At a mile’s distance I could make out that it was indeed the barrel, but what was beyond it still puzzled me. There were sharks’ fins, several of them, but among them was this object that seemed to move with the others, straight and thin. We were not more than a quarter of a mile away when I recognised it for what it was, a harpoon-stick jutting from the back of a shark that was now feeding in the wake of a second, both fish travelling leisurely eastward. The drag on the floating barrel that the harpooned fish was towing was very slight, and there must have been a great sag of slack rope hanging down in the sea between them.
We argued as to whether we should shoot the more distant shark before recovering the first, but in the end decided to steal a march on the harpooned fish and get most of the rope back before he became aware of our presence and remembered the fact, of which he was now apparently unconscious, that he had more than a foot of heavy steel inside him. We picked up the barrel and kept the boat going slowly ahead while we hauled up the slack rope as fast as we could. We were not more than five yards from him when he felt a slight drag on the rope and began to sound, but by that time we had the rope on the winch and he could not go down. We had him secured alongside the boat in less than twenty minutes, and in another quarter of an hour we had shot the leading shark and were hauling him up too. I remember that a few miles to the east of us we saw the old whaling factory ship Sir James Clarke Ross steaming majestically northwards up the Minch, her fleet of five catchers, red-rusted from stack-top to waterline, looking like day-old ducklings beside their parent. Perhaps they saw the gun in our bows and puzzled over it, for each in turn gave a blast upon her hooter.
We had killed twenty sharks in the first two days of the week, and it seemed that at last we were going to make the killing of which we had dreamed, perhaps fifty fish in the week. The price of the oil had now risen to a hundred and thirty-five pounds per ton, so that if we could land that number we should take nearly two thousand five hundred pounds for the week on the livers alone. The first formal meeting of the board of directors had been called for the following week-end in Mallaig, and I felt that such a catch would ensure the factory ship for which I meant to press.
When I heard the gale warning on the wireless that night I could scarcely believe that we were, after all, to be robbed of our chance. “Iceland, Faeroes, Hebrides, Fastnet, Shannon; strong to gale, south to south-west, visibility good.” It seemed that we were never to have a week of fair weather when the sharks were plentiful, and I felt all the frustration of a child who is denied, capriciously as it appears to him, the desire of his heart.
There was, however, much to do on shore. The beaches were packed again, and once more at slack tide one looked down from the hill-top upon a sea crimson with blood. I had had two of the factory workers sent up from Soay, so we had nine men to work on the carcases. We had finished barrelling and ferrying the livers by Thursday night, and it was plain that it was no use keeping the Moonlight any longer. Until two days ago we had been receiving continuous reports from Davidson of sharks at Uishenish Lighthouse, so we told the Moonlight’s skipper to call there on his way to Soay and put off several hundred empty barrels in Shepherd’s Bight for our future use. (Of these nearly a third had been stolen by passing boats before we reached Uishenish a fortnight later.)
The island steamer, Lochmor, berthed at Scalpay during the time we were clearing the beaches. Her skipper, Captain Robertson, whom Compton Mackenzie described in Keep the Home Guard Turning and Whisky Galore, had long since become an old friend. A short plump man, red-faced and with protuberant blue eyes, he owned a voice whose natural key was pitched so many octaves above the normal masculine that he was universally known as “Squeak.” When Whisky Galore was filmed there was a project to secure Squeak himself to act the part of the skipper who, in the novel, represented him; but the idea was abandoned owing to practical difficulties. He retired in 1948 and died a year later; without his weekly visits the ports of the Hebrides seem poorer.
That bat’s voice decorated the flattest of sentences with a fictitious but intriguing significance, an individuality so intense that it seemed that Squeak never in fact used the words or phrases of his fellow men. The stories of his dry wit are innumerable and often apocryphal; perhaps, too, he had not remained unconscious of his invariable effect. Once he berthed at Lochboisdale, and was shown by Finlay Mackenzie a telegram received from one of the Lochmor’s passengers. The message read Arriving Lochboisdale this evening with the aid of God and the skipper of the Lochmor. Squeak read it with bulging eyes, then laid it aside, saying dreamily in a voice almost beyond the range of the human ear, “God and the skipper of the Lochmor … aye, two good men.”
On this occasion when he came to Scalpay pier, he leaned down from his bridge to see my guest, Walter Hamilton, whose head and shoulders were protruding from the after-hatch of the Sea Leopard. Walter, usually a dignified and staid figure, wore a week’s growth of beard, and was dressed in a black-and-white Faeroese sweater. His beard merged with his hair, which was standing on end, and he presented an entirely unscholastic appearance. When Squeak had made his acquaintance on the mainland he had been engaged upon a translation of Plato’s Symposium, a fact that had made a deep impression upon Squeak’s unclassical mind.
His eyes came out on stalks now, as he peered down, crimson and incredulous, and recognised Walter.
“Whatt are you doing hee-ar?” he shrilled. “You look chust like a py-rate.” Then, following no very apparent train of thought: “You’ll be writing another book, I suppose.”
He went on to tell us that he had seen a shark in comparatively calm water in Scalpay Sound as he came in. We took the Sea Leopard out and shot it; the forty-seventh, and last, fish that we landed from that one shoal.
We had cleared the beaches by Friday, and we sailed for Mallaig in appalling weather, a raging grey sea on which the Sea Leopard lurched and rolled sickeningly, until every unsecured object below decks clattered to and fro in hideous cacophony. Water poured down the galley chimney and put out the stove, so that we could not have so much as a cup of tea during the eight-hour run, and we had used the last of our solid rations the day before. We towed with us that last shark we had shot; the tremendous and ominous thump of his body against the ship’s side became increasingly disquieting, though it was not until after the end of that season that we knew with how much justification.
We went straight to Mallaig, without calling at Soay, and the shark was still lashed alongside the ship when we berthed. In Mallaig itself the sight of a dead shark was still a novelty, and it began to collect a small crowd of tourists and sightseers. The fish was drawn well up, so that some twenty feet of his flank was clear of the water, and onto that elephantine skin people began to throw pennies. The next day I counted a total of four shillings and two-pence halfpenny, and the money was still coming in.
In the London Zoo I have often seen motionless alligators dotted with coins over their entire length, and supposed that the most obvious and available missile had been used to try to break the sphinx-like calm and produce some movement. Since, however, the shark was patently dead, and no missile in the world could stir it to twitch so much as a muscle, I began to wonder whether the alligator coins, too, had in fact some common and unconscious motive of oblation or propitiation. I got into conversation with an elderly lady who was spending her money particularly freely in this way (she had, to my knowledge, contributed a threepenny piece besides four pennies), and asked her if it did not seem rather a waste of money in these hard times.
“Not at all,” she replied briskly. “I don’t waste my money on cigarettes and drinks like some folk, and I’m on holiday, and it’s my own money.”
I pointed out that at dusk I was going to empty the collecting-plate, as it were, and buy myself a packet of cigarettes with the proceeds. She was unimpressed. “Well, each to his own pleasures,” she said, and threw down another halfpenny with a slightly defiant gesture. Later, I tackled on the same subject a gi
ggling Glasgow girl who was throwing her coins down with squeals of delight and anticipation. “Why?” I asked. On a fanfare of giggles she blurted, “Och, I’m sure I dinna ken,” and took to her heels. My curiosity was left unsatisfied.
In Mallaig for the week-end was Niall Rankin, one of the first of the early subscribers to my venture. He had come up from Treshnish in his converted life-boat, the Albatross; he and this tiny white boat having just returned from an expedition to the Antarctic island of South Georgia, to which the Albatross had been carried down on one of the whaling-ships. This expedition, from which he brought back a huge number of King Penguins for British public collections, he has since described in his book Antarctic Isle. He had only recently dispersed his penguins to their destinations, and he described two as it were personal penguins that he had kept aboard his own boat. He spoke of Leopard Seals and Sea Elephants and Antarctic blizzards, and sitting in the Albatross’s sedate little cabin under the July sun in Mallaig it was difficult to believe that these same bulkheads and portholes had been so recent a foreground to the remote world of which he spoke.
Our first board meeting, which was held in Mallaig that weekend, was long, interrupted, and tedious, beginning in the early afternoon and ending at eleven p.m. There was too much to be explained, too much that in the course of years I had come to take for granted as background knowledge, and which was all virgin territory to the rest of the board. “Have you tried …” was a favourite beginning to any question asked me, and I had step by step to go back over that road of experiment and rejection of the past years. I faced the board with a clear conscience, for in the spring I had conservatively estimated a season’s catch of fifty sharks, and by now we had already killed eighty-three. I made a lengthy report upon the season’s work. My two primary requests, for some form of factory ship to accompany the catchers and make them more independent of a shore base, and for a spotter aircraft to keep us in touch with the shoals, were immediately approved in principle, and it was arranged that a Tiger Moth belonging to one of the other directors should be flown up for spotting tests the following week.
We had the worst possible weather for these tests, but I had come by now to expect nothing else. The aircraft was flown to Glenbrittle, a bay on the Skye shore not far from Soay, which before the war had been a regular calling point for the Glasgow-Hebrides air service. The field was tiny, but it was one of the very few places in Skye where an aircraft could land at all. In the war, however, the field had been obstructed by cairns of stones during the invasion scare, and was never restored as a landing-ground. It was under cultivation now, and a narrow strip at the edge of it, used by the farm-carts, was the only space on which an aircraft could touch down. My co-director who brought up the plane was a brilliant pilot; he arrived on schedule despite a strong southerly wind and a bumpy passage over the mainland mountains. The small white Tiger Moth appeared flying low down the glen, the tops of the Cuillins nearly three thousand feet above her; she circled the landing-field once and returned to make a perfect landing on that unbelievably short and narrow strip.
We made a long tour of the Skye coast and the whole of the Outer Hebrides, stopping to refuel at Stornoway and Benbecula. It was bright and sunny with a strong blustering south wind, and the water below us was of a blue so deep as to be almost black, flecked with brilliant white horses, as beautiful and as useless for our purpose as it could be. I occupied the rear cockpit, and had to lean continuously over the side of the open fuselage, for only from a vertical angle could one hope to see anything below that opaque surface. One ear-flap of my helmet was broken; gradually the ear became intensely painful, and I have been slightly deaf in it ever since. What was worse, however, was that the “intercom” between front and rear cockpit was out of order; there was no way of communicating with the pilot other than writing notes and passing them over his shoulder, and it was difficult to prevent them being torn from one’s hand by the wind.
We saw no sharks on the Skye shore, crossed the Minch, and refuelled at Stornoway. We flew on south down the east coast of the island chain in very bumpy weather, and a few miles to the south of Stornoway I saw the first shark, right below me, in some calmer water sheltered by a headland to the south of us. He looked far larger than I had expected, though he was, I think, a fathom or more under water. He seemed to be stationary, looking pale and enormous in the royal-blue water. I leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder, pointing down to where the shark was below and now slightly behind me. I immediately wished I had not done so, for the instanteous result was what seemed to be to be an almost vertical diving turn in which I was so acutely uncomfortable that I lost the position of the shark and took minutes to rediscover it. After that I became rather cautious about attracting the pilot’s attention to any object of which I was not absolutely certain.
We saw only two more sharks before we turned to recross the Minch, but in the evening, flying at a thousand feet north of the Isle of Raasay, we saw five together, heading southward, looking like a fleet of submarines. They were well down below the surface, but even in that rough water they showed plainly, and we considered the results of this first test to be eminently satisfactory. We closed the 1947 season with approved plans to use both a factory ship and a spotter aircraft the following year.
CHAPTER XI
Decline and Fall: 1948–9
Spondet fortuna multa multis, praestat nemini,
vive in dies et horas, nam proprium est nihil.
THROUGH the serious business of the next eight months, through the numerous and sometimes acrimonious disagreements on policy, through the struggles to find some mutually agreeable working basis for the 1948 season, I remember a steady and unvarying background. It could not be called an undertone, for it belonged to the sense of smell rather than hearing. The sixteen tons of shark flesh in the factory pickle-tank had turned rotten. The salt solution in which the flesh had been immersed had, despite the most meticulous adherence to Davidson’s directions, been of insufficient strength.
On the flat concrete surface upon which the sharks’ carcases were cut up was a small wooden hatch. When this was lifted one looked down into some fifteen feet of obscurity to which the eye became but gradually accustomed; the only other method of inlet or egress was a door, temporarily sealed to adjust the structure to its improvised use as a salting tank, on the outer wall a little above sea level.
This hatch was raised to allow me to inspect the contents and appreciate the situation with which we had to deal. For a wave of air so noisome, so active and evil, it is difficult to find comparison; indeed, to anyone who has not smelt (how meagre a word) sixteen tons of rotten fish whose essence has had no previous possibility of a wider and gentler diffusion, it is indescribable. Ammonia, dense, suffocating, and almost visible, knocked me back from that trapdoor as completely as a robot fist; the smell of the Blackwall crypt seven years before was no more than a pale presage of what my illusory Island Valley of Avalon had to offer me now.
When I had stopped choking and spitting I raised the hatch for the second time. Holding my breath, I steeled myself to peer down into the dusk of that nightmare cave. To say that the surface was crawling would be an understatement so gross as to defeat its own object. It was alive, heaving, seething, an obscene sea such as Brueghel might have conceived, alive as the sanctuary of Beelzebub himself, with a million million grubs, twisting, turning, writhing, as though beneath that surface layer of putrescence were the struggling bodies of all the wounded but resurrected dragons that we had attacked and that had escaped us.
Those million million grubs would become a million million flies; my mind’s eye saw the island darkened with them as with a swarm of locusts, Avalon eclipsed by the Prince of Flies whom I had summoned up.
The grubs were as immortal as the evil dreams of which they seemed a part. We sprayed paraffin upon them; they flinched, as it were, but soon the fumes of the spirit had become displaced by those of the ammonia, and the grubs were as living and v
irulent as before. Months later we poured quick-lime through the hatch, but when those acrid vapours had dispersed the charnel pit seemed still to retain its obscene but now amorphous power of movement. Throughout that autumn the question followed me; by wire, by telephone, by letter; it was repeated, as it were a ritual of hypnosis or the slow drip of the Chinese water torture—“How shall we deal with the tank?”
It pursued me, this question, to London, to the board meetings in Glasgow, where it renewed its strength with the sickening urgency of a gastric ulcer; it pursued me in my dreams, and as I travelled to distant ports to inspect vessels for sale. For by now we had much to buy before the beginning of the 1948 season. The Sea Leopard had been found to have extensive dry rot throughout her hull, and was considered unfit to work another season. We had been lucky indeed that she had withstood at sea the tremendous strain of that summer’s work. She lay at Troon, in Ayrshire, and by degrees I removed my possessions from the cabin that had been my home for what now seemed an infinitely long time. Her engines were to be sold separately; and the hull, infected by that deadliest of diseases of wooden ships, was to be sold for firewood. The eye of association lent her dignity as she lay at that squalid wharf, the long scars left by struggling sharks reaching almost to her gunwale, and the echo of “Muldoan” barely stilled from her bridge.
The Sea Leopard was to be replaced by two or more smaller vessels of the ring-net or skiff types, and we were to buy a ship capable of acting as an accompanying factory. It was autumn then, and we had all the vessels to buy and to equip before the coming April.
In the purchase of the boats I left the last word to Harry, feeling, as I had felt in the case of the Dove, that a man with a lifetime’s experience of sea was better qualified than I, and that if the skipper was allowed to buy what he wanted personally, he would not afterwards grumble at the choice.
Harpoon at a Venture Page 22
