Harpoon at a Venture

by Gavin Maxwell

  At this time I had staying on the Sea Leopard Hamish Pelham-Burn, who afterwards led the Northern British Columbia Expedition in 1949. We spent the evening with Finlay and some mutual friends, and left the hotel at about one o’clock in the morning. How many of those gargantuan measures of whisky we had drunk I cannot remember, but it was enough to impair judgment. It was a very still clear night with a new moon, just light enough for us to find our way over the odd hundred yards between the hotel and the pier, with a certain amount of wandering among the sheep-pens that lay directly between us and the boat.

  When we had berthed it had been at full tide, and the Sea Leopard’s decks had been level with the pier; now the tide was out and only the truck of her wireless mast was showing. Her decks were an alarmingly long way below us, and I fumbled around in the dark trying to find one of the fixed ladders on the pier. But they were set back under the main baulk of timber, and my questing toes found nothing to rest upon. I was wearing canvas shoes, and I had all the bravado that such an evening can breed. I pulled myself up again, faced the boat, said “Here goes,” and jumped. I landed on my feet on the poop deck, but the jar was enough to make me realise what a long jump down it had been. I was just picking myself up when I heard a violent oath above me and saw against the sky a figure coming hurtling downward in the most extraordinary attitude. Hamish had failed to negotiate the last of the sheep-pens as adroitly as I, had been left some twenty yards behind, and had not noticed at all that the Sea Leopard had changed her level in relation to the pier. He just stepped off into empty air, and came down like a plummet. He hit the deck beside me and bounced; I could never have believed that a human being could bounce so high. He landed on his buttocks, with his knees drawn up to his chin, and shot up again like a tennis-ball, so that there were two entirely separate sounds of impact, and while he was in the air between them he loosed a stream of invective without changing his attitude. He sat there groaning and swearing in the dark, and if he had broken every bone in his body I do not think I could have stopped laughing at that moment; it seemed to me to be the funniest thing I had ever seen in my life. He was undamaged, but he walked like a duck for days afterwards, and it appeared to him obscurely to be my fault.

  The following morning we tried the area of the Binch Buoy again, and when we found nothing there we decided to cross to the inner islands and look at the coasts of Rhum and Canna. It was weirdly calm as we started across those thirty miles of usually troubled water; there was not so much as a wrinkle upon the surface, and minute objects were visible miles away. From the bridge of the Sea Leopard the field-glasses would make out a floating feather at half a mile, and patches of drifting weed showed as clearly as dark islands upon a white chart. We saw, as we often did at great distances from our fishing-grounds, small relics of shots we had fired: pieces of broken harpoon-stick or floating felt wads that had tamped the powder charges. (Years later, at Sandaig Lighthouse, beside which I now live, I was searching the shore below the house for some object that could conveniently be converted into a breadboard. Half concealed in the gravel I saw the projecting edge of a small barrel-top, white, smooth, and sea-worn—exactly the object I required. I pulled it from the shingle in which it was imbedded, and there across the centre of it were the still legible letters ISSF—Island of Soay Shark Fisheries. It had all the nostalgia of a carnet de bal tied with faded ribbon; it brought so many half-forgotten scenes so vividly to my mind that I began this book the next day.)

  We were fifteen miles from land, almost exactly half-way between Barra and Canna, when a mile ahead of us we saw the tip of a shark’s fin. The surface was still flat as a swimming-pool, and the fin left a long triangular furrow in the water as it moved. As we drew nearer it submerged sometimes, but it was never far below the surface, for the furrow never disappeared, guiding us to the shark’s course like the empty footprints of The Invisible Man. It was Bruce who first noticed that far beyond this fin there were other furrows, and as I trained my field-glasses on to the place I saw that the whole surface of the water was slightly disturbed over a wide area.

  The sharks had begun to surface before we reached them. It was a gigantic shoal, far larger than the pack in Loch Scavaig which had so excited us a year before. At one moment we counted fifty-four dorsal fins in sight at the same time, and that was, as it were, only like looking at the topmost branches of a tree that has been almost entirely submerged. We could see the fish down below us in the green water as a practically continuous mass, crossing and recrossing, ponderous and mighty; only the topmost layer, and not all of them, were breaking the surface.

  There was one group that was more often visible than other parts of the shoal, a group of five fish that followed each other almost nose to tail. They changed course often, but always they followed the leader, so we felt that we should have warning of their turns, and find them easier to follow than the single fins that were everywhere dotted over the surface. We shot the hindmost fish after ten minutes’ manœuvring; the barrel was heaved overboard, and within another quarter of an hour we had the next as well.

  This was a male fish, and during a tremendous struggle at the surface just after we had got the tail-sling into position, he emitted a great quantity of what we afterwards found to be sperm. It was not a fluid, but hundreds of semi-opaque milky globules like golf-balls, varying in size, and looking as though made of Lalique glass. These, Dr Harrison Matthews later discovered, were the spermatophores, each having a hard casing enclosing a central core of sperm.

  The Gannet was still winching up the first shark when we shot the third; then, for no apparent reason, the sharks began to go down, and in a few minutes there was not one in sight, just a flat, white, unrippled sea that gave no hint of the great herd of antediluvian monsters that moved beneath its surface.

  The story of the rest of that week is best told in the words of a letter that I wrote on Saturday.

  This is begun on the way into Mallaig from Soay, with the idea of cutting down the enormous amount of writing that there will certainly be to do this evening and tomorrow. There is just enough motion to make writing a little awkward, but I hope I shall remain legible….

  We towed the three carcases to Soay and were back at the same spot soon after dawn next morning (we had marked the place pretty accurately on the chart). There was nothing in sight, and we all felt sure it had been a moving shoal. We took a wide cast round, and in the late evening we found them again, eight miles north of where they had been on Wednesday. It was so calm, the sea so white and utterly flat, that we could see the fins at about four miles. This time we only got two; we lost three more through having ropes too short for the depth of water, the sharks took the ropes and buoys under and never let them up again. I suppose the steel drums burst—next year we ought to have buoys that will stand far greater pressure, so that once a shark was firmly harpooned and the buoy overboard he would always turn up again somewhere.

  The shoal didn’t go down, and we were shooting at them by searchlight long after it was dark; probably even if the barrels hadn’t been taken under they would have been lost in the darkness before we could pull them up.

  We haven’t tied up or dropped anchor since we found the shoal on Wednesday, and we are all getting a little short of sleep; I’ve averaged about two hours in each twenty-four, and I think some of us are even worse off than that.

  The next day, yesterday, we found the shoal still further north, about sixteen miles from where we first saw them. They did not show until five in the afternoon, and they were thicker than ever. It was still glass-calm, and a mist began to form after about half an hour, so we didn’t dare to let the Gannet far from the Sea Leopard. It got thicker and thicker, and by the time we had got five sharks (our record to date) you couldn’t see fifty yards. We shot six, but we lost one barrel in the mist, and I dare say it was just as well, for I don’t see how we could have towed another shark. By using the whole length of the boat we can get three one behind the other overlapping by a few fee
t, but only on one side of the ship, as on the other side one has to leave a space clear for the engine’s exhaust pipes.

  We got these five lashed alongside and started very slowly for home. It was very eerie; you know the way writhing white mist is used in films for an effect of mystery and horror—the mist, right down to the surface, was moving and twisting and reforming, and out of it would appear again and again those great slippery fins, ahead, astern, and on both sides. Heaven knows how many sharks we could have killed if we hadn’t had to think about towing them home; we should certainly never have had to wait for a shot after re-loading. There was enough money round about us to make us all rich for life and we couldn’t touch it.

  Next week—if we haven’t lost the shoal. This year, next year, sometime …

  We are only a mile out of Mallaig now, and judging by the gulls in the air we are not the only people who have been catching fish.

  Bruce left us that week-end. He left, as it were, on the crest, and I had been so impressed by the new mate, Harry, that I did not then realise the magnitude of our loss.

  Harry had attracted attention during his first week with us, by extracting one of his own teeth with complete nonchalance. He had had toothache all day, and in the evening he tied a piece of wire round the roots of the molar, and, using his whole strength on an upward jerk, wrenched it out without batting an eyelid. He explained that once, in the China Sea, he had pulled out four like that in an hour.

  His first action as skipper was to persuade the crew to regard Saturday as a full day’s fishing. Before this, Saturday had always been completely wasted (the morning being occupied in reaching Mallaig so that the crew could be ashore by midday), and he could have chosen no better way to make me regard him as already indispensable. He went further; he proposed to organise the crew to work all night, in two shifts, and I looked on him as the answer to all problems, the superman of whom all worried business owners dream.

  The factory was working to capacity. There were rows of inflated dead sharks tied up or anchored in the harbour, and the factory hands were all working the long hours of overtime which gradually drained each shark of profit. With these catching opportunities we could no longer afford the time to carry salted flesh to Mallaig, and the ice-house was now given its first test as a bulk salting-tank. Into three feet of brine the flesh was tipped through a hatch in the concrete cutting-up stance; load after load went in until there were nearly twelve tons of it, the topmost layer floating at the surface of that dark subterranean lake. Floating: it did cross my mind to wonder whether this was as it should be, but we had followed Gordon Davidson’s instructions so exactly that I dismissed the doubt.

  Scientific work upon the shark’s anatomy had begun at last, and at the factory and with the small resources of the laboratory hut, were working Dr Harrison Matthews, now Scientific Director of the Zoological Society, and Dr Parker of the British Museum. A summary of their work is appended to this book, and the pure scientist may be inclined to regard the book itself as no more than a lengthy explanation of the circumstances that made it possible, a background to discovery in an entirely fresh zoological field.

  Harrison Matthews and Parker toiled endlessly. They were no pure laboratory scientists, these two; they worked with axes, saws, and knives, and neither their work nor their dress would have excited adverse comment on a whale-flensing plan. The sight of them lopping off for dissection the two giant “claspers” of an adult male shark (photograph 60) reminded another guest of mine of a story of a German guide conducting a party of pigtailed Mädchen over a provincial museum. On reaching a statue of Priapus possessing a like superfluity of equipment, and hearing the party calling each other’s attention to this phenomenon in excited whispers, he boomed sonorously: “Mädchen, wenn der eine müde ist, dann fängt er mit dem anderen an.” This, in view of Harrison Matthews’s later discoveries, would appear to be equally true of the sharks.

  Our luck did not hold into the next week; the wind was at hand to defeat us again, and on Friday I wrote in another letter:

  We have had an exasperating week. The big shoal is still far out in mid-Minch; the exasperation began on Tuesday, when we lost in the dark the float-buoys of two sharks whose ropes had become entangled, and which we had left a mile away while shooting another shark. Next morning a full gale was blowing, and we could not even look for the buoys, which were fifteen miles out in the open sea. The gale went on blowing right through Thursday, and it was too rough to let us out of Castlebay harbour until an hour or two before dusk last night, when we killed two sharks off Barra Head. We found the big shoal again at four thirty this morning, but they wouldn’t remain steady at the surface, and we never got a shot. For sheer temper-trying I know nothing quite so powerful as being among a lot of sharks that won’t allow themselves to be shot at.

  We got the two fish off at the factory this afternoon, and are now (evening) on our way back to keep contact with the big shoal, which seems to be moving steadily north, and tends to be at the surface only at night. The great enthusiasm of my new skipper means that we are now virtually never in harbour or at anchor, and steam away the whole twenty-four hours. He seems to let most of the crew get a little sleep, but how he survives himself I don’t know. But despite these tremendous efforts it is now Friday evening, and we have only three sharks for the week. We intend to work until late tomorrow night, and don’t expect to be in Mallaig until the small hours of Sunday morning, so the answering of the week’s mail on Sunday is a nightmare in prospect.

  At Soay I found that the new salting tank, converted from the icehouse, is apparently tainted, and the whole sixteen tons of salted flesh which it contains may have to be scrapped.

  The letter has a postscript:

  I re-open this letter today (Saturday) to add that I got two sharks from the big shoal at midnight last night, with the searchlight, and two more at dawn this morning.

  In retrospect the rest of that season seems to be dominated by a single incident; or, more exactly, by a single fortnight that was full of incident.

  The period was as isolated geographically as temporally, for we were virtually shore-based on an island nearly eighty miles from Soay. During that time we reached the peak of all our shark-catching, and our difficulties in handling the carcases brought into final focus our original error in policy.

  A week of gales followed our last attack on the big shoal, and when it was calm enough to sail again we did not know where to look for them. We crossed from Mallaig to Uishenish, but Davidson had not seen a fin since the weather broke. We kept on up the coast, and reached Eillean Glas Lighthouse, on Scalpay Island, fifty miles to the north, late in the evening. We had decided to lie the night at Scalpay pier, at the back of the island, but had to follow its circumference right round and came in from the north, as the southern channel, East Loch Tarbert, is blocked by a mass of small rock islands and hidden reefs.

  Scalpay was not quite unknown territory to us, for we had brought the Dove here two years before, but so far we had had no reason to regard it as an especial shark-haunt like Uishenish or Moonen. Rather I had thought of it as a place of beauty so great as to distinguish it even among that long chain of which each individual island is a brilliant jewel. I was never there for long enough to know well the community that inhabited it; they must, like other human herds, have had their ugliness, their strifes, and their despairs, but these were not evident to the outside eye. Here was a small pastoral community, every visible phase of whose life had a minute and individual beauty, whose every activity enhanced rather than detracted from the wider beauty of their surroundings. Much that the cynical might dismiss as having primarily the shallow appeal of the “picturesque” is recognisable as something deeper by an eye already long accustomed to these archaic forms of architecture, dress, and speech, so that they in themselves have no intrinsic allure or novelty.

  Wool is the industry of Scalpay’s tiny village—wool for dyeing, weaving, and spinning on the island; no great flock
s here, but single individual sheep on tether, tended with as much individual care as the milch-cows that are tethered in the same way on the short flower-covered turf. Swathes of brilliantly dyed wool hang drying in the sun, and on the hillsides one may see hundreds of yards of bright woven tweed stretched like rainbow pathways. There must have been many colours of dye, but particularly I remember one of a vivid sky-blue, and the warm red-brown crottle that is made from the rock-lichen. The scents are of wool and wool dye, mingling with the smell of the sea and the heather and peat smoke. Here the old women do not drag their spinning-wheels from the house for the attraction of the tourist; they sit there naturally in the sun, with a shy and perhaps suspicious glance for the stranger.