prowling round the Canna cliffs without seeing anything. A telegram to Davidson at Uishenish produced the reply No sharks since you were last here, and when the wind began to shift a point or two into the west we set off for the Barra shore. When we had crossed the Minch the wind was backing into the south again and near gale force; there was nothing we could do but put into Castlebay harbour and wait. And wait we did, for three days of unbroken gale, reaching hurricane force in gusts.

  Castlebay has always seemed to me a grim place, as stark and depressing as a northern mining village, and I had never been there long enough to acquire friends, as we had in other ports, who would perhaps have led me to see it with a different eye. When I summon a mental picture of Castlebay the colour is all grey—grey hills, grey houses and sea-worn pier, grey sea that laps the rock on which ruined Kismul Castle, from which the village takes its name, is built on a jutting rock-island in mid-harbour, a rock so small that at high tide the sea beats upon the very walls of the Castle.

  On the second day I walked across the island to watch the seas coming in on the Atlantic side. In comparative shelter I climbed the eastern side of the low watershed, past straggling crofts and out into open country. Some of the crofts were the smallest and most primitive I had seen, dry-stone walls leaning dourly inwards where the heavy stones had begun to settle, and the grass springing green and luxuriant from the edges of the thatch. But I noticed that most of the tiny windows held flowers and a glimpse of spotless curtain. Besides these there were houses of the age of invention and culture, with roofs of the ubiquitous red corrugated iron. The low ground was marshy and yellow with flag-iris; higher up was nothing but the sparse heather, through which the rock showed every few feet, and had here and there claimed an acre or more for its own. The wind blew wet and gusty over everything, and gulls hung tensely upon it, poising and turning over the small cultivated patches.

  When I reached the top of the watershed the wind hit me with bewildering force. It lifted the skirt of my mackintosh and slapped me viciously across the face with it, whirled me round, and, while I was trying to regain my balance, rushed me back a dozen steps the way I had come. Between the gusts it was blowing a full gale; during the gusts it was mad, irresistible. Even through the sound of it I could hear the steady boom and roar of the great Atlantic seas breaking a mile away. As I topped the ridge it was there before me, a wide bay of pure white sand with rock and reef at each side and high cliff headlands to the north and south. At the white sands the rollers came in massive and unhurrying, huge plumes streaming from their shoulders, and as I looked to the northern headland the whole three hundred feet of cliff was suddenly blotted out by a fountain of white water which shot up from its foot and seemed to subside as though on a slow-motion film. When I reached the edge of the white sand, a few hundred yards from the tide, the wind was whirling it up into a sandstorm, smoke-like spirals careering along the beach like ghosts. Every crevice of my clothing was instantly full of sand.

  I reached the rocks at the side of the bay, eyes shut and bent double. Here the noise of the sea was stupefying. Over the reefs and isolated rocks a little to the north the sea had lost all form and architecture; here was no articulated procession of rollers, but a tumbling, leaping, white confusion, out of which shot up every now and again a column like a single vigorous puff from a big steam engine. Further off the rollers were in vast and orderly ranks, thirty feet high and lead-grey, with the white spume snarling back from them; the gradual, terrible piling up of force before each crest curled over
and the whole ridge of water came roaring down in collapse. I turned to look at the big cliff to the north, and watched as again and again it was hidden by a mighty white mushroom of close-packed spray.

  I tried to take photographs, but had to cling to the rocks with one hand to avoid being blown away. Spray drenched the lens and the reflex; the empty leather case of a telephoto lens disappeared at fifty miles an hour. There was, in any case, nothing to photograph; the waves were grey, and when they rose high above the sea-line they were grey against a grey sky; no combination of lens and filter could reproduce what the eye saw.

  Of all natural subjects the sea is the most difficult to record photographically. When an apparently satisfactory result is achieved, it is a tiny fraction of the sight that produced the emotional reaction; it is as if one were to record one stone of a mosaic and by it hope to recall the whole intricate pattern, or by the writing of one note to convey a symphony. I have taken a very few photographs of waves which have in themselves some form and design, but in none can I recapture the least feeling of the sea’s mood at the time, nor of my response to it. And it is as difficult to describe as to record by any other means.

  To emulate.

  When first I read that I drew from it a great deal of comfort, until I reached the last lines of the same poem, so completely giving it the lie and replacing comfort with the undisciplined squads of emotion:

  Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

  Surprisingly great sea imagery occurs sometimes in works of a very much lighter character:

  Perched on my city-office stool I watched with envy while a cool And lucky carter handled ice … And I was wandering in a trice Far from the gray and grimy heat Of that intolerable street O’er sapphire berg and emerald floe Beneath the still, cold ruby glow Of everlasting Polar night, Bewildered by the green half-light, Until I stumbled unawares Upon a creek where big white bears Plunged headlong down with flourished heels And floundered after shining seals Through shivering seas of blinding blue.

  I was beginning to be afraid of the sea; that is to say, my landsman’s fear of it was just beginning to be tinged with a seaman’s fear, and with a faint, very incomplete concept of its almost illimitable power.

  That evening, as we sat in the Sea Leopard’s fo’c’sle, I remember asking Dan, who had sailed all the oceans of the world, what was the biggest sea he had ever seen.

  He thought for a moment, and smiled, as though pleased at some recollection; his eyes were remote. I knew his tremendously vivid visual memory, and that he was seeing some great sea of the past careering by on a mental cinema screen.

  “Oh, well, well,” he said at length; “oh, well, well, well.”

  This was a characteristic preface, especially when some experience or idea was too large for easy translation into words.

  “I’ve seen waves so big that I wouldn’t like to be looking at them,” he went on; “I would just turn my back on them and pretend to myself that they weren’t there. You’ll find there’s many a deep-sea man who’s had the same experience—you just can’t be standing there and watch those things coming up, getting bigger and bigger every moment, unless you’ve got a job to do. If you think of them the height of big trees, and you right in underneath them, you’ll maybe understand my meaning.”

  “When you say a big tree, Dan, what actual height do you mean?”

  He thought again for a long moment; then he said:

  “Well, Major, this will give you some idea. It was in 1923. I was in a ship of more than twelve thousand tons, a big cargo-boat, and we were crossing the Atlantic. There was a westerly gale; it had been blowing for days and days, and we were ploughing into a head sea like a moving mountain range. The danger in a big head sea is when you’re climbing up the face of it—if it starts to break, to curl over, when the ship’s nearly at the top of it, she can be put right under by solid water. Well, I was in the crow’s nest of this ship at the time I remember, and that would be more than fifty feet above sea level if it was calm. Well, I’m telling you, Major, the top of that wave was higher than I was in the crow’s nest. It began to break a little before it reached the ship, and the whole foredeck of the ship below me just disappeared under the sea. I would be twenty-five or thirty feet above the decks, but the crow’s nest—like a big open barrel—was filled right up with water. Not spray, you’ll understand, but pure green sea. Maybe that’s just words to you, Major, but I tell you men who haven’t seen big ocean seas cannot understand the power of them.”

  They were not just words to me; at that moment I saw that mighty cinematograph as clearly as he, and I found nothing to say.

  “I don’t remember being frightened then,” he went on, “but it stands out in my mind that I was really frightened after that. I would be about thirty-five years of age, and we were sailing from Dunkirk to Boston with a cargo of French Clay, soon after I left the sheep-ranch in Australia. She was a ship of about eight thousand tons, the Arundel, with a deep well-deck for’ard. I was on the middle watch—that is, midnight till four a.m. It was a westerly gale and a head sea; she was taking it green over her bows—and, Major, when you talk about seas it’s hundreds and hundreds of tons those old ships used to take solid over the stem. We’d reduced speed till we were almost hove-to, and she kept taking those mountains right over her till you’d wonder she didn’t break into wee bits. It was only the hatch-covers saved us going right under—they were breaking loose, and the mate had been at the tarpaulins, trying to secure them to hold down the hatches. We found him lying all smashed up, behind the spare anchor where it was lashed for’ard against the bulkhead. You’d say he hadn’t a whole bone in his body—he’d just been hammered out by sea after sea coming over the stem. I’d had the wheel from twelve till two, then a spare hour, and then that last hour, three till four, as look-out. Of course the look-out would usually be in the stem, but when there was a sea like that—and I’m telling you we might thank God it wasn’t often—the look-out would stop in the lee wing of the bridge. Well, I’ll never forget that voyage, and I know I was frightened, really frightened, then. We’d sailed from Dunkirk on the first of December, and it was the twenty-fourth when we dropped anchor in Boston Harbour, a westerly gale the whole way, and the ship’s pumps working all the time. We averaged just five knots for the whole voyage—a man can row a dinghy at five knots—and I don’t want to see another like it. No, Major. We lost that ship later, carrying grain from the Black Sea to Hamburg, lost her on a reef off Ceuta, but I don’t think any of us was frightened in quite the same way, and I hope I’ll never be again.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  The 1946 Season: The Outer Islands, July

  WE sailed from Barra the next morning. The wind was still nearly at gale force, carrying obliterating squalls of rain before it. One cloud-burst soon after we left the harbour was like a tank of water emptied from low altitude; a solid mass, with no feeling of individually distinguishable drops. The land looked black and sodden, with a thousand waterfalls streaming from it into a tumbling and confused sea. It seemed as though it might be weeks before the Minch would be calm enough for us to tow the Gannet home, so we took her gun aboard the Sea Leopard and left her at anchor in Castlebay harbour.

  When we reached Mallaig in the late afternoon we found that the midday train had brought all that we had been waiting for since the beginning of the season. As case after case was opened, the Gannet’s motor-winch, the Sea Leopard’s gun-mounting, and finally the gun itself, came successively to light. Once on the fishing-grounds each boat would now be an independent unit, each able to harpoon and winch up a shark unaided. But still it blew, and the Gannet was at the other side of sixty miles of heaving grey sea.

  We lay two days in Mallaig, fitting the new gun and mount to the Sea Leopard by the same process of trial and error as we had used with the Dove eighteen months before. The wind was moderate at last when we sailed for Uishenish on the afternoon of the third day, and when we reached Shepherd’s Bight an ho
ur or two before dark it was glass calm, with only the long, slow undulations of a distant ground-swell. It did not take Davidson, gesticulating from the cliff-top, to show us the sharks; they were everywhere, all the way from the jabble of tide-race off the lighthouse point right up into the head of Shepherd’s Bight and north to the mouth of Loch Skipport.

  The log for the day is reticent. It records three kills and “innumerable” shots. The truth was that none of us could hit a shark from the Sea Leopard’s bows. I had three easy shots in the first ten minutes, and each was a clean miss. The crew were incredulous; they remained polite, but with apparent effort, as bonus after bonus plunged free into the deep water. After the third shot I handed the gun over to Tex, acutely aware of Davidson’s telescope trained on us from the lighthouse wall. But Tex could do no better, and he and I retired miserably to the bridge while Bruce planted himself stockily and with obvious confidence behind the gun. Bruce killed a monster with his first shot, and was beginning to be a little smug about it when the fish winched up easily and without fight to the surface. It did not come up as usual, tail first, but rolling belly upwards, with the harpoon trace wrapped round the body, and as the bulk broke the surface we saw that Bruce’s harpoon had missed the body altogether and passed through the left pectoral fin or flipper, rather near the tip. In other words, Bruce had missed his target by at least four feet. I am afraid that Tex and I were delighted, but the delight wore off when Bruce’s next two shots were both clean misses. I do not remember how many shots we fired altogether, but we finished with three sharks, of which Bruce, Tex, and I had killed one each before the last fin submerged at about eleven in the evening.