Harpoon at a Venture

by Gavin Maxwell

  Tex bought such quantity of the gear and guns as his slender capital allowed, though much was dispersed in less satisfactory ways before he had time to raise the money. He is now a free-lance shark fisherman, with all the experience of our venture behind him, and he is doing well in a small way. If I again have capital to invest it is to his business that I shall turn as the foundation-stone of a new concern. My faith in the future of the idea I conceived in 1944 is unshaken.

  Harry survived several disasters to become one of the several small free-lance shark fishermen whose shoots grew seedily from the stump of my felled tree.

  Of Harry I thought, as Prince Hal of Falstaff, “I could well have spared a better man.”

  As people who own dangerous dogs are apt to say “He’s all right with me,” I inclined always to trust my employees too far and to neglect danger signs, and when I think of them now it is their virtues rather than their defects that I remember, and the many experiences that we shared as companions.

  So, too, when I think of Soay, it is not the stench of the rotting shark-flesh nor the myriad clamouring problems of the factory that come to my mind; nor the civil wars and demands, about which a separate book could be written, of its tiny population; nor the days of unhappiness, loneliness and frustration that those who cut themselves off from their kind must endure. I remember it on those glorious summer days when a smooth blue sea lapped the red rock of the island shore and the cuckoos called continuously from the birch-woods; or on bright winter mornings when the Cuillins were snow-covered, hard, intricate and brittle as carved ivory; I remember it with nostalgia for something beautiful and lost, the Island Valley of Avalon to which there can be no true return, no second spring.

  When the taste of failure has been bitter on the tongue, I have remembered the lessons of Lewis and of Leverburgh, where all the capital and acumen of Leverhulme’s mighty organisation left scarcely more evidence of endeavour than is borne by my pathetic little ruined factory on Soay today. Only a few of the thousands of Hebridean islands can ever hope for development, and then only by the State and public funds. The many such as Soay will remain untouched, with a dwindling population, until at last they are empty and deserted.

  All that remained of Lever’s plans

  Were some half-built piers and some empty cans,

  And the islanders with no regrets

  Treated each other to cigarettes …

  But far below in the Western Seas

  The moors were quiet in the Hebrides,

  The crofters gossiped in Gaelic speech

  And the waves crept over the lonely beach.

  APPENDIX I

  Here be Dragons

  I SHOULD preface this appendix by saying at once that during the few years I was at sea I saw no living object that I was not able, perhaps after a moment’s doubt, to identify as belonging to a known species, sometimes in an unfamiliar aspect. Although my own experience—and that of my crew—was separated from that of the great bulk of inshore seamen by the fact that as a matter of routine we examined carefully every object appearing at the sea’s surface, that we saw nothing inexplicable is quite inconclusive. I have met men of very much longer qualification than myself who have seen phenomena outside their very considerable experience, and it is with the greatest hesitation, and only after the minutest examination, that such records should be dismissed as beyond the boundaries of practical science.

  I do not want to trespass upon Commander Gould’s preserves; the existence or non-existence of the sea-serpent was his preoccupation for many years. If one or more very large marine species does remain unknown to science, it is quite certain that its appearances, like those of the much-exploited Loch Ness monster, are rare, and the fact that we saw nothing during four summers is negative evidence. But this book would be incomplete without some reference to “monsters,” if only because our unusual familiarity with Basking Sharks and the other large marine creatures enabled us to recognise them as such when they might have been mistaken, by less experienced observers, for unfamiliar species.

  The belief, factual and unsuperstitious, in the existence of at least one giant sea species at present unrecognised by science is widespread in the Hebrides, and is as strong among some of the educated people as it was among their less-informed ancestors.

  To appreciate the basis for this belief, one must understand just how familiar an islander, constantly either in sight of the sea or actually on it, becomes with all its apparent life. His names for the creatures he sees, whether bird, fish, whale, or seal, would be unintelligible to modern taxonomy, but they are constant names, the result of repeated identification, and when he sees for the first time some species unknown to him, he is generally able to give an accurate enough description of it, often resulting in its identification beyond reasonable doubt as a rare visitor to the seas he knows.

  As very few people who spend much time at sea in the Hebrides have any particular interest in accurate identification, it is perhaps not surprising that I should find the commonest of all creatures other than the Basking Shark described in a well-known and reputable text-book as a rare visitor to British waters. Because of these popular misconceptions I shall describe the species with which I became familiar before producing any secondhand evidence of creatures unknown to science.

  The Cetacea—the whale order—includes everything from the giant Blue Whale to the Common Porpoise. Of these I identified seven species positively: Blue Whale, Common Rorqual, Killer Whale, Risso’s Grampus, White-sided Dolphin, Common Dolphin, and Common Porpoise.

  The first two are the great whales, the whalebone whales, of the family Balœnoptera. I may have seen the Humpbacked Whale also, but would be positive only of the Blue Whale and the Common Rorqual or Finback. One of the methods of identifying the large whales at a distance is by the shape and height of the “spout,” but this aid was denied me, for the air was never cold enough to produce condensation. The “spout” is merely the contents of the lungs, violently exhaled after the breath has been held for a long time, and in the majority of seas where whales are hunted the atmosphere is cold enough for this to appear as a column of white steam whose shape and height vary with the species of whale. But cold as it often seemed during those Hebridean summers, I myself never saw more than the faintest mist of condensation above a blowing whale.

  The other methods of identification are by size, colour, and the behaviour of the visible part of the body at the surface. The Rorqual, for example, rarely shows his tail-flukes above water as he sounds, whereas the Blue Whale characteristically lifts his tail clear of the sea in the final movement.

  I saw only one Blue Whale (Balœnoptera musculus) of which I could be certain; the size and colour, together with this characteristic action, left no room for doubt.

  The Common Rorqual (Balœnoptera physalus) we saw much more often, and usually at close quarters. I would say that a week rarely passed without our seeing one or more, usually singly, but the very fact that the “spout,” which is what reveals a whale at a distance, was always absent, makes it probable that the numbers were very much greater than that.

  These two species of whale were very much the largest creatures, the Blue Whale commonly exceeding eighty feet and the Rorqual little less. They are, in fact, the largest living creatures in the world, and Millais mentions that even the largest of prehistoric animals could not rival their size.

  The Killer Whale (Orca gladiator) I have mentioned on pages 62 to 63. In each of the three summers I was at sea we used to meet small packs of killers perhaps a dozen times in the season, and to me they are the most impressive animals of the sea. As a rule there were between five and ten whales in each pack, and never more than one adult bull with that nightmare sword-like fin. I saw parties, too, that were apparently all females and young males. On July 18, 1946 we were cruising about a mile off Uishenish Lighthouse looking for sharks in the Sea Leopard. A party of four killers appeared close inshore about a mile to the south of us. They did not ap
pear to be “travelling”; they were somewhat scattered and moving very slowly, each individual often changing direction. I am not sure of the exact composition of the party, but I remember that there were two immature males, in which the dorsal fin, though little higher than that of an adult female, was already beginning to lose its re-curvature. They were still a little to southward when one of the crew called my attention to a dark object at the water’s surface some two miles north of us. It disappeared at the same instant as it caught my eye, but soon after I had raised the field-glasses it reappeared, and I saw that it was the dorsal fin of a very large bull killer, travelling towards us at a fair speed, probably about ten to fifteen knots. The fin appeared to be eight or nine feet high (the crew support this apparent over-estimate), and the whale was alone and holding a straight course in the general direction of the herd that was moving north. It was clear that they would meet at a point roughly between the Sea Leopard and the shore. There were three of us on the bridge at the time—Bruce, Dan, and myself—and we watched with interest to see whether either the bull or the north-going party would reverse course and move off in one direction as a herd. The distance between them decreased rapidly. The foremost of the young ones was zigzagging in an aimless sort of way, and on his last blow he was actually facing a little south of west, when simultaneously the giant fin of the old bull began to rise thirty yards to the north of him. It came towering up out of the water to its full height, the bull “blew” with a deep, harsh exhalation that sounded very loud from where we stood a hundred yards away, and the fin began to go down again on a forward roll as the whale sounded. At this instant it appeared that the young one became conscious of his presence for the first time. I say “appeared” because it is very easy to draw false or teleological conclusions; one should only record observed fact. The young whale had just “blown”; now, instead of sounding, his fin remained for a second stationary before he shot off in a rush whose speed was bewildering. The fin showed above the surface the whole way, and left a white wake of foaming water behind it for perhaps a hundred and fifty yards before the whale sounded. Both the speed and the acceleration with which it was reached were beyond anything I had ever seen in the water. The old bull paid no attention; he held his course, passed through the scattered herd and went on down the coast, the great fin thrusting up from the water at regular intervals of about a hundred yards.

  We began to speculate about the speed the young whale had attained during that ferocious surface rush. I hazarded twenty knots, but Dan shook his head.

  “It would be far more than that, Major.”

  Bruce was able to provide exact comparison.

  “Well,” he said, “you know I was at a torpedo-testing station for quite a while during the war. I’ve seen hundreds of torpedoes travelling at thirty knots and more, and I’d say yon whale would beat them every time.”

  I did not feel sceptical, but I felt that we should not be believed if we repeated this story with a speed of more than thirty knots attached to it. Later I consulted Dr Fraser of the British Museum, a leading authority on Cetacea, and did not find him unbelieving. He produced instead an authentic Admiralty record, in which a killer, travelling near to the surface and on a parallel course, cleared the ship’s length in twelve seconds, giving a calculated speed of twenty-two knots, at a time when there was no overt reason to exert himself.

  The killers’ prey, the very fast seals and dolphins (attaining speeds of more than twenty knots), to say nothing of the larger whales, make it necessary for the killer himself to be capable of a tremendous maximum. Just as we find that the fastest of the gazelles and antelopes, attaining approximately sixty miles an hour, cannot in a short dash escape the cheetah or hunting leopard which reaches a speed of sixty-five miles an hour or more, it is a fair assumption that the killer is faster than any of his prey. The dynamics of these very high speeds in relation to the size of the animal are discussed by Professor Hill in a paper which appeared in Science & Progress, April 1950,[*] but it is a little erudite for the average reader.

  I do not know if one can safely draw any inference from the fact that we never saw sharks when killers were in the immediate neighbourhood. Only a few whales ever go very deep under water—probably not more than fifteen fathoms under normal conditions—and it is a tempting conclusion that the sharks take refuge in deeper water. We have no proof that killers attack adult Basking Sharks, but habitual attacks on the most voracious of tropical sharks are recorded by Millais,[*] and it is a justifiable assumption that young Basking Sharks of from six to fifteen feet are eaten by killers. In these small sharks the skin is comparatively smooth and soft; the mass of tiny spines which makes the skin of the adult so painful to handle has not yet developed, and the only probable deterrent to attack by killers is wanting. In temperate waters the Basking Shark, assumed to be six feet long at birth, could have no other natural enemy. This would tend to produce a numerical unbalance of species, more especially as the shark’s own food consists of a proportion of larval forms that are eaten before they can attain their final form and reproduce.

  The gigantic and deeply indented healed scars that we found on a few adult sharks may have been due to fouling ships’ propellers, which could, according to the position of the fish, leave a wound of almost any shape or length; and the shark’s power of recovery from the most terrible wounds is suggested by the comparatively small number of fish from which our harpoons had pulled out, that were afterwards washed ashore.

  So far I have listed these various sea animals, which we came to know and recognise instantly, in the order of their size. The next, which the only text-books available to me at the time described as a rarity, was, apart from the sharks, the commonest of all creatures that we saw. This puzzled me for a long time, and made me hesitate to give a positive identification. It is yet another example of how few naturalists are at sea in one area for long enough to form a clear conception of the relative numbers of the species in it.

  “A rare visitor to our shores” is a typical text-book description of Risso’s Grampus (Grampus griseus), nor can I find a single reference to the names by which it is well known to every fisherman—“dunter,” “lowper,” and “false killer.” The last name is a confusion with quite a different species, Pseudorca crassidens, but the superficial resemblance between the appearance when “blowing” of a cow killer and an adult Risso’s is very clearly illustrated in photographs 76 and 77. These photographs were taken by Picture Post’s photographer, Raymond Kleboe, during a week’s stay on the Sea Leopard.

  It was on one of the Dove’s early trips that I first saw Risso’s Grampus, and I do not think I am exaggerating if I say that during the three seasons I was at sea there were very few weeks in which we did not see several schools of them. The schools would range from about a dozen to forty individuals, the average school being about twenty-five, and were always composed of adults and young, the latter swimming close alongside their parent.

  As this has not up till now been regarded as a very common species, I record here all my own observations, even if they contradict recognised authority.

  The length of the adults seemed to me to be between ten and fourteen feet; there appeared some variation in size even among parents who were accompanied by young, and the smallest calf was not less than four or five feet. The colour is extremely variable, the back and dorsal fin ranging from pale buff to a dark ochre-brown, the dark form being the commoner, and there were odd individuals that appeared greyish. One of a large school that was playing round the Dove off the east shore of the Isle of Harris came up right under where I was standing in her bows. He seemed to come up almost vertically from a considerable depth, and was so pale all over that the effect was almost of albinism. The under-side of all the Risso’s I saw was white or almost white, and this seems to extend for a variable distance up the flanks and onto the head, but I saw none with a plain demarcation line between the two colours.

  When travelling, they hold a speed of ten or
twelve knots, and “blow” about every thirty yards. The sound of the “blow” is not as harsh or prolonged as that of a killer, but it is audible at a considerable distance—up to perhaps a quarter of a mile in still weather.

  Sometimes we would find a bay full of them; scattered, and each one going in a different direction, swimming more slowly, at seven knots or less. These were probably in the middle of a shoal of fish, and feeding, and it was easier then to approach them closely. When they were travelling they seemed very conscious of the vibration of the boat’s engines, and kept an average distance of forty yards to port or to starboard when blowing, though we could see them under water at closer quarters. With the engines stopped among a feeding school they would blow right alongside, but the blow would seem to be cut short by a scared forward plunge as they saw our movements on deck.

  During the time that I was trying to identify them with certainty I tried persistently to shoot one with the harpoon gun, but the only satisfactory chances I had were from the Dove, whose gun was not able to hit even a practically stationary shark. Once from the Sea Leopard we followed a travelling school for some miles; they did not appear frightened or alter the timing of their “blows,” but only one came within range of the gun. I saw it coming up from several fathoms down, a pallid moving blur in the dark water, and I took a firm stance and began to align the gun. But as the grampus shot up to the surface just below me I saw, even as my finger was tightening on the trigger-grip, that close alongside her and duplicating her every movement was a tubby young calf not more than half her length. He blew at the exact moment his mother blew; he appeared to be a serious-minded baby, anxious to get everything just right. He looked what the Americans call “cute” and I could not bring myself to kill the parent and leave him searching the empty sea for her. This piece of absurdly unscientific sentimentality might have resulted in failure to identify the species at all, had it not been for Kleboe’s photographs and the lucky accident of finding a halfgrown calf stranded on the sands of Morar estuary.