Harpoon at a Venture

by Gavin Maxwell

  When travelling, Risso’s Grampus does not show the tail-flukes as he sounds except when he is alarmed (photographs 81 and 82), and we learned that a flourish of the tail, often ending with a possibly accidental but audible slap upon the water’s surface, was always followed by the complete disappearance of the whole school. I did not time their periods below the surface, but I should say that ten minutes to a quarter of an hour was the maximum, after which they would reappear in the far distance.

  Whatever their method of communication, no one who has watched schools of the smaller whales can doubt that it is efficient and instant. Following an alarm such as the report of a gun, a whole school will disappear completely, though some were at the surface and some at the maximum depth of their sounding when the alarm took place.

  The possibility that it is an actual communication by sound has been considered by Dr Fraser,[*] who quotes several instances recorded as varying between “a shrill ringing sound, not unlike that of musical glasses when badly played” to “high-pitched whistles,” both apparently beyond the upper limit of most humans’ hearing. One early author whom he quotes mentions that the sound is more audible when the animal passes directly below a small boat, suggesting that the woodwork acts as a sort of sound-box. Dr Fraser also records having seen an intermittent stream of fine bubbles issuing from the blowholes of Common Dolphins while they were still a fathom or more below water, and it is possible that this is connected with the production of an extremely high-pitched sound.

  When Risso’s are feeding or at play practically no attitude or antic is improbable. The very first one of which I had a clear view was stationary—treading water, as it were, and staring at me with his head vertical and three feet clear of the water. The face looked to me like that of a huge lizard, and, as I was seeing mainly the under side of it, it appeared pure white. I was accustomed, as are the great majority of people, to think of sea creatures as virtual automata, heedless of man except in fear of him, and the impression of sentience, awareness and curiosity that this weird staring head gave me was alarming; a reminder that the whale family have the most highly developed and convoluted brains of all animals but man—far higher than the anthropoid apes; and it may well be that only their environment and virtual dependence upon a single sense prevent them from reaching the degree of civilisation or chaos to which we have attained.

  When playing, Risso’s Grampus breaches like other whales, shooting high out of the water; they make short rushes along the surface; flourish their tails in the air; remain absolutely stationary at the surface for several seconds at a time; seem, in fact, to get their bodies into every possible and impossible attitude. More than once I saw a dorsal fin remain stationary and high out of the water while the tail lashed violently up and down, showing itself just above the surface at each upward movement. This, judging by what is known of other Cetacea, may well have been the act of copulation, but I was never near enough to them at the time to say so with any certainty.

  It was not until the middle of the summer of 1946 that I was able to secure positive identification for these beasts with which we had become so familiar, as the “rare visitor to our shores” Grampus griseus. Berthing at Mallaig pier one Saturday morning, I was told that a small whale was stranded on the sands of Morar estuary below Bourblach, Foxy’s croft. It was still alive when we reached it, helpless, and with its blow-hole choked with sand, each breath drawn and expelled with a long agonising groan through that blocked air-channel. Dan reminded me years later of the wounded innocence of its face and the distress of those awful breaths. My own feeling was of pity amounting almost to revulsion; the sound was unbearable, and it was only after I had killed him with a shot through the brain that I was able to focus my interest on the species.

  We recognised him at once as a half-grown specimen of the animal whose herds we had come to know so well. He was about eight and a half feet long, of a dark buffish colour which looked pearly grey in certain lights. The skin had dried under a June sun, and I wetted it to see whether this would produce an apparent change of colour, but it remained constant. We took photographs (78), from which Dr Fraser later made the positive identification over which I had hesitated so long.

  Both the Killer Whale and Risso’s Grampus are strictly speaking Dolphins, a family that embraces a large number of genera and species. The Common Dolphin (Delphinus delphis), six to eight feet long, is one of the beaked species, having a well-defined duck-like bill about six inches long. This animal we saw rarely—not more than a dozen times in the whole period—and I should say that of these the greater number were in the southern part of the Minch near to Barra Head. We met one very small beaked Dolphin, not more than four feet long, travelling alone and at high speed, near the mouth of Loch Shell. It was raining at the time, and I could not get a very clear view of it; it may have belonged to a less common species.

  The Common Dolphin’s relative, the beakless White-sided Dolphin (Lagenorhynchus acutus) I saw only once to identify certainly, but in very great numbers. We were about a mile off Rodel Bay in the Isle of Harris, heading south at about ten knots, when, looking back over the Sea Leopard’s stern, I saw a disturbance of the sea’s surface over a wide area a mile or more to the north of us. With the field-glasses I could make out a great school of dolphins covering a front of at least half a mile, and travelling at speed on the same course as ourselves. They overhauled us amazingly quickly, and began to pass close along each side of the ship. We were to the shoreward side of the school; there were perhaps two hundred yards of it on our starboard side and six hundred on the port side. They swam with the characteristic dolphin leaps, each leap taking them a few feet clear of the surface for twelve or fifteen feet, the distance under water between leaps being about double that. They were travelling at not less than twenty to twenty-five knots; the estimate is, I think, conservative, as is an estimate of five hundred adults in the school. In the bright sunshine it was a glorious sight; to the human eye the impression of this leaping grace is of happiness and rapture abounding, an abandon to the joy of speed that is half in the sunlight and half in the cool shining sea.

  If they had been animals that I recognised I should have found it impossible to become their enemy; I would rather have had Arion’s cithara in my hands than a harpoon gun. But watching them as they sped along the ship’s sides, I knew that this was an animal I had not seen before, and desire for knowledge overcame my sentimentality.

  As on an earlier occasion, with Risso’s Grampus, the first to pass under the gun platform was a female with a calf, the latter not much more than a yard long, but imitating her movements exactly. The next was the same, and the next; I felt like a murderer loosed into a communal nursery. The fourth dolphin was unattended, and as he leapt through the air a few feet below the gun I squeezed the trigger-grip. I missed him by feet, if not yards. I reloaded with a fresh rope and harpoon and missed another; it seemed like trying to hit driven grouse with a rifle. At the third try I aimed at a point in the air some six feet in front of a dolphin’s nose as he began his forward leap from the water, and the massive harpoon caught him squarely in mid-air, killing him instantaneously. He fell back dead upon the sea, and began to sink in a widening pool of bright blood.

  At this instant, and not before, the whole school—even the most distant, by now far ahead of us—submerged practically simultaneously, and it was five or more minutes before they re-surfaced far to southward. I can find no satisfactory explanation of the fact that they did not submerge after the previous shots. It occurred to me at the time that the school must have passed below Brollem Light-gun as they came south, that they might even have been fishing there, and so become accustomed to the sound of explosions, but this offered no suggestion as to how or why the death of one of their number had caused an alarm that spread immediately to the furthest parts of the school.

  The dolphin we had killed was a male, a little over seven feet long, graceful and streamlined as a swallow, the flared white markings on h
is side looking as though they had been drawn in conscious design to enhance an image of speed and beauty.

  The only other true sea mammals we saw were porpoises, about as often as Risso’s Grampus; but only on a flat calm are they visible at any distance, so in fact they may be the commoner of the two species. It seemed to me that the porpoises were more easily frightened by the vibration of a boat’s engine at close quarters than any of their larger relatives, and from the Sea Leopard or the Gannet we would see no more of them than does the ordinary sea-side holiday-maker—a little, steeply arched black back and tiny triangular dorsal fin as on the circumference of a bicycle wheel held below water and revolved so that its edge just breaks the surface. Among the cetaceans that I saw they share this revolving appearance only with the great whales, whose movement suggests the gentler angle of an elliptical or eccentric wheel, while the porpoise’s is round and neat without much feeling of forward movement. Their backs above the surface look mole-like, nosy, and intent.

  But to be in the middle of a school of porpoises in a rowing-boat in calm weather—to ship oars and avoid all noise or movement, so that they pass and re-pass beneath the boat, coming up to breathe with that gentle sigh right alongside the gunwale—is to receive quite a different impression. Here is no tubby little black pig, but a swift, compact, and boldly marked little whale the size of a man, the whole of the underside white and the upper side black. One sees the dive after blowing to be very steep for the first fathom or so, which explains the apparent smallness of the revolving wheel, and the buoyant return to the surface has almost the élan of a dolphin’s leap. Not even the most enthusiastic passenger on a pleasure-steamer can readily be made to take much interest in those discreet little black backs. “Oh, just porpoises,” they say, for they have not seen them under water, and the word has none of the romantic association of “shark” or “whale” or “dolphin.”

  Those were all the Cetacea that I saw during those summers of shark-fishing in the Hebrides, and anyone familiar with the popular text-books will perhaps be as much astonished by the implied list of omissions as by the unsuspected commonness of Risso’s Grampus.

  Besides the whale family there were the two species of seal—the Great Grey Atlantic Seal, whose nearest breeding-station was at the Treshnish Islands, only forty-five miles to the south of us; and the Common or Brown Seal, which we would see almost every day. While a seal is resting with his head above water, eyes closed, and mouth half open with an expression of infinite ennui and lassitude (photograph 73) at a distance he is practically indistinguishable from the fin-tip of a stationary shark, and often we turned far off our course before recognising it.

  This, then, is a complete list of the sea mammals that I am aware of having seen in the Hebrides, and in considering the possible occurrence of very rare or completely unknown species it must be remembered that the average Hebridean fisherman, though unaware of their scientific names or classification, is very much more familiar with each of the species I have described than I was myself.

  A letter which I have before me, dated 2 March 1951, is an example of the accurate recording of a species completely outside the observer’s experience. The writer is Ronald Murdoch Macdonald, of Meadowbank, Island of Soay. He was born on the island, and has lived there for the greater part of his life, being now in his late thirties. He has always been keenly interested in animal life, and when I heard that he had seen a strange sea-creature in 1950 I sent a message to him asking for details. His reply is an astonishingly perfect description of an extremely rare creature, one that has been recorded in British waters less than a dozen times in the history of natural science, and only once in the last forty-five years.

  His letter reads:

  I have had a letter from my brother this week saying you were interested to know what kind of fish Neil Macrae and I saw one day last year at Rudha Dunain while hauling our lobster creels there in the Emerald.

  In the first place I can’t say what kind of fish it was as I have never seen any of that kind before or since.

  It was pure white in colour from head to tail and would be at least twenty feet long, probably more, and travelling I would say at six knots, following the coast line very closely and swimming about three feet under the surface.

  It came up twice to breathe in one hundred yards’ distance, at least it looked like as if it came to the surface to breathe.

  The only queer thing I noticed about it is that it had no dorsal fin. If it had it wasn’t to be seen. Also where it broke the surface it stopped dead for a second or two before diving again.

  It had a long roundish kind of nose or snout, something similar to the tip of a Basking Shark’s nose when you see it sometimes above the surface when the shark is feeding and plankton floating at the surface. Another thing that struck me as rather odd about this fish, it made no noise like whales or porpoise when it surfaced for breath. At the same time I do think it was a mammal.

  I can’t explain the exact shape of the fish as we were about seventy yards away from it. It seemed to be slender for its length. I wanted to go after it to get a better view of it, but we were in the middle of a fleet of lobster creels, and could not go in time unless we cut the creels.

  You could easily see it a mile away underneath the surface as it was as white as driven snow.

  Maybe you can offer an explanation as to what kind of fish or mammal it was. If so, I would like very much to know, so if you have a spare moment maybe you would drop me a note.

  Beyond all reasonable doubt Ronald saw a creature of which he had never even heard, the White Whale or Beluga (Delphinapterus leucas). This is an inhabitant of the polar seas, mainly Siberia and Arctic America now, for towards the end of the last century it had already been driven from the Spitzbergen bays, where the females would come to calve when the ice broke up in mid-summer. Here it was hunted by the early English whalers of the seventeenth century, and in 1670 there is a record of a Greenland ship arriving in England with twenty-four tons of oil from “white fish.” During the nineteenth century it was fished regularly in Spitzbergen by the same method as the Faeroe Islanders kill the Pilot Whale—fleets of small boats driving the schools either into nets or aground in shallow water—and the Russian trappers who came to the island used also to be equipped with these nets in case a school of White Whales should visit the bays during their stay. By the turn of the century it had become scarce in Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla, and it never reappeared in these waters from which it had been driven by ruthless and excessive hunting. The last comparatively heavy killing in the European Arctic of which there is any record seems to have been in 1901, when half a dozen whaling-ships sailing from the east coast of Scotland for Arctic waters killed seven hundred and thirty-eight White Whales in the season. (It was part of a mixed bag, for from 1890 till 1898 an average of eleven vessels fishing every year had killed a total of only a hundred and forty great whales, and they were by now ready to turn any living thing to profit. Besides the seven hundred and thirty-eight White Whales, these six steamers killed in that year four hundred and twenty walrus, three thousand four hundred and thirty seals, and a hundred and forty-nine polar bears.[*])

  The slaughter of the White Whales by this wholesale murder of pregnant females might well have resulted in their extermination, had they not had the safer waters of the West Siberian Arctic as sanctuary. In Arctic America they are still killed in large numbers. Millais[†] quotes a terrible description of something like a thousand White Whales crammed into a small space of open water in pack-ice, being fired on continuously by Eskimos so that at last there was hardly an unwounded animal among them, and many had been wounded several times.

  Before Ronald wrote his description in March 1951, there were only eleven records of the White Whale in British waters since 1793, and four of these were hearsay evidence of single specimens being sighted in 1832, 1878, 1880, and 1903. There were six isolated strandings between 1793 and 1905, after which the last British record of any kind is
of a calf stranded at Stirling on October 13, 1932; but there is a record from even further south, in France in 1950, when a White Whale was captured on the Loire coast, 47° N.[‡]

  That there may be discrepancies in descriptions by two people who have in all probability seen the same creature or type of creature is evidenced by the following two statements. I know both these people well; the first is from Bruce Watt, who was for a long time skipper of the Sea Leopard, and the second from John McInerney, who was for a time our ship’s cook, and is at the time of writing shark-fishing with Tex.

  Bruce and Dan MacGillivray share a boat business in Mallaig now, doing both fixed runs with mail and provisions for the islands and carrying large parties of tourists in the summer months. It was on such a trip last year that they saw a fish quite outside their long and wide experience at sea.

  Bruce describes the incident as follows:

  It was in August last year [1950]—I’m not certain of the exact date. We had a party of twenty-four passengers—trippers—aboard the Islander and we were in the mouth of Loch Hourn, on the south side near Crolag. I saw what appeared to be a shark’s fin ahead of us—an ordinary shark of perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four feet, I should have said at first. The tourists are interested in that sort of thing, and I thought we would give them a look at it. As we began to approach it, it struck me that somehow it wasn’t quite like a shark’s fin; it looked kind of quick in movement, although it was the right size and colour. It seemed to be waving from side to side as if it was very flimsy. We approached it from astern; it was going round and round in small circles, and when we came up to it it happened to meet us head on, and started to submerge. It seemed just to sink, without tipping to dive. We were passing it on an opposite course just as it went down, and I expected to see fifteen feet or more behind the fin. Instead of that there was only five or six feet behind it, and in front of the fin it seemed to end off short in a sort of egg-shaped nose, in which I thought I could see a large eye. The tail must have been very small—so much so that at first I thought it was a horizontal tail, and it certainly was not a powerful-swimming fish like a shark. I’d say its depth was at least half its total length—a very squat kind of fish. It looked very dark, darker than a shark, and the whole fish wasn’t more than about eight feet or so.