How many mare’s nests I found eggless during those next few months, how many red herrings I pursued avidly to their distant depths, how many oases trembled and dissolved into mirage I do not know, but they were many. The press had given the Soay project (“Bid to Found New Industry”) a wide publicity that summer, ranging from serious features in illustrated papers to the comic-cut type, such as:
Answer.
Doubtful (Duntochter)—The carcase of the average shark yields, after processing, 7 gallons of oil, 57 lbs fish-meal, 9 sq. ft. of shagreen, 3 sets artificial dentures, 2 gold watches, 1 sea boot, 5 wedding rings, 2 golf balls, 7 kirbigrips, and 1 copy (spoiled) of Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s Poems.
These, in conjunction with such headlines, on days when the daily press was hard pushed to fill its columns, as: “One Man starts a New War,” and paragraphs in which the subject-matter was barely recognisable, as:
After a thrilling chase of several hours from the coast of Skye to South Uist two Basking Sharks were captured by Major Maxwell and his crew yesterday. Major Maxwell runs the oil factory at Soay, near Skye.
A school of sharks was sighted off the coast of Skye and after several unsuccessful attempts to harpoon the fish two were eventually struck and set off with the speedboat in tow in the direction of South Uist.
Finally, the big fish were secured and taken to Lochboisdale Pier, South Uist, where they were secured while the hunters left to follow the school which had moved further up.
Both sharks measured about 10 (sic) feet long.
—had attracted a growing community who had recently been discharged from the Services and were restless for adventure. They had savings, varying, usually, between five hundred and a thousand pounds, and were willing to invest it all in a project that offered release from the ennui of peace-time. Some were pathetically specific about the domestic or personal problems from which they wished to escape; one wrote:
I’ve only got eight hundred pounds in the world, but I’ll put it all into your business if you’ll give me a job and keep me there. I thought the war was hell and I had a breakdown and then I looked forward to getting home. Now I’ve got there it’s back to a wife who I never wanted and never wanted me—I guess you shouldn’t get married that young; I’m only twenty-two now. She’s younger, but she’s been around these years and I haven’t and don’t want to. Perhaps I could raise a thousand pounds if that’s the minimum. I did all right in the Army and I’ll learn anything I have to quick enough if you’ll give me the chance.
Whatever the outcome, whether or not the business could be adequately capitalised, it looked as if I at any rate had begun by losing all my own money in it, and I could not with a clear conscience take these widows’ mites at the present stage. From those who specified their available capital exactly I could at that time have floated a Company with a capital of nineteen thousand pounds, of which every share would be taken up, but if that Company failed, each investor would have lost all that he had, and I could not face the responsibility. I declined them all, and waited for the man of my pipe-dreams, who would sink more money in experiment, and be patient if the venture went on showing a loss for a season or two.
At this time I was approached by a Mr Charles Osborne, who wished, in return for an advisory fee, to collect from me enough information to start a Basking Shark Fishery on the West Coast of Ireland. His principal, Mr Sweeney, owned various sea salmon fishings in Co. Mayo, where the sharks were to be found in great numbers throughout the summer and caused heavy destruction among the salmon-nets. I realised with a pang that were it not for my island factory I had but to transfer the boats and all the catching equipment to Ireland to feel sure of all the capital support that I required. I had many interviews with Osborne, and in exchange for a hundred pounds I told him all I knew of catching, handling, and processing Basking Sharks.[*] I was not able to follow closely the progress of the Mayo fishery; it continues, I think, in a desultory way under the name of Achill Island Shark Fisheries, operated by various small groups up the coast as an interest subsidiary to other forms of fishing. Judging from articles on the subject that I have since read, they have forsaken the harpoon for some form of ring-net, which takes an age to repair after the capture of each shark, and the photographs show only the smallest of fish upon the beach.
I travelled a lot; I was in Glasgow, Edinburgh, London, Manchester, Birmingham, and Southampton in the same week; I was in constant telephone communication with Bruce, who in September was still catching sharks, and arranged with him the closing of the season on September 17. Bruce had to lay the Sea Leopard up in Mallaig, and when the winter fishing began and the harbour became crowded out with ring-netters he must have become as irritable and nervous as I was. He wrote to me of the constant necessity of moving the Sea Leopard from pier to pier, of the impossibility of clam-fishing with the Gannet (which I had arranged with him on a profit-sharing basis, so that he and the Gannet should not lie idle during the winter months) in these circumstances. He warned me, too, that he must leave the business not later than the end of the following summer, as he and Dan were going into partnership in a hire-boat business. He was beginning already to look for the 1947 crew, whom, I felt miserably, we had no certainty of being able to employ.
I was very nearly in despair when the pipe dream came, or seemed to come, true.
After a very brief preliminary negotiation through lawyers, the business registered as Isle of Soay Shark Fisheries was bought in the winter, lock, stock, and barrel, for thirteen thousand five hundred and fifty pounds, and re-registered under the name of Island of Soay Shark Fisheries Ltd, as a subsidiary of a wealthy firm who had already many interests in the Hebrides. The island, the boats, the gear—all that we had—passed out of my possession, and I became Managing Director of the new Company with a shareholding of five hundred pounds, a nominal salary, and a third share of the net profits when they rose over a thousand pounds per annum. The Company was formed with a nominal capital of twenty-six thousand pounds, of which sixteen thousand one pound shares were taken up; my nine original subscribers accepted shares in the new Company in full settlement, and our creditors were paid. I had lost all my capital except that five hundred pounds’ worth of shares, but I still had the highest hopes for the future.
By the time the new Company was formed, and its first informal meeting held in the spring of 1947, it was far too late to add anything but the most minor pieces of equipment to our existing organisation. I think in fact that the only additions were extra pairs of field-glasses, some new instruments for the Sea Leopard, and an experimental coil of nylon rope. We must work the 1947 season with just the same handicaps as before, the same towing difficulties and factory inadequacies, the same necessity for using the catching vessels as factory transport ships. But the relief that we were able to carry on at all took the edge from these disappointments.
The Chairman, who was chairman of the parent company too, was naturally disinclined to pursue my idea of a floating factory or to sink further capital until he saw the result of the first season’s effort, and it was clear to me even at that early stage that he had too much on his hands to give much thought to the detailed workings of so small a concern. Thereafter a personal adviser accompanied or deputised for him, a Londoner who had little opportunity to appreciate our problems or to learn them at first hand.
I dreaded the repetition of those hours and days wasted by the catchers in towing dead sharks back to Soay from the Outer Hebrides, but I was not yet ready to accept the fact that it was impracticable at the present stage to market any product other than the liver oil.
In retrospect I think, too, that there may have been a subconscious feeling that the Company could not be expected to find acceptable a programme that involved increasing independence upon a factory which they had so recently bought. The general policy was to explore more and more products as opportunity offered, the tacit goal for some future season being a large floating factory which could produce them all on board. It was
one of the major turning-points; had we invested then in one boat capable of extracting liver oil at sea, and abandoned the sale of all other materials, we should have seen a handsome dividend on our first season.
The Articles of the Company provided for five directors, of whom I might nominate one, and the parent company three. I nominated Gordon Davidson, of the Glasgow firm of J. N. Davidson, who had helped and advised me with marketing problems since the inception of the project. In common with the rest of the world, he had, unfortunately, no experience of the materials with which he was dealing, and in his failures I used unjustly to forget that experiment by trial and error was perhaps as necessary on shore as at sea.
The parent company nominated only two of the three directors to whom it was entitled, the chairman and his brother, whom I did not meet until the middle of that summer. As a body, the board remained elusive, and we rarely achieved a complete attendance during the life of the Company.
We aimed at beginning the season on the usual date, the last week of April, but there was much to be done in that short time. The Sea Leopard had not had her annual engine overhaul, and it was only a few weeks earlier that I had been able to confirm to the gunmaker our order for modified catching equipment. We fixed our opening date for April 17, the date by which we expected the material from Birmingham, and began a frenzy of reorganisation.
There were major changes in the crew. Dan MacGillivray had left me to begin the preparation of the boat-hiring business in which he and Bruce were to be partners; Bruce was to leave us about the middle of the season or when we had found a new skipper to take his place. Two irreparable losses: Dan with his soft island speech and calm unhurrying competence; Bruce, often dour, uncommunicative and “crabbit,” but infinitely dependable.
The ring-net boats had already made up their crews while we were still uncertain of being able to carry on at all, and we counted ourselves lucky to find a mate and engineer at such short notice. Harry and Jamieson had been working a small cargo-boat of their own, the Noup Head, and came to us together, with the tacit assumption that Harry would succeed Bruce as skipper. He was an Orkney man, whose past was something of a mystery, but who possessed a deep-sea Master’s Ticket and a tremendously enthusiastic manner.
Neil Cameron had been called up and joined a parachute regiment, and in his place we took on Duncan McPhail from Knoydart, who later gained a temporary glare of publicity as one of the Nine Men of Knoydart who rebelled overtly against the land-management of their English landlord.
We began the season with Bruce as skipper, Harry as mate, Jamieson as engineer, and Tex and Duncan as basic crew of the Gannet. Donald Ritchie, a Soay boy, was cook; the remaining deckhand was changed several times during the season.
We were ready to sail by April 28.
*. Charles Osborne was drowned in the spring of 1951, when a vessel engaged on making a film of the shark fishery was sunk off the coast of Co. Mayo.
CHAPTER X
The 1947 Season
WE were ready to sail, but the weather was unwilling to let us. So bad had it been that I had not dared to cross to Soay myself, lest I might be stuck there for an indefinite time. The winter in the Hebrides had been cold and still, with nearly nine weeks of sunshine. The seasons had become reversed, and it had now settled down to a truer winter of rain and gales. We lay in harbour for another week, and, on the only moderate day in fourteen consecutive days of gale, Watkins’s shark-fishing fleet arrived from Carradale in Loch Fyne. There were changes, for the Gloaming, the parent drifter with the oil-extraction plant, had been wrecked at the mouth of Lochboisdale during the winter, while acting as a herring carrier. In her place was the Recruit, a steam drifter of the same character, and on the deck of the Perseverance I noticed a stack of harpoons that appeared to be of an entirely new type. Both fleets were ready, but we both had to wait in Mallaig harbour until the wind dropped.
On the morning of Saturday, May 3, the first herring of the season were caught, but they were “winter herring”—that is to say, herring that were not feeding, and not the kind one might expect to find in association with sharks. We sailed on Monday, leaving the Gannet in harbour, called at Soay to make sure that the factory was ready for action, and for the whole week we searched the coasts of the Inner and Outer Islands without sighting a fin. We had covered more than a thousand miles when we got back to Mallaig on Saturday; either the sharks had not arrived, because of the backwardness of the season, or they were keeping to the deep waters. From Monday until Friday it had blown unceasingly and near to gale force. The wind came for the most part from a clear sky, forming mountainous emerald seas with cobalt-and-purple shadows, the waves rearing splendid and triumphant, white-crested and shining against the blue sky. We searched the Skye shore where we had fished all through May of the previous year; An Dhusgeir was hidden by every wave that broke on it, and no boat in the world could have followed a shark in that sea had a hundred fins been showing. We crossed the Minch, and went on down to Barra Head in the lee of the islands; on Friday, when the wind began to moderate, we went westward through the channel between Mingulay and Pabbay, lifting high on the crests of a mighty, slow-rolling blue swell that heaved in from the Atlantic to surge forty feet up the cliffs. We could hear it booming like distant artillery through the fantastic caves and galleries of Mingulay’s thousand-foot bird-whitened precipice, surging on into the dark, losing colour and form to become something disintegrating and violent like an explosive.
When we returned to Mallaig at the end of that wasted week it was nearly calm, and when we berthed we were told that the first of the summer herring had been caught that morning and that at least one shark had been seen, at the Binch Buoy, some forty miles north of Barra Head.
Throughout Sunday there was a bustle of preparation aboard Watkins’s boats, berthed just astern of us at the big stone pier, and we, too, were checking through every detail of the catching equipment. Bruce came to me in the evening.
“Watkins will have got the same news as us, and he’ll be going to the Binch Buoy too. I think we should get away ahead of him, but the way we’re berthed now he’ll hear our engines the moment we start up. I think we’ll shift across to the end of the fish-pier late on in the evening, and slip out of the harbour before it’s light.”
I turned in to get what sleep I could, and just before four in the morning I was awoken by the Sea Leopard’s engines starting. I came up on deck to find that it was still dark, the water of the harbour reflecting our starboard light in a long zig-zag of brilliant emerald, a calm morning with the sky just beginning to pale in the east, and belts of mist lying flat along the hillside above the harbour. There was no light from below decks on any of Watkins’s boats; I watched them anxiously as we left the harbour and headed for the open sea, but our manœuvre had succeeded.
As dawn began to break we found ourselves nuzzling into a dense sea-mist, so that we could see no more than when it had been dark, and we set a blind course for the Binch Buoy. As we neared the Barra coast after four hours the mist was thick, white, and enveloping, but bright and translucent, as though brilliant sunlight were shining behind it. It thinned for a second, and through a gap we had a glimpse of the low hills of the Barra shore a mile away in full sunshine. Then the mist settled round us again, so that we could barely see the other end of the ship.
“I think we’ll just wait here until the sun takes the mist off,” said Bruce; “there’s no point in mucking around in this.”
The sea was flat calm; with the Sea Leopard hove-to one could look down over her side to a narrow belt of water enclosed by mist and as unrippled as glass.
We had waited for perhaps half an hour when the mist began to furl up quickly, and the sun broke through, brightening the dispersing tendrils to a dazzling white. The Barra hills, hard and brilliant in the early summer sunshine, were streaked with the same white cottony strips, and half a mile away on our port bow was the Binch Buoy, black on a sea of pale blue.
We got out
the field-glasses; we looked to the north, to the south, and back across the Minch, but the Buoy itself was all that broke that satiny surface. Then the incredible happened; a shark’s fin, flashing light wetly from the low sun, came up between us and the Buoy; before we had got the ship under way another surfaced a quarter of a mile to the south of us; then two more further inshore. We had steered a perfect course, arrived exactly where the sharks were, and they had appeared at just the moment when we wanted them.
It was a glorious beginning to the season. We harpooned four sharks in less than an hour, and there were four barrels at the surface within a radius of a quarter of a mile. We hauled them all up and had the sharks lashed alongside the Sea Leopard by nine a.m. We could see a long way now, and there was not another shark in sight. Watkins’s fleet came steaming up over the horizon at nine-thirty, and as he came nearer we gave an extra hitch to the tail-ropes on each shark, so that the tails should show well above water, and the opposition be in no doubt as to what they had missed. Watkins waited there all day, but saw nothing.
We worked up and down that same piece of coastline for the rest of the week, but the sharks still did not seem to have arrived in real quantity, and despite a hundred-per-cent success in attempted kills, we only had a total of nine fish for the week. On Monday morning we returned to the Binch with diminishing hope; from there we sailed south to Barra, north to Uishenish, and back to Lochboisdale, without seeing anything.
I remember the evening in Lochboisdale harbour very clearly. We had friends in most of these ports now, and at Lochboisdale was the owner of the hotel, Finlay Mackenzie. Finlay was the best company in the world, as full of diverse stories as the Arabian Nights. He had spent some years in the Canadian North-West Mounted Police, and grizzly bears and gun-fights were part of his stock-in-trade. Besides being a superb narrator, he was also a superlative host, and his large private room on an upper floor of the hotel was the automatic rendezvous for every one of his friends who berthed in Lochboisdale for even an hour or two. Here the profits of his hotel business were poured out in magnificent generosity; Finlay’s standard measure of whisky for his guests was the equivalent of about four doubles in one, and many people found that they could remember little detail of the conversation toward the end of an evening. It was in keeping with the man himself and all that went with him; he was tall, enormously broad, and carried himself so straight that he looked a giant, a silver-haired giant with blue eyes as bright and direct at fifty-five as they had been thirty years before. To complete the picture was his dog, a black Labrador retriever as big as a St Bernard which could carry a wild goose at the gallop.