Harry and I were separated, pursuing different rumours of advertised boats, when he telephoned to me to say that a ship of the coaster type had come on to the market and that he considered her ideal for conversion to a factory ship. He had known this vessel, the Silver Darling, for some years, while she had been in use as a herring-carrier; she was modern and sound throughout, and he considered her cheap at the asking price of twelve thousand pounds. Another buyer was after the boat, and we could only secure forty-eight hours’ option upon her. Harry was utterly convinced that we should buy immediately.
This placed me in a dilemma; the directors were widely separated, and no meeting could be called to discuss the question in the time available. Besides myself, Harry alone was familiar with all our problems, and of the two of us he had infinitely the better qualification for judging the ship’s usefulness to us. I could do no more than forward to the Secretaries the urgency of his recommendation. After a great deal of feverish long-distance telephoning and enquiry by the parent company they were independently advised that she was a good investment, and decided to buy her, sending me an unequivocal letter to the effect that this vessel was not in the meantime to be regarded as the property of Island of Soay Shark Fisheries Ltd either in principle or in fact; that it would remain the property of the parent company, to be resold or chartered to the subsidiary Soay Company as they considered advisable.
The Silver Darling joined the Sea Leopard in Troon Harbour on December 12, and soon afterwards a naval architect, together with technical representatives of the parent company, arrived to advise on her conversion. This conversion was to be extensive, to enable us to draw the fish up over a stern-ramp and perform a complete dissection on board. Centrifugal oil-extracting machinery had already been ordered by Gordon Davidson, and it was only now that he realised that these machines could only operate on a true horizontal base, and were therefore useless at sea.
A meeting was held to discuss the naval architect’s report; the parent company decided that the conversion would too greatly diminish the capital value of the ship, and resolved to sell her again forthwith. Unfortunately they were not prepared to buy any other factory ship until the Silver Darling was sold. The surveyors whom they had personally appointed before her purchase had advised that she should resell at a profit, and she was put on the market at fifteen thousand pounds. We were not back where we started; we had actually lost ground, for we now had no authority to buy a factory ship at all, and I could not see how the small catching vessels for which we were still searching could ever show a profit alone, even at the enormous price of one hundred and thirty pounds per ton that we were now offered for the oil. The whole venture was already tottering; I seemed to detect that strange agitation that moves among the high leaves of a great tree as the saw bites into the heart of the trunk.
Meeting after meeting was held, view after view put forward, but it seemed that no agreement upon our future policy could be reached. A small portion of the correspondence of those winter months occupies the whole floor-space of a large room as I write now, and reading those letters again I feel all the frustration and the despair that I knew then. The weeks crept on, and but for the last season’s shooting gear we had no shark-fishing equipment at all. The Gannet was the only boat we had left.
So many detailed proposals for the working of the 1948 season had now been put forward, clothed in so many different words, that it was becoming difficult to tell at a glance where one scheme overlapped or differed from the others.
Harry’s proposal was to use catchers only, beaching the sharks, extracting their livers, and carrying them back to Soay, as we had done at Scalpay the previous year. I could not agree; in the light of the last season’s experience I felt that the boats could not satisfactorily undertake so many branches of the work, nor the crew stand up to such long hours throughout a season. I remembered the days wasted in clearing the beaches of the great disembowelled carcases; remembered the number of barrels that had been necessary to contain the livers of that one catch, and the enormous distances over which a huge cargo might have to be carried in small boats—boats that must stop catching sharks in order to do that carrying. The scheme seemed to me a refusal to acknowledge our own experience. It could only be carried out with the addition to our fleet of a boat capable of extracting the liver oil on the spot. I wrote, “Only in this way can I see the possibility of working at a great distance from Soay without a complete floating factory, and I must stress that I consider it absolutely essential that in any scheme the catchers must be responsible for catching only.”
At this stage I cleared my mind finally of a long-standing misconception. I recognised at last that the by-products of the shark could have no significance for us for many years; that the liver was the elephant’s ivory, and that we should concentrate upon this alone. I failed completely, however, to convince my co-directors of the wisdom of this, which, at best, they regarded as a temporary or emergency policy.
I felt, too, that we were being cheated of all the advantages that our recapitalisation should have given us. Where were the opportunities for experiment that should increase our efficiency? During the 1946 and 1947 seasons there had been no time for experiment other than that which was incidental to securing sharks by any available means whatsoever; we had not dared, by experimenting with one fish, to risk losing the opportunity of killing another. With my private certainty that until a very much later stage of development had been reached the liver was all that was worth handling, it was clear to me that if we could find some means of extracting the liver at sea, without beaching the fish, most of our problems would be solved.
With this major point in mind, I put forward to the Company the only proposal that I thought would be acceptable. We were well into the New Year now, and I saw no possible chance of our being ready to catch sharks on a profitable scale before the beginning of May. I wrote:
My considered proposal is that two catchers should be bought in the immediate future, and that they and the Gannet should engage in lobster fishing from, say, March until the end of the year…. It should be well possible for the crew to catch a few sharks with a particular view to finding some method of extracting their livers while the fish is still in the water. This point is, to my mind, the crux of the whole matter. The liver is the pearl in the oyster, and, while every other part of the fish may be of some value, I think that a profit can be made upon the livers with far less capital outlay. To remove the liver, it is at present necessary to take the fish on board or beach him on the tide, and it is this one fact that is responsible for the large outlay estimated for the conversion of the Silver Darling…. The catchers will be already in hand for the 1949 season, and the question of a factory ship can be discussed in detail with very much more leisure and time than has been available in the case of the Silver Darling.
This proposal was finally chosen from the welter of schemes that now littered the board-room table, though it was made clear that the board did not consider any policy that aimed at dealing with the livers only to be of any lasting significance; the possible byproducts were what fascinated them.
Harry was entrusted with buying two small boats suitable for the new scheme. At the same time I began inspecting a number of Tank Landing Craft Mark IV, which the board had at last approved as a floating factory for the 1949 season. My inspection, carried out with a naval architect and a representative of the parent company, was encouraging; we each rendered independent reports to the board, and by March a firm of ship-brokers had been authorised to buy the first sound example that was offered at four thousand five hundred pounds or less. Although 1948 was to be a non-shark-fishing year, it seemed that the Company still had a future.
Harry bought two catchers in Tarbert, Loch Fyne, in the first week of March. By the time I arrived there in response to his telegram he had already taken both boats to sea and had beached one for an inspection of her bottom. He also had a surveyor’s report, couched in characteristically non-committal la
nguage. The board authorised the buying of both boats immediately.
The two had names suggesting, perhaps, a slight element of comedy, but certainly not of disaster. The larger was called Nancy Glen; the smaller Maggie McDougall. They were overhauled in Ardrishaig, and arrived in Mallaig on May 2.
At this stage the Maggie McDougall developed serious engine trouble. No one in Mallaig could be found to do the work, and the crews of both boats were kept in Mallaig to carry it out themselves.
The boats sailed on May 24, only the Nancy Glen mounting a gun, and for a month I was unable to contact them by any means; they might, for all I could tell, be at the bottom of the sea. I took to spending every week-end in Mallaig on the chance of their putting in, but they called neither there nor at Soay, where we had retained a skeleton factory staff.
During that month the determination was growing in me to tender my resignation as managing director. In the course of informal conversation it had become plain to me that we should never obtain unanimity on future policy, and that the use of a floating factory was far from assured; moreover, the board tended to repose increasing trust in certain employees whom I was convinced were unreliable. I had a suspicion, later confirmed, that one of the directors was in private negotiation with our competitors. I had no employee to whom I could turn for the smallest executive work. If so much as a new boiler-glass or a ton of coal was required for the factory I had to make the purchase and organise its transport myself; if a crofter in the Outer Islands wrote for a barrel of shark flesh for lobster-bait there was no one else to answer him or deal with his order. My mind was never free to deal with the major problems that faced us.
I remained long enough to prepare a report upon the season’s work, which was so deeply shrouded in mystery that I was glad to think that it was the last time I should have to try to account for the work of the boats when I was not with them. The month had yielded twelve sharks, whose liver oil was badly discoloured and of inferior quality owing to long keeping, and, apparently, only about two dozen lobsters. The remainder of the season was as farcical and mysterious in production, but entirely successful from the point of view from which I had originally urged it. The crew had discovered a way of removing sharks’ livers at sea.
My last action as managing director was an urgent warning to my successor against relying too far upon certain of his employees. My resignation was finally accepted on July 12, and for me the adventure that had begun four years before was over.
I was succeeded by a young man from the Secretaries’ office, though his responsibilities were more limited. He began with the greatest optimism and a flood of letters asking my advice upon a thousand questions whose answering looked like filling my time as completely as had the managing directorship itself.
His first official communication was in the autumn, a document headed “Reasons for expecting a profit in 1949”; and, indeed, had his faith in his subordinates been justified, there seemed every reason to expect a profit, and a large one.
The 1948 season had closed early, and there had been an unwonted leisure for the modification of minor equipment. The muzzle-loading whaling guns had had Martini actions fitted to their breeches, the powder charge now being set off by a sizeable blank cartridge in place of the unreliable caps and antiquated hammer; and to the armoury had been added a modern Norwegian whaling gun. The harpoons that had been ordered for the previous season, and had not been delivered until July, were now available in bulk for the next year, and there seemed ample time for overhauling the boats. Only the human factor remained unchanged, and for this reason I could not share the new atmosphere of optimism that prevailed. To my mind, too, there was still an evident and unhealthy insistence upon the exploration of by-products, which by this time I was convinced belonged to a much later stage of development.
So strongly did I feel that sense of impending disaster that in November I wrote a personal letter to the chairman, expressing in confidence my lack of trust in certain of the Company’s employees, and giving in support some irrefutable instances which had recently come to my knowledge. I never knew whether that letter was received, for it was never acknowledged.
I believed the new manager’s optimism to be utterly unjustified; I knew in my heart that the saw was near to the centre of the tree-trunk, and a lengthy memorandum from the Secretaries’ office, of which item No. 6 read: “Boots. Liver oil gives rubber boots a short life. Is the Company to pay for the boots of —— and —— (two employees), who will hold them as Company property: the Secretaries request instructions,” seemed to me to be the brushing of a caterpillar from a leaf at the last instant before the fall of the tree.
Proposals for fresh experiment during the 1949 season included many that I had explored exhaustively during the very earliest days of shark-fishing, and I was by now becoming too weary, and necessarily too occupied with trying to earn my own living, to do more than reply that these methods had received the fullest consideration before their rejection years before.
The story of those last months, the story that led to that final despairing letter written by my successor from the Soay factory on May 17, 1949, is a little difficult to unravel, nor do I know whom Harry had with him as crew. Tex had left the Company’s service when I resigned, and was, in partnership with an Englishman, fishing for sharks as a free-lance.
The Maggie McDougall had at the last moment been reported unseaworthy, and Harry had sailed with the Nancy Glen and the Gannet. During the first days of May Tex met him in Moonen Bay with five floating barrels about him in a narrow radius, and a sixth shark being hauled up. A few days later the sharks were in quantity at the Isle of Canna, and again Tex, now in open competition, met Harry on the fishing-grounds. The Nancy Glen was faster than the boat on which Tex was harpoon gunner, and Harry had things all his own way. Between the fishing at Moonen and at Canna he must have killed a great number of sharks before the disaster of a few days later. Harry, that strange, contradictory, unclassifiable character, had the first of three shipwrecks in as many months, and in three different ships.
He must have thinned the shoal at Canna, and crossed the Minch to Uishenish. Just inside Loch Skipport is a famous anchorage locally known as “The Kettle,” the only anchorage from there to Lochboisdale. Here Harry went to anchor for the night. It seems that the crew were inexperienced seamen (said to be students), and that may in part explain what followed.
The ship needed fresh water, and it was hard to see where to get it. They decided to slack the anchor till the boat ran ashore, but apparently no one noticed that they were on an ebb tide. The hull grounded upon a rock, and as the tide left her dry she overbalanced and smashed down, breaking her keel far aft. When the tide returned the hull filled with water, and remained full for several tides, so that the crew had to abandon her. They lived ashore, in a nearby croft. After some time they obtained enough cement to fill the lower part of her scuppers, and eventually got her floated. A Mallaig boat, the Primrose, towed her back across the Minch, and everyone concerned seemed to agree that Harry had done a magnificent job in preventing a total loss. Long before, the Nancy Glen had been called the Nil Desperandum, and now she lived up to her name. But the Company was now without a single catching vessel except the tiny Gannet, which could not work alone.
I was ill in London at the time, and my first certainty that the tree was indeed falling was a letter from the new manager, written when the wreck of the Nancy Glen had been towed home, telling me that with the chairman’s authority he was beginning the sale of the Company’s assets immediately.
It is indeed sad to look on the scene of so much hope and possibility, which will so shortly be left to the gulls and the rain. I still believe that there is money in sharks, but this can now never be more than an opinion.
The wreck of the main catcher had not been the only problem. The sharks had been coming into the factory far too fast for the small oil-extraction plant to cope with the livers as they arrived in bulk. A factory boat to accompan
y the catchers had been an absolute necessity, but of what use now were the vindications of the views I had expressed so long and so urgently?
The guns and the apparatus for extracting the liver at sea had worked perfectly; the manager added that our finish was all the sadder because the catchers could now haul up any shark in ten minutes and have the liver out in another ten. Only I, he said, could really appreciate what that meant, and in that he was right. The parent company could not.
Though our problems were now all virtually solved, though we knew at last how to land, quickly and efficiently, a huge tonnage of liver containing a valuable oil, nothing could persuade the parent company to sink any further capital in a venture which was, by comparison with their larger interests, both small and very tiresome. Like many before us, we were wrecked on the sheltering rock of our own harbour.
The sale of the assets began. A year later, in Mallaig, I was told:
“It would have broken your heart, Major. It was a free-for-all; what wasn’t just about given away was taken, and who could blame the takers? Some of the stuff just lay there until it was finally disclaimed and was public property—half the garden fences in Mallaig are held up by your harpoon sticks.”
The tree was down at last, and what the foresters left was gleaned by the passers-by.
The venture was over; in a sense we had failed, in a sense we had succeeded. I hope, anyway, that we paved the way for someone with capital to follow us, and that all our experience was not entirely wasted. I did not blame the parent Company for turning back when we were in sight at last of the promised land. Only one thing galled me; their first official reason for giving up—that no suitable replacement could be found after my resignation as managing director. I pressed this question before the Company finally went into liquidation, and was unable to satisfy myself that any steps at all had been taken to find a replacement.
Harpoon at a Venture Page 23
