Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  At the end of our allotted week Gavin asked me to stay on for another week and I only left when a friend of his, a rather handsome youth to whom he seemed completely devoted, joined the boat. For me the entire shark-boat episode had been an amazing period of almost undiluted derring-do – and an illuminating experience that influenced me enormously. It showed me what other worlds there were out there, and taught me that one has to make a decision between merely earning a living and experiencing the things life has to offer.

  Early in August 1946 Gavin attended an Army Medical Board in Inverness. He did not rejoin the shark boats when he returned, but concentrated his attention on the venture’s embattled finances. He was still confident that basking-shark fishing was commercially viable, but he was only too aware that his version of it was no more than (as he put it) ‘an experimental project already in debt and struggling on insufficient capital’. Recapitalisation was urgently needed to pay off the capital debt and operating losses, though this would almost certainly mean selling it to an individual or firm who would then take a controlling interest in the company.

  Armed with his prospectuses and balance sheets Gavin traversed the length and breadth of the country looking for a wealthy backer. Eventually, after his boats had returned to Mallaig on 17 September at the end of the 1946 season, he found one. The Duke of Hamilton had married Gavin’s cousin Lady Elizabeth Percy, and had many interests in the Hebrides; he agreed to buy Gavin’s Isle of Soay Shark Fisheries – lock, stock and all its barrels – for £13,550, and re-register it as a tiny subsidiary of the parent company under the new name of Island of Soay Shark Fisheries Ltd. At a stroke Gavin’s debts were all paid off. But the price was high, for he would now hunt for shark not as the owner of the venture but as its employee. He ceased to be the laird of Soay, losing the Island Valley of Avalon of which he had dreamed amongst the bombs and debris of the London Blitz, and lost too his boats and gear and every penny of his original capital. He was now the managing director of the new company, with a nominal salary and a share of the profits, and though he still had high hopes for the future he was aghast when he learned that the board of the new company had decreed he should work the 1947 season with the same boats and the same gear – and for the same useless multiplicity of by-products.

  In the autumn of 1946, while he was wrestling with the problems of his shark-fishing business, Gavin disposed of the whole of his private collection of fifty wildfowl at Monreith – the last and largest such collection, he claimed, to have survived the war in Europe. The recipient was his ornithologist and conservationist friend Peter Scott, who had just established his Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge on the edge of the Severn mudflats in Gloucestershire.

  Quite why Gavin parted with his precious collection is not clear. Nor is it clear whether he sold them to Scott or donated them. Scott paid over £700 for birds in the first year of setting up the Wildfowl Trust, though it seems Gavin’s birds were merely ‘on indefinite loan’. Whatever the deal, Gavin Maxwell’s birds formed the nucleus of the collection at Slimbridge, which was to become one of the world’s premier wildfowl stations.

  To look after the new birds Peter Scott had appointed John Yelland, later Curator of Birds at London Zoo, and the two of them travelled to Monreith to collect the birds. Because their pen at Slimbridge was not ready the new arrivals were kept in a bungalow for the night – the snow geese in one bedroom, the little Ross’s geese in the other, the quarrelsome upland geese in the larder and the emperor geese in the kitchen. A few pairs of birds from Peter Scott’s Norfolk days were added to Gavin’s nucleus, including a pair of Lesser Whitefronts Gavin had brought back from Finnmark just before the outbreak of war.

  Only a few greylags were now left at Monreith, but before long they too were to find a new home, and this time it would be Gavin’s own – a new, more permanent Avalon.

  On 23 January 1947 Gavin gave a lecture about the habits and distribution of basking shark and his own shark fishery in the Hebrides to a learned audience of zoologists at the Linnaean Society in London. After the lecture two of Britain’s most eminent zoologists – Dr Harrison Matthews, then Scientific Director of the Zoological Society of London, and Dr H.W. Parker, of the British Museum (Natural History) – asked him about the research opportunities provided by his sharking venture. Very little was then known about the anatomy and biology of this mysterious species, for the only specimens to have been examined were a few badly decomposed corpses that had been washed ashore, and none had ever been properly dissected by a qualified scientist. Gavin’s fishery provided a unique chance to study the basking shark at close quarters, and the two zoologists went up to Soay in May to investigate the anatomy, biology and reproductive system of sharks caught by Gavin in the surrounding waters.

  Harrison Matthews recalled:

  Our lab was just a little shed, but most of our work was out on the slipway where the carcases were hauled up. It was an enormous help to be able to use the machinery Gavin had installed for cutting up the sharks, because these creatures were not easy things to dissect – some of the organs were so big and heavy we could barely handle them, and if your scalpel slipped and you punctured the stomach you could release half a ton of semi-digested plankton all over your dissection. And often the carcase was not dead in the usual sense. It’s actually quite difficult to kill a basking shark. Its brain is incredibly tiny, no bigger than the brain of a small dogfish, so you could hold it in one hand quite easily. In practice this means that even if you fire a twelve-bore through its head at point-blank range you won’t kill it; and you can sever the brain from the spinal column and all the usual organs go on working – existence without awareness. So when I first cut a male shark’s clasper off – its sexual organ, which is a yard long and eight inches thick – the nerves were stimulated and the thing flew up and hit me in the face. And even after the flesh had been cut up in cubes it continued to twitch most disconcertingly. This also meant, of course, that basking sharks had relatively little sensitivity to pain. Though Gavin enjoyed hunting these sharks, he was very conscience-stricken about the pain he might be inflicting on them. But he needn’t have worried – sticking a harpoon in them didn’t make much difference, not like killing a whale or a seal, which could be very cruel.

  On the whole Gavin was not a happy person when we were with him. We had plenty of fun with him, but it was against a background of melancholy, and he was very worried that the project wasn’t working out. And it was a hopeless venture, really. As a commercial enterprise I think the idea was flawed from the start – the overheads were huge but the season was only three months long, so that for three-quarters of the year there was nothing to do and no money coming in. It has been suggested that what Gavin should really have gone after was the insulin in the basking shark’s pancreas, which would have been worth a fortune. But this wouldn’t have been possible. The pancreas in the basking shark is not a solid discrete organ but distributed throughout the body, so there’s no exact place you can extract it from.

  The Sea Leopard sailed out of Mallaig for the start of the new sharking season on 5 May 1947. Apart from Bruce Watt, who would stay on till mid-season, the entire crew was new. For more than a thousand miles they scoured the coasts of the Inner and Outer Hebrides without a sight of a basking shark’s fin. Then, halfway between Barra and Canna, they came across the biggest shoal Gavin had ever seen, fifty-five dorsal fins in sight on the surface at the same time, and down below in the green ocean water an almost continuous layer containing many more shark, a great herd of antediluvian monsters moving steadily along in the depths of the sea. For three days and nights they followed this vast northward-moving shoal, even shooting by searchlight long after it was dark, towing the carcases back to Soay five at a time and never tying up or dropping anchor in all that time. Gavin and his crew were averaging only two hours’ sleep in the twenty-four and almost dropping from exhaustion. Then a thick mist came down and they turned for home. It was an eerie voyage, as Gavin wrote to Raef Pa
yne during the voyage back:

  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 reloading. 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 …

  Next week they were out after the shoal again, now far out in the middle of the Minch; but wild unseasonal gales hampered the pursuit, they lost the shoal and by the time they caught up with it again it was off Barra Head. ‘We found the big shoal again at four-thirty this morning,’ Gavin wrote in a letter from on board the Sea Leopard, ‘but they wouldn’t remain steady on the surface, and we never got a shot. For sheer temper-trying I know nothing quite as powerful as being among a lot of sharks that won’t allow themselves to be shot at.’

  Once again they intercepted the shoal, now further north off Scalpay in Harris, and for the first time Gavin achieved the kind of results he had dreamed of when he first conceived the idea of a shark-fishing industry three years before. For eighteen days he hunted the great shoal, harpooning a total of nearly fifty sharks – a third of the number he felt could have been taken if time had not been wasted in towing the carcases to Soay or beaching them on the nearest shore at Scalpay to extract the liver oil in situ rather than waste time towing them back to the factory. The beaches soon became a terrible sight, the sea crimson for hundreds of yards – ‘a true sea of blood’, Gavin called it. When a shark’s belly was cut open a tremendous weight of liver and entrails would be released. ‘One had to jump aside to avoid that ponderous slithery mass as it came rumbling out like an avalanche,’ Gavin wrote. ‘Once I was not quick enough in avoiding it, and was knocked flat on my back and enveloped by it, struggling free drenched in oil and blood, with a feeling almost of horror.’

  With the price of the oil having risen to £135 per ton, that one haul represented a gross revenue of £2500 for the livers alone. By the time the first board meeting of the new company was convened Gavin had killed eighty-three sharks, and the future looked bright – so bright that a bold promise was made of a factory ship and a spotter aircraft for the following season.

  All seemed well – and yet all was not. The fate of the pickle-tank on Soay could be read as a metaphor for the insidious canker at the heart of the enterprise. The salt solution in the tank had not been strong enough, and the sixteen tons of shark flesh it contained had turned rotten. When Gavin lifted the tank’s hatch he was greeted with a wave of suffocating ammonia that knocked him back like a fist. After he had got his breath back and his choking and spitting had died down, he lifted the hatch again, steeling himself to peer down into the dark nightmare of the fifteen-foot-deep tank. He wrote: ‘To say that the surface was crawling would be an understatement … 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 … 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.’ Not even a hefty dose of paraffin or quicklime could entirely still the grubs.

  More dire news followed. The Sea Leopard was found to have dry rot throughout her shark-scarred hull, which was to be sold for firewood, and Gavin’s efforts to replace her with a factory ship that could extract the shark oil at sea came to nothing. As the weeks crept by and meeting after meeting of the company board came to no firm decision about future plans, Gavin began to realise that the whole venture was tottering – receding and dissolving through indecision, lack of will and growing lack of interest on the part of the parent company. ‘I seemed to detect,’ he wrote of that deeply frustrating time, ‘that strange agitation that moves among the high leaves of a great tree as the saw bites into the heart of the trunk.’

  In March 1948 two small boats were bought to join Gavin’s old Gannet, but Gavin was never to go to sea in them. He was still nominal managing director of the Island of Soay Shark Fisheries Ltd, but his thoughts began to turn more and more to the possibility of resignation. He had already moved all his possessions from his cabin on the doomed Sea Leopard, and though his faith in the idea he had conceived in 1944 was unshaken, he knew in his heart that he would have no active part to play in it ever again. The taste of failure was bitter, but he would never lose his vivid memories of the bold adventure. Four years later, and almost within sight of Soay, he was to write an elegiac requiem to those strange Hebridean years when he was laird of his very own Avalon, and hunted the great shark in pursuit of a dream:

  When I think of Soay … 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 the 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 sudden spring.

  Or can there, could there?

  To those who know Gavin Maxwell as a key figure in the development of the animal protection and conservation movement, the violence and slaughter of the sharking venture must present a shocking and dismaying paradox. But the enterprise, stemming from Gavin’s inner drive, found expression at a time when public opinion imposed no moral constraints on it (big-game hunting was still approved and whale hunting condoned). Gavin himself felt few inhibiting qualms. He was simply doing what he had hitherto done best – hunting wild animals with a gun, and finding a tough-guy masculine role for himself (hunting the second-biggest fish in the world could be made to fit this scenario, even if it was a poor, harmless, lumbering monster that browsed on plankton like a cow).

  Gavin felt, moreover, a need to prove himself, to achieve something of note as a man of action, for his war had been non-combative, unlike his dashing warrior relatives Lord Lovat (the commando leader), and Colonel David Stirling (the founder of the SAS). Harpooning the basking shark was not a fair fight, but in the context of drably austere post-war Britain, and the need to find a vocation or at least a living after six years of war, the project could be justified as an attempt to harvest the bounty of nature and provide a living for an impoverished, backward Hebridean community on a small, neglected island.

  The sharking episode provided perhaps the most involving and purposeful period of Gavin’s life – and eventually, in a roundabout way, the springboard for the career upon which his reputation rests. But this was achieved at the cost of his inheritance and much bitter heartache and disappointment, and the final failure left him stranded as a kind of upper-class down-and-out.

  With the advantage of hindsight it is clear that the project was bound to fail in the long term. The intrinsic nature of the quarry was against it. Elusive and unreliable, the basking shark’s appearances and disappearances were subject to cycles that are still not fully understood. For eight months of the year it vanishes, no one is sure where; and after a decade or two in one body of water it may disappear altogether, only to reappear decades later. The fish is slow to grow and reproduce, and could not survive sustained modern industrial fishing for long before its population was annihilated, and the industry with it.

  Today, though large shoals of these great fish are still seen off the Isle of Man and the south-west peninsula of England, and a lone shark-hunter called Howard MacCrindle carries on Gavin’s tradition in the area of the Clyde, the basking shark is a rarity in the Hebrides. But the reason is not, as some have claimed, the depredations inflicted on the species by Gavin in the 1940s, which were minimal in terms of the basking shark population of those years. Norwegian whalers (who have killed more than seventy thous
and of the creatures in the forty or so years since Gavin gave up) certainly have had a hand in it, but other factors may also be in part to blame – changes in sea temperatures, plankton distribution or migration patterns – global factors over which Gavin and his little band of marine Don Quixotes had no influence whatever.

  One day, perhaps, the basking shark will become a protected species – once it has been proved that it is endangered, for even now next to nothing is known for certain about its population, migration or reproduction.

  As for Gavin, he seems to have undergone a sea-change. Perhaps in contrition for his ravages among the shark shoals, perhaps in acknowledgement of the fact that his love for wild creatures was now stronger than his urge to kill them, he rarely hunted wild animals again except perhaps on a few special occasions.

  NINE

  An artist’s life

  I put no end to

  The life that led me,

  The friends to lend to,

  The bard who bled me.

  Every bad penny

  Finds its own robber,

  My beds were many

  And my cheques rubber.

  DOM MORAES, ‘Song’ in Poems (1960)

  By the spring of 1948 Gavin had turned his back on the sharks and the sea, the Hebridean arena of his long struggle and final defeat, and bade farewell to the Shaw Stewarts and their exuberant menagerie at Morar Lodge. As a temporary lodging he moved into the factor’s house at his brother Aymer’s baronial seat at Monreith. Not long afterwards he installed himself – complete with his loudly snoring springer spaniel, Jonnie, and loudly roaring 3½-litre Bentley roadster – in a flat in a wing of Glenapp Castle, a Scottish baronial pile near Ballantrae on the Firth of Clyde, which was then the home of the shipping magnate Lord Inchcape.