Birds occupy the eye a great deal when one is continuously at sea in Hebridean waters, both because of their numbers and incessant activity, and because for hours at a time they are often the only living things in sight. They were my first love in childhood, and they filled many long empty days on the Sea Leopard when there seemed to be no sharks in the sea, and I would grow tired of the heat and tobacco smoke of the fo’c’sle or of working through accounts and business correspondence in my cabin. The minute actions of birds, the intimate realisation of separate sentient life, have always held for me an almost magic fascination; the Herring Gull that would alight with an infinitely controlled and delicate poise upon the truck of the wireless mast, smooth white wings folding against a blue sky, the yellow bill with its blood tip gaping a rhythmic wail of defiance to its companions who hovered above trying to oust it; the migrating wild geese that would pass high overhead flying northward to the thawing Arctic wastes during the first week of every shark season, trailing distant notes of music behind them; the little dark storm-petrels, no bigger than swallows, flitting among the rearing grey waves of the Minch in the dawn and the dusk; the kittiwake colonies, appearing against the great rock walls like a shaken snow scene in a glass paper-weight; and, best of all, the golden eagles soaring above the sea cliffs. Besides all these and the ubiquitous Guillemots, Puffins, and Razor-bills, there were occasional rarities, such as the Great Skua, Glaucous Gull, and Leach’s Fork-tailed Petrel, which we saw once in daylight near Barra Head. Tex found another lying stunned on the rocks behind Chinatown in Mallaig. “It sat there on my hand, combing itself, just the thing,” said Tex. He always had some slightly grotesque and more expressive word to replace the obvious.
The sea and the open sky, the sharks and whales and sea-birds, were the Sea Leopard’s background, and my own diary, when I had leisure to write it, is concerned with each almost equally, so that when I read those pages now an effort of memory is needed to recall that the writing of each was an almost conscious escape from the nagging worry of an experimental project already in debt and struggling on insufficient capital.
A long entry on the Tuesday of that week, July 9, is worth quoting verbatim, because the latter part of it deals with my own, perhaps not very subtle, reactions to a question that must present itself to every averagely sensitive individual who kills great creatures.
Today I have missed three fish and killed four. There is a disproportionate emotional expenditure in this missing, especially when fish are scarce or difficult to approach and the shot is the result of a long and painstaking stalk. The sharks were very unsteady on the surface today, appearing at one moment with the whole dorsal fin clear of the surface and the next moment totally submerged and leaving not so much as a ripple to guide one. Each time they submerged they changed direction, usually to reappear on an opposite parallel course on the wrong side of the boat. In misty weather like this the surface reflection is practically opaque unless one is looking vertically into the water, and one strains one’s eyes to make out the great brown shadow under the surface. It is worse when there are several sharks near together, one’s attention being constantly distracted by the appearance of a fin-tip in some fresh unattainable position.
A teleological observer today would have said without hesitation that the sharks were coolly, confidently avoiding the gun with an exact and experienced eye to its range and the manœuvrability of the Sea Leopard. Time and again the fish suddenly changed course at the last moment, or submerged in a leisurely but entirely efficient way at exactly the distance that made a miss a mathematical probability. Sometimes we followed the same fish for nearly half an hour. Standing at the gun and peering down into the water one can hear, appraise and mentally criticise, the orders issued from the bridge to the engine room.
The fish surfaces a hundred yards ahead.
“Half ahead both engines.”
The boat surges forward in pursuit, and the eye glances over the gun and ropes; steel trace outboard, harpoon barbs vertical and tied closed, safety bar out of the gun. The shark swims steadily away on an even course. The ship is rapidly overtaking it; I think “If he comes up at this speed I shall never be able to take an aim.” Exactly as this thought becomes conscious, I hear:
“Stop starboard.”
and, a moment later :
“Stop port.”
The shark is twenty yards away; slowly he begins to submerge. The fin disappears, is invisible, then suddenly reappears travelling to starboard at more than right angles to his previous course.
“Slow ahead port, half astern starboard.”
The ship wears round.
“Stop starboard.”
The fish has sounded again.
“Stop port.”
So it goes on. The whole crew, except Jockie, below decks at the engines, is watching. At times like these the gunner feels a miss very acutely. There is the last-moment hesitation over a poor chance; the shark is going down and turning away; only the very tip of the three-foot dorsal fin is breaking the surface, and there is a rapid undulation over the whole length of the body.
To the inexperienced eye it is an easy target, more than twenty-five feet long, and at least five feet wide, less than ten yards away. Small markings are visible on the shark’s body, light-coloured scars left by parasites, a bold python-like pattern on the flank. But the harpoon will have ten feet of water to penetrate before reaching the target, and bitter experience has taught the odds against the success of this shot.
I killed one fish today that I did not expect to hit. It was just such a shot, the shark turning to right angles away from the ship as I took aim, so that I looked down the length of his body from tail to distant gills. He was submerging rapidly when I fired, aiming at the base of the edge-on dorsal fin. The roar and flash of the gun and the boil of spray always make the point of impact difficult to determine, but as the water cleared I could see the great fish a fathom down, swimming away from the boat with blood pouring in a dark stream from a white-edged hole in his back where the steel trace entered it. He made off slowly, almost as if unconscious of his deadly wound; the eye could follow him far under the surface, a vast grey shadow with glints of white. When we pulled him up we found that the harpoon had passed clean through him and out at his belly.
Yet I should say that earlier in the day I had taken exactly the same aim on another shark presenting an identical target, and the result had been a miss. The wooden harpoon stick came up still attached to the harpoon and covered with slime, showing that it had rubbed along his flank, and implying a lateral error in aim or a lateral deflection of the harpoon by the water it had to penetrate. I have no explanation for the incidence of these hits and misses in apparently identical circumstances, and I am as nearly certain as I can be that the human factor is not involved.
All this harpooning has its unpleasant side, no matter how much it may be forgotten in the excitement of the moment. If a warm-blooded animal were concerned, and more especially if it were a warm-blooded land animal, ninety-nine people out of a hundred (of whom I should be one) would hold it to be unthinkable cruelty. Yet is one justified, because this monstrous bulk of flesh and muscle is cold-blooded and directed by a brain which could almost be enclosed in a match-box, in assuming that the experience undergone by the shark is so widely different from our own? It is extraordinary how few people devote much thought to these subjects of pain and cruelty, extraordinary not because it is easy to reach satisfactory conclusions, but because they hold a uniquely ubiquitous position in every sphere of human activity. Yet few people can explain what they mean by pain in all its senses, let alone the complicated and uncomfortable abstract of cruelty.
The dictionary definition of the word pain is “suffering or distress of body or mind,” but to find synonyms for a word is far from understanding the meaning and function of the fact for which that word stands.
The function of physical pain in the animal—including the human species—is entirely easy to understand on
an unethical plane. The physical sensation of pain is used mechanically to ensure the continuation of the species, just as plainly as is the physical sensation of sexual desire. In the animal world pain is the only limiting factor to the acceptance of physical injury, inflicted either by the animal itself or by another animal, which would result in the death of the individual and ultimately of the species. If it did not hurt to knock one’s head against a stone wall, one might playfully do it so hard that it resulted in death. Similarly, a slight stimulus which is at first perceived as pleasure, will, if it is sufficiently increased in intensity, be perceived as pain; an unequivocal warning that if the stimulus persists physical injury will result. This is an invariable law, and on its account we must accept as axiomatic that all animals perceive pain as disagreeable enough for it to act as the necessary deterrent.
We cannot know the exact degree of pain which animals at different evolutionary levels are capable of experiencing, but we know that in all the higher animals and most of the lower it is strong enough to make its avoidance—usually teleologically condensed as the “instinct of self-preservation”—stronger than any other instinct except the sexual. So we must assume that the shark feels pain strongly enough for it to act as the necessary deterrent to self-destruction. There is an argument, possibly fallacious, which attempts to reduce pain at all evolutionary levels to a common denominator. It is the argument that when an animal or human is suffering as much pain as it can suffer the precise degree of pain measurable by a common standard is unimportant; that the maximum degree of pain sufferable by a fish is as unpleasant to the fish as the maximum that a human can suffer is to the human. How can one reconcile this theory with the authenticated fact of a carnivorous shark, gutted and heaved back into the sea, being caught a few minutes later on a hook baited with its own intestines?
From this muddle of inconsistencies we can at least eliminate one glaring example of woolly thinking: the size of the animal concerned is completely unimportant, and one who is moved to pity by the sight of a stranded thirty-foot shark suffocating on a beach should be moved a thousand times more by the sight of a thousand herring suffocating in the hold of a fishing boat; or one who is revolted by the idea of a ten-pound steel harpoon in a thirty-foot shark should be equally revolted by an inch hook in the jaw of a salmon. And perhaps both those facts can be brought into fair proportion only by the realisation that at every moment in the sea millions and millions of fish are being pulled into bloody pieces by millions and millions of other fish.
An interesting, though to me very inconclusive, treatise on pain, has been written by C. S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain) from the Christian standpoint. Being more an exposition of doctrine than a detached examination of the subject, it is perhaps unfair to expect conclusion; as an exposition it is clear and concise, and in the sphere of human pain it is unconvincing only when it attempts explanation on a human, as opposed to an animal, level. In bold précis, pain in its relation to humans is expounded as a divine weapon used to recall man from the formation of a continuing city on earth—as a rod in the hand of God. This doctrine is softened and made more palatable in the course of an able and rather lengthy discussion.
In the chapter devoted to animal pain the argument, though presented with admirable clarity, remains to me entirely unacceptable. The fact of pain as a deterrent to self-destruction is skirted both in this and the previous chapter. But the theoretical difference between sentience and consciousness (the ability to feel as opposed to the ability to translate it into experience) is well explained in words of one syllable, and it is perhaps here that one should look for the true comparison between shark pain and human pain.
But complex though these problems are that arise from consideration of the fact of pain, they are crystal clear by comparison with its child, cruelty. Here the dictionary gives us “indifference to, or delight in, another’s pain.” As an abstract, independent of the human factor, cruelty does not exist; it stands as an entity divorced from the simple fact of pain only when the human appears on the scene. A swallow flies into a telephone wire, and falls to the ground with one wing practically severed from its body. Pain is there, but no cruelty. A boy passes on a bicycle, sees the bird flopping in the pathos of its destruction, and rides on. The unknown factor has made its appearance, and the problem of cruelty has arisen, without interference by a human being, for he has only been a spectator of pain. The bird must suffer an equal degree of pain whether the injury is self-inflicted, inflicted by a beast of prey, or by a human, but the word cruelty can be applied only in the last case. A few, but I think a very small minority, would admit the fact of cruelty, in its most precise meaning, between animal and animal, but probably this same minority would describe cruelty as sin, and an animal without ethical code cannot be held guilty of sin even in its widest sense.
One fact emerges plainly from this: that since the degree of pain remains constant whether or not cruelty exists, the evil effect of cruelty must be confined to the inflictor, and has no reference to the sufferer. And here more than anywhere else it seems to me that all men live by instilled standards of conduct, condoning those cruelties which the code of their upbringing legalises, and condemning those that are exactly similar but outside the sphere of their habit. The Japanese thought a kiss indecent but displayed prostitutes in cages; the sportsman is bound to wound several birds in the course of a day’s shooting, but is revolted by the sight of his son pulling off a butterfly’s wings. And who pauses to think how many wild animals can ever die any but a terribly painful death; how many fish in the end escape the mangling teeth of some larger sea creature?
We fished for another two months, but we had had the best of that season. For four weeks the wind scarcely moderated, and for the greater part of the time the sea was too rough for us to tell with any certainty whether or not the sharks were still in the area. I look down those log entries and see again the panorama of roaring grey skies and flying scud: “Lay riding out westerly gale at Lochmaddy”; “Gale all round the compass in 24 hours; no shelter anywhere”; “Too much sea to follow the only fish we saw”; “Sou’-westerly gale; lay two days at Lochboisdale.” Throughout that time we averaged about two sharks a week, and it was borne in upon me that even at this low rate the factory or its staff was apparently working to capacity. Our export licence had come through, and we were now shipping all the sharks’ flesh salted in barrels to Hamburg, so that even these small catches were not showing us an appreciable running loss, but we had a heavy capital deficit, and it was clear that only a complete recapitalisation could carry the project into a full working stage the following season. Through correspondence I had been pursuing this idea since early June, and now I decided to stay with the catchers not later than mid-August before going to Glasgow to try to raise the necessary capital.
Each individual shark that we killed was still an adventure in itself, as fiercely exciting as the very first, and each could still make me forget for an hour the menace of failure and bankruptcy that swept back on those unceasing winds. “Ay,” said one of the crew one day, “the weather always beats you in the end—time and the weather,” and in these small fatalistic words lay all that there was to be said.
There were times when the crew were bored and discontented, and privately I made up my mind that I would end the season with the first man who left us. Late one evening, when we had lain in harbour for two days, one of the crew came to my cabin to voice, it seemed, a private rather than a general discontent. He was a man I knew and liked, so I foolishly gave him some rum, although it was obvious that he had had too much already. We sat at opposite sides of the narrow cabin, with the table between us. He grew heated, and I tried to be placatory. This made him angrier still; I became angry myself, and with a sudden reversion to an army pattern of behaviour I told him to get out and come back when he was sober. There was a very quick movement, and his hand came up on the table in front of him, holding a sheath-knife by the point of the blade.
“You?
??re not in the bloody Guards now,” he said. “Take your eyes off me, and I’ll stap this through your guts.”
I didn’t know whether to take this seriously or not, but he was drunk enough for anything. I was scared stiff. On the vague principle of a lion-tamer, which seemed to be running in his mind too, I did not take my eyes off him, and after a moment or two they began to smart with the smoky atmosphere.
“Put that thing away, and don’t, be a fool,” I said, hoping my voice would not show how frightened I was, and forgetting that he was past noticing. But he only said:
“Take your eyes off me—just take your eyes off me, and see what you’ll get.”
I had a wonderful idea. “All right,” I said; “I’ll go on looking at you as long as I can, but we can both have a drink while I’m doing it.”
He had one, and I had one—about a tumbler full of rum each. Then we had another; he had a flying start on me, and I felt sure I could outlast him. When the first bottle was finished he became more friendly, though the knife remained conspicuous.
“I like you, you know,” he said, “if only you weren’t such a bloody fool. I wouldn’t really want to put a knife through you. But I’m fou’, you see, so don’t you go taking a risk on it, not if I was you.”
I didn’t. We were half-way down the second bottle, and I was beginning to feel pretty hazy myself, when he went gently to sleep and I cautiously removed the knife. It was quite calm when I lugged him up, half conscious, on deck about three in the morning, and the rest of the crew had turned in. I plumped him down on the poop deck, and seated myself beside him, staring foolishly at the moon and thinking what a wonderful night it was and what a wonderful life it was. You must have been able to smell the rum a quarter of a mile away on shore.