Harpoon at a Venture Read online

  The cattle moved into the weedy shoal-water, snuffling and blowing; a calf backed in comic alarm from my jacket where I had left it upon a rock, his fringed baby face staring wonderingly from it to me.

  This was the last time that I would ever see Soay as I saw it then, as an untroubled island with a single and beautiful face. When next I came to it I came as its owner, and the owner of all its troubles, internecine feuds, frustrations, and problems; when I go there now it is with a fierce and bitter nostalgia, and when I walk across that narrow neck of the island I can hardly bear to look at the azaleas that I planted by the path-side.

  When I returned to Camus na Gall the crew were waiting to embark. One of them had a fish-box containing three large lobsters, and a box of eggs. I asked him if he had bought them. He shook his head.

  “They wouldn’t sell anything, it being Sunday. That’s why nobody came down from the houses—they’re Seceders.”

  As we rowed back to the yacht he went on to tell me that he had had tea in one of the houses, and had heard something of the island’s troubles: its inadequate communications and transport, its decreasing population, and the absence of State sympathy. He added, “There seems to be a good deal of ill feeling between the families, and they mostly seem to be related. The people I was with seemed to think a resident landlord would do the place a lot of good.”

  THE THIRD STONE

  I decided to buy Soay if I could do so at a figure that would show me the small rate of interest from rentals and feu-duties that I received from my invested capital. I entered almost immediately into prolonged negotiations with the owner, Flora Macleod of Macleod, and the island became my property about a year later.

  But during the latter part of those months of negotiation I began to feel a growing uneasiness. My medical category made it probable that I should survive the war, and the spirit in which at Blackwall I had first thought of a Hebridean island, a mood in which rest and remoteness from struggle seemed all that was desirable when the war was over, had left me. The years of hard work and organisation had become habit, breeding, as with so many others, a restlessness, an impatience with former interests and ambitions, and a desire for application and achievement. There was no clear way to the satisfaction of these cravings on Soay.

  With the island were sold to me the salmon-fishing rights of its coast, a commercial bag-net fishing which had for some years been leased to Robert Powrie, owner or lessee of commercial salmon fisheries on both coasts of Scotland. But by an oversight his lease had been renewed for a further eight years during my negotiations, and the door to the only obvious work on Soay had been slammed in my face. Without the introduction of a new industry, it was difficult to see how the island could be developed or improved.

  In the spring of 1944 I had bought a thirty-foot lobster-fishing boat, in which I spent the whole of my free time. By this date the routine of my department was no longer six and a half days’ hard work and a free Sunday afternoon. Instead, it had become spasmodic and a little feverish; we would be asked the impossible, and for weeks on end would work all day and most of the night—then, without warning, we would find ourselves virtually unoccupied for an equal period. After D-day the work of our back-room was practically finished, and there was little to do but to clear away the mess. But our department could not be closed until the trend of events on the Continent made it certain that we could be of no further use, and during the latter part of that summer we had to stay where we were, waiting and often idle. It was as though all the week-end leaves that we had forfeited for three years were restored suddenly and in aggregate; we could not spend a night away, but our days were for the most part our own. The weather was brilliant, hot and still, and whilst many were bitter not to be able to spend this unexpected idleness with wives and families, I wanted nothing but to be where I was.

  Those brazen days I spent in my boat, exploring the coast and the islands from Mull to the narrows of Skye, slipping imperceptibly back into a world I had almost forgotten, dream-like and shining. I used to visit the seal-rocks and spend hours watching the seals; sit among the burrows of a puffin colony and see the birds come and go, unafraid, from their nests; fish for conger eels by moonlight; catch mackerel and lobsters; and for the first time saw a Basking Shark at close quarters. It was the beginning of the long adventure of which this book is the story.

  I had with me a Morar man, who looked after the boat for me; “Foxy” he was called, both by his friends and his enemies. He was a little over thirty then, fat yet enormously strong—I have seen him lift the back of a medium-sized saloon car clear of a ditch onto the road—arms reaching almost to his knees, a massive boil-pitted neck, and a foul mouth as fluent in English as in Gaelic. His requirements were those of all mankind; though all, perhaps, a little magnified. He would have made a good guerilla fighter in the Chouan tradition; not a leader, because it was difficult to keep his attention focused on any one thing for long. When Foxy started working he would do as much in an hour as three other men, but how many such hours there would be was always unpredictable.

  We were returning from Glenelg; it was late afternoon, the sky paling and the hills turning to deep plum, their edges sharp and hard, as though cut from cardboard. We were about a mile off Isle Ornsay Lighthouse, heading southward over a still, pale sea, when I noticed something breaking the surface thirty yards from the boat. At first it was no more than a ripple with a dark centre. The centre became a small triangle, black and shiny, with a slight forward movement, leaving a light wake in the still water. The triangle grew until I was looking at a huge fin, a yard high and as long at the base. It seemed monstrous, this great black sail, the only visible thing upon limitless miles of pallid water. A few seconds later the notched tip of a second fin appeared some twenty feet astern of the first, moving in a leisurely way from side to side.

  It was some seconds before my brain would acknowledge that these two fins must belong to the same creature. The impact of this realisation was tremendous and indescribable: a muddle of excitement in which fear and a sort of exultation were uppermost, as though this were a moment for which I had been unconsciously waiting for a long time.

  I could only guess at what was beneath the surface. In common with the great majority whose lives have not been lived in fishing-boats, I had no idea what Basking Sharks looked like. Once, years before, I had seen them from the road bordering Loch Fyne, three great black sails cruising in line ahead—heavy with the menace of boys’ adventure stories and shipwrecked sailors adrift in the Caribbean. I knew nothing of them, their size or their habits; to me all sharks were man-eaters. That was my state of knowledge as I looked at those two fins and guessed wildly at what must lie below them.

  Foxy’s knowledge, though not encyclopædic, was less sketchy than my own. He knew the name by which the fishermen called them—“muldoan,” “sailfish,” “sunfish,” and the Gaelic name cearbhan; he knew that they played havoc with the herring-nets; that their livers contained large quantities of valuable oil; that they were immensely powerful and could damage small boats; that long ago the people of the Islands used to harpoon them from massed formations of small boats, to get a winter’s supply of lamp-oil. He assumed that they fed upon the herring-shoals, because they were usually to be found where the herring were.

  All this he told me as we closed in to the fish. I scrambled up on to the foredeck and stood in the bows, hoping to see clearly what lay below the surface.

  The first Basking Shark of which one has a clear and entire view is terrifying. One may speak glibly of fish twenty, thirty, forty feet long, but until one looks down upon a living adult Basking Shark in clear water, the figures are meaningless and without implication. The bulk appears simply unbelievable. It is not possible to think of what one is looking at as a fish. It is longer than a London bus; it does not have scales like an ordinary fish; its movements are gigantic, ponderous, and unfamiliar; it seems a creature from a prehistoric world, of which the first sight is as unexpected, an
d in some way as shocking, as that of a dinosaur or iguanodon would be.

  At ten yards I could make out a shadow below the surface; at five, as Foxy slipped the engine into neutral, I could see the whole form clear in transparent water. The body was brown, with irregular python markings upon it, a vast barrel that seemed to get steadily wider towards the incredibly distant head. The head was perhaps the most unexpected thing of all. The gills were by far the widest part, frill-like and gigantically distended, like a salamander’s or a Komodo Dragon’s. The upper jaw was a snout, the tip of which was now breaking the surface; the mouth was held wide open, and a child could have walked upright into that whitish cavern. As we began to sheer off, our wash slapped across the dorsal fin, and the shark submerged with a slight flurry of water about his tail.

  Mounted in the bows of the Gannet was a Breda light machine-gun, which I carried to shoot up drifting mines, and also in the rather ridiculous hope of engaging a U-boat, since they had been sighted as near as Eigg. A Danish seaman had told me that a small launch, accurately handling a light machine-gun, could permanently damage the periscope and also command the conning-tower if a U-boat surfaced, since it would be unlikely to waste a torpedo on so insignificant a target.

  Foxy said, “Try him with the gun, Major.”

  When I had finished loading two extra magazines, the fin had reappeared, apparently stationary, and within a stone’s throw.

  We circled it widely and approached from astern—the technique we later used for harpooning. I waited until the fin was abreast of me and not much more than a yard away; the boat was almost scraping the shark’s side. I fired thirty rounds in a single burst, straight into the huge expanse of his flank, and saw a mass of small white marks spring out on the brown surface. A great undulating movement seemed to surge through him, and near the stern of the boat his tail shot clear of the water. Its width was a man’s height; it lashed outward away from the boat and returned, missing Foxy’s head by inches, to land with a tremendous slam upon the gunwale of the stern cockpit. It swung backward and hit the sea, flinging up a fountain of water that drenched us to the skin.

  He was back on the surface in less than a minute. Six times we closed in; I had fired three hundred rounds into what was now a broad white target on his side. At the last burst he sank in a great turmoil of water, and it was ten minutes before the fin surfaced again. Now it seemed to me as though he was wallowing and out of control, the fin lying at an acute angle. I thought that he was mortally wounded, if not actually dead.

  Foxy suggested that we should try to make fast to the fin with the Gannet’s boat-hook. He stood up on the foredeck, and I steered him as close to the fish as I could. I felt the bows bump against the shark’s body; then Foxy took a tremendous swipe with the full force of eighteen stone. I could see the hook bite deep into the base of the apparently helplessly rolling fin. There was just time for Foxy’s triumphant shout of “Got the b—–,” then the boat-hook was torn from his hands, and those gorilla-like arms were waving wildly in a frantic effort to keep balance, as shark and boat-hook disappeared in a boil of white water.

  It was some time before the boat-hook came to the surface; then, several hundred yards away, it shot ten feet out of the sea, as though scornfully hurled back from below. We did not see the shark again.

  The fly-spotted room at Blackwall, one golden day on Soay, the mystery and excitement of that chance encounter at Isle Ornsay: these were the first stepping-stones across the ford; from them my feet went on inevitably to the next stone and the next, and when I turned to look back the stream had risen and covered them, and it was too late to return.

  CHAPTER II

  Beyond the Ford

  I WAS intrigued by this first adventure, and it made me curious to know more about Basking Sharks. It was only then that I began to understand that here was an unexplored field; an amazing blank upon the neatly, if superficially, filled-in map of the world’s natural history. Here was the largest fish of European waters, a creature as large as any land animal in the world, and yet virtually nothing was known of it.

  The herring fishermen gave me a good deal of unrecorded field natural history, but left a thousand questions unanswered. They seemed to agree that sharks had not been common in Hebridean waters before the nineteen-thirties, but for some fifteen years had seemed steadily to increase in numbers and regularity of appearance. They told me that the sharks arrived about the last week of April, usually on favoured herring-grounds well inshore on both sides of the Minch. The Soay Sound was said to be one of their favourites. They were in evidence until September, though there were some who said that they could not remember sharks in July, and others who said specifically that they always disappeared from mid-June until mid-August, reappearing on an apparently southward migration. One man told me that in March he had seen a huge congregation in the open Atlantic twenty miles south of Barra Head, “like a great fleet of sailing boats.” And it was in March that they were usually reported off the Irish coast. Everything I was told about their movements built up a picture of a steady northward migration to the Hebrides in spring, and a southward migration in September, though there would be years in which the route of the autumn migration seemed to be round Cape Wrath and down the North Sea. Little has been added to our knowledge in that respect, and I have found no reason to change the original picture that I formed.

  I do not think that any of the fishermen with whom I talked could tell me the food of the shark. Even now, after the wide publicity which the press accorded my venture, daily papers still report plagues of Basking Sharks “in pursuit of the herring shoals,” and there are many fishermen who believe this to be true. In fact, the shark feeds upon the same food as the herring: small organisms in the water which in aggregate are called plankton. Some are larval forms of crustacea, others are mature but almost microscopic creatures, some are vegetable and some animal. The word embraces all minute free-swimming organisms in the sea, as distinct from those which are attached to, or crawl upon, the bottom. The stomach of a shark may contain as much as a ton of this material, a soft pinkish mass, very like shrimp paste in appearance and smell.

  About the size of the sharks it was difficult to obtain agreement. “As big as the boat” was a common expression; the ring-net boats are between forty and fifty feet long. Some fishermen with wide experience claimed to remember individual fish much larger than this. In a later chapter I shall discuss this question in greater detail; until many more sharks are caught and beached for measurement it must remain a vexed question. I am certain, however, that I have seen very much larger sharks than any I have ever caught.

  The smallest shark that any of the herring men had seen was about six feet, which they assumed to be the young of the year. Then the astounding fact emerged: no one, no scientist and no fisherman, knew whether the young were born alive or hatched from spawn. Here was the largest fish of northern seas, the second largest fish in the world—the largest is Rhinodon, the whale-shark of the Pacific—and no one knew this elementary fact.

  To the fishermen the sharks were a menace, to be avoided at all costs. They destroyed the herring-nets, passing through them as an elephant would pass through a stretched sheet of muslin, and when the nets were mended the tear would reopen like a recurrently festering wound, rotted by the black glue-like slime from the shark’s flanks and back. To a small boat the sharks were dangerous, and also apparently inquisitive; an inshore fisherman handlining mackerel from a dinghy would pull with all his strength for the shore when the black sail surfaced nearby.

  Of scientific data there was practically none. Very few fresh specimens had ever been examined by any qualified person. The rotting carcases occasionally washed ashore, and nearly all hailed as sea monsters (for the gills, being soft, decay first, leaving an apparently distinct and slender neck), had had in the past to be examined hastily between tides. I should guess, too, that the field instruments available to an unsuspecting marine biologist were inadequate for the dissection
of a Basking Shark. Even a simple dismembering calls for axes, saws, and armoured gloves.

  My curiosity led me to acquire two harpoons, which I carried in the Gannet in the hope of meeting another shark. They were the old type of whaling harpoon, intended to be fired from the muzzle-loading whaling guns of the type we A: Old whaling harpoon used for early experiments in 1945. B: “T-type” hand-harpoon, 1945. C: The “idée fixe,” a barbless gun-harpoon with the ring attached far forward, designed to lever the shaft round at right angles to its course of entry, 1945. D: Two semi-tubular barbs, 1945–6. E: The final design, four barbs of nickel-chrome steel, total weight 10 lbs., 1947–8. later employed—with entirely different harpoons—as our standard equipment. I do not to this day understand how those harpoons could be expected to remain in a whale under the slightest strain. The tips were spear-shaped, much like a flat stone arrow-head. There were no barbs, no holding surface to give the least resistance to the harpoon’s being withdrawn exactly as it had entered; in fact, the rear edges of the arrow-blades were sharpened, as if to cut their way out more easily. Each harpoon was about a yard long; the whole of the shaft was intended to fit inside the barrel of the gun, with only the arrow-head protruding. The length of the shaft was slotted, so that a metal ring for the playing rope could slide to the arrow-head when the harpoon was in the gun, and to the back end of the shaft after it had been fired. (Fig. A on page 35.)

  To the ring of each harpoon I fixed a coil of rope, and lashed the harpoons to boat-hooks to drive them into the fish. But it was getting late in the season, and it was some time before I saw another shark. Again it was near a lighthouse: Point of Sleat, the most southerly point of Skye. Sharks are often found near lighthouses, probably because these promontories produce currents which concentrate the plankton.