Shallow thought might hold that the cultivation, also, has only the appeal of the archaic, but the honest eye must concede a specific grace to the deep ridge and furrow of the traditional “lazy-bed,” and to the strange rhythmic patterns that it forms.
The people, too, unless a nostalgic imagination has redrawn them, were for the most part of an unusual beauty. The faces of the old had the serenity, the pencilled lines of experience and adjustment, that suggest resolved conflict superficially improbable in that remote Elysium. “True human beauty,” said a man whose opinion I respected, “is to be found only in the faces of the old Chinese and the young Balinese,” and I wondered how he would have responded to those sculptured heads of Scalpay. The young did not suffer by comparison; I remember a girl of perhaps seventeen, black-haired and blue-eyed, with small straight features, who ran barefoot down a flowery slope to untether a bleating calf and lead him back to the croft. As he gambolled she danced and played with him, tenderly and exultingly, as though her own ebullience of spirit must find a common expression. There were twin fourteen-year-old boys, too, who often visited the boat and made friends with the crew; they were indistinguishable but for a tiny scar that one had above his left eyebrow, and they would ask us to guess which was which. They would go to elaborate lengths to confuse, changing jerseys or jackets at a moment when no one was looking, so that before addressing either one must look for the confirmation of that minute betraying scar. These two were of a different type from the barefooted girl, fair hair curling like fronds of a fern, and colouring as brilliant as that of the distant Norse stock from which they had probably sprung. The people of Scalpay seemed to me to be like the island on which they lived, serene and beautiful.
We woke on that first day at Scalpay to a glorious summer morning, with the sun already up over the hills and the colours dazzling and intense, the sea so smooth and brilliant that the mind rebelled against being able to perceive it only with one sense at a time. We turned out through the narrow channel of Scalpay Sound, and the Minch lay before us, pale, shining and glassy, with the weird basaltic-columned turrets and towers of the Shiant Islands ten miles away. Off the lighthouse point there was usually a jabble of small leaping waves; now, in this intense calm, there was no more than a series of faintly disturbed patches, as though an invisible hand were dragging at the water from beneath.
In the middle of one of these patches, almost stationary, swam a large shark; nose, tail, and dorsal fin all breaking the surface. He was the herald, the outrider, of the great shoal from which, when we left Scalpay eighteen days later, we had killed nearly fifty sharks; and could, I think, have killed three times that number if the boats had had nothing else to do but kill them and bring them in. During all that time there were rarely more than half a dozen fish showing simultaneously, but the supply seemed inexhaustible over those ten miles of water between the two headlands, Rudha Bocaig and Rudha Bhaird, to the south and the north of Scalpay Island.
On that first day, a Thursday, we killed no less than nine sharks, and on the Friday, despite bad weather in the afternoon, we shot another six. The last of these had attached to his back a parasite we had never seen before, a brilliant steel-blue fish, perhaps eighteen inches long, clinging to the mid-line of the back between the two dorsal fins. He remained in view while the shark rolled two or three times at the surface after the tail hawser had been secured to the ship’s side, but detached himself and swam clear before any way of catching him had occurred to us. This must have been a species of Remora or shark-sucker, not previously recorded from the Hebrides.
We were seventy-odd miles from Soay and the factory, and to tow the sharks there would have meant four full days’ ferrying for the Sea Leopard. We decided to draw them up on the Scalpay beaches and cut out their livers. The beaching of those fifteen giant carcases took the whole of Saturday, and required the co-operation of both boats. The work had to be done, for there was no pier to which they could be tied without obstructing the berth of the Island steamer when she came in; outside, the sea was still full of sharks, but we were not free to hunt them. The beaching could only be done at full tide, and it took two tides before the work was complete.
Between tides there was much else to be seen to. We had to find containers for ten or more tons of liver and somehow organise its transport back to the factory. It was the clearest object lesson we had yet received in the futility of working without some form of factory ship which could perform its own oil-extraction on board.
It was a windfall to find that in a store in Scalpay harbour there was a huge quantity of new and unused half-size herring barrels which some firm had left there in connection with a herring-curing project. The barrels were no longer required by their owner, and after an exchange of telegrams and telephone calls with the mainland we were able to buy them all at a reasonable figure.
Next there was the question of transport; the bulk was far too great for the Sea Leopard to carry without many journeys, and we hoped, too, to kill at least another thirty sharks during the following week. There was only one thing for it, to hire transport, and I arranged with a Glasgow firm, seeming incredibly distant at its two-hundred-odd miles away, to send up a “puffer”—a small steam cargo-boat. It was a gamble, but, I thought, a justifiable one; the hire of the boat would cost three hundred pounds, but even if we caught no more sharks, the livers of those that we had would do more than pay the cost.
Scalpay was capable of comedy as extreme as its beauty. When, late in the evening, we had finished moving the barrels from the store to the beach where the sharks lay, and the Sea Leopard was once more berthed at the pier, a very old and very tiny man came to ask us if we would give him one barrel so that he could cure some herring for the winter. He enunciated the English words with infinite difficulty, and his voice creaked like some piece of machinery long disused. I conceded his apparently humble request with some reluctance; for, small though the item was, it entailed a disproportionate amount of trouble in book transfer and cash adjustment from fund to fund. In the same laborious and unlubricated voice he expressed his everlasting gratitude, but when I handed him the barrel he said he would “send the boy for it,” and moved slowly and painfully off up the pier.
Some half-hour later “the boy” arrived, followed at a distance of some yards by the new owner of the barrel. “The boy” was small and slight, and he carried himself bent double, with his back almost parallel to the ground, moving as slowly as his follower. For he was at least eighty years old. Ages beyond that are difficult to estimate with accuracy, but he was no less. The two of them arrived at the ship’s side with an almost ritual similarity of movement.
“Put it on the boy’s back,” quavered the first gnome, advancing with a piece of string already knotted into some form of harness; and the second gnome was carefully reversed up to the stack of barrels on the pier. His shoulders, bent as though they had borne the entire aggregate of human sorrow since birth, made a perfect resting-place for the feather-light barrel; it was knotted into position under his armpits, and in response to a creaking Gaelic sentence he moved off into the dusk.
But the first gnome lingered on. He spoke, but we could not understand him. At last the twins arrived, and between angelic grins they translated. He wanted whisky, just a very little, for his health. It so happened that we had none on board—no alcohol at all, in fact, but some champagne we had been keeping to celebrate the first week in which we killed twenty sharks. We told him so, and it was duly translated, but clearly he did not believe us. He thought we were holding out on him. He argued and pleaded, half in English and half in Gaelic, while the boys became brusque and almost menacing. Then he played his last card. So slowly that there was a second’s interval between each word, he said;
“I—am—ferry—bad—with—the—flumatism”; then, as if seized by a sudden doubt, he added “I think.”
It was too much for me; it was too much, too, for a distinguished Cambridge don who was staying with me on the Sea Leopar
d, Walter Hamilton, now headmaster of Westminster, and one of my first subscribers. We fled precipitately to my cabin, where we dissolved into fits of giggles unknown to either of us since childhood, pausing only now and again to say to each other “Ssh—he’ll hear us!” before the convulsions came on again.
How many whose livelihood depends on the sea have thought that if they could control the wind they would ask no more; what proof of divinity more certain to touch the hearts of those early fishermen could Christ have given than the stilling of the waves. Now, when at last we were in sight of fortune, those winds that we could not still sprang up again, and for all the following week it blew and blew, until the calm shining sea over which we had sailed so few days before seemed a memory infinitely distant.
I pictured the boat that we had hired lying, perhaps, in the Crinan canal, or in some port far to the south of us, unable to face the open sea, while her bills mounted daily. Fortunately for us, however, the Moonlight, as she was called, developed boiler trouble half a day out from Glasgow, and did not reach Scalpay until Friday evening. We spent the week working upon the beached carcases, and chasing sharks with the Gannet among the rocky islets and reefs of East Loch Tarbert, which separates Scalpay from Harris on the south side. Even in that comparative shelter there was quite a sea running; and between it and the unknown hazards of the hidden rocks we had all the excitement we could have wished for, if not all the sharks. It was a different form of shark-hunting from any that we had known; the channels between the islands were often no wider than broad roads, and among these winding alleyways we had to look for shelter as well as sharks, and to judge carefully in what direction a shark would take the Gannet after it was harpooned, for we could not use the barrels in these conditions. We were making, as it were, a series of tip-and-run raids upon the outliers of the main shoal, and we could never kill more than one fish without returning to the harbour, for that was the Gannet’s towing capacity. Altogether we killed six in this way during the week, which was, as one of the crew put it, better than a slap in the belly with a wet fish.
The beaches where we had drawn up the sharks were a tremendous and terrible sight. The sharks lay in long rows at the tide-line, black mountains on the pale grey boulders. As more and more of the carcases were opened the blood trickled down among the stones, and the sea behind them became crimson for hundreds of yards, a true sea of blood. We had soon acquired a technique for the opening of these carcases from which we required the liver only: we would cut two long vertical slits in the flank, one at the front and one at the rear end of the belly, and then connect the tops of these two incisions with a horizontal line. It was, so to speak, a door in the shark’s flank, with the hinges at the bottom. As the horizontal cut was almost completed the door would begin to sag outward under the tremendous weight of the liver and entrails that it was holding in, and one had to jump aside to avoid that ponderous slithery mass as it came rumbling out like an avalanche. 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.
There were other reasons for the horror; this was not the first contact I had had with that particular shark. He was the fourth in the line, a huge bull of unusually black colouring, and when the working party, moving down the line, had reached him, he was still moving, shuddering and undulating down his entire length, though he had been beached for two days. I told them to go on to the next fish, and went back to the Sea Leopard for one of the two eight-bore shot-guns which we carried aboard her. At point-blank range I shot the shark between the eyes four times, so that the brain must have been completely obliterated. There was no visible effect; the movement of the body neither accelerated nor slowed. Then, to make certain that the fish was dead, we cut off the entire forepart of the head with axes, but this, too, produced no change. Four days later, when we dragged the carcases off the beach, the body, now headless and disembowelled, was still twitching and jerking over its whole length.
The removal and barrelling of the liver was light work by comparison with the recovery of the harpoons. When they had passed clean through the body, or come to rest in the body cavity, we had only to remove the shackle that had secured the end of the steel trace to the rope and then draw the harpoon out forwards, as a prolongation of its original flight. But when it had penetrated the vertebræ, or its barbs had become jammed in that mass of cartilage, it was sometimes half a day’s work with axes and saws to free one harpoon.
At nightfall, when we were all exhausted, the barrels of liver on the beaches must either be ferried across the harbour to the Sea Leopard and lifted onto her decks with the hand derrick, or must in some way be secured against the tide floating them off during the hours of darkness. We thought, the first night, that we had moved them all above the tide’s reach, but at the very first light a messenger came to tell us that they had broken loose and were floating all over the harbour, and that some had gone out on the ebb tide and would soon be in the open sea. It took nearly all that day to round them up with the Gannet and the Sea Leopard, and when we had at last beached them again we roped them in flotillas one to another, so that they could not become completely dispersed. Even so, they would somehow slip their ropes when the breeze freshened during the night, and latterly one of us would remain as a patrol on the beach while the others slept.
On Friday the Moonlight came in from the south, and by degrees the barrels were ferried over to her and stored in her capacious hold. Her capacity was three times what she was carrying, and we decided to gamble on the weather once more, and to keep her with us throughout the following week. If the weather was fair she would provide a solution to another problem, too. The Sea Leopard’s winch, on which we had been so long dependent before the Gannet’s had arrived, was hand-operated, though with a lever large enough for several men to work at a time. The Gannet’s was driven directly from her engine, so that now she could haul up a shark far more quickly than could her parent ship, and when we were in these dense shoals the process of winching up with the Sea Leopard had come to seem frustratingly slow. We intended, therefore, to keep the Moonlight with us on the fishing-grounds, to haul in harpooned sharks while we went on shooting. We hoped to bring off during the following week the slaughter of which the gale had cheated us during the past five days.
Monday dawned calm but dull, and we were out at the very first light, the Moonlight having been instructed to come out and find us by eight-thirty a.m. The sea had gone down very quickly, and the air, even at that early hour, was muggy and warm. The tops of the hills were hidden by banks of heavy grey cloud, lying flat and inert as though they had always been there and the hills had pressed upon them and grown up through them.
The sharks were nearly as plentiful as they had been before the weather broke, but now they were more capricious in appearance, the fins often submerging before guns could reach them. We had shot three when the Moonlight came punctually round the point, and she began at once to pull up the float-barrels. Presently a mist started to form, so that after two hours each boat had little idea of where the others were, and only the boom of a gun in the mist, sometimes startlingly close by, would tell us of the others’ activity. The visibility limited our catching power, for a float-barrel was soon lost in the mist, and whereas the Sea Leopard could summon the Moonlight with her hooter the Gannet had to winch up her sharks as she shot them, and sometimes approach the next one handicapped by a carcase lashed alongside, whose heavy drag made the steering inaccurate.
Altogether we landed eight sharks that day, and lost two more float-barrels in the mist. The Moonlight and the Sea Leopard laboured back into the harbour just before dusk, and it was three o’clock in the morning, and the sky already paling, when we had drawn up the sharks on to the beaches, now cleaned by the tide of all trace of their former carnage.
The weather gave us only one more day’s fishing. The next morning was as fair and smiling as the day on which we had arriv
ed at Scalpay, and we killed twelve sharks. The Moonlight, unaccustomed by practice to the securing of sharks after they had been brought to the surface, took an age to lasso the tails and to fix the gill-slings in position, and by seven in the evening there were still five barrels dotted over a radius of perhaps four miles. Most of the sharks had now submerged; only an occasional fin showed through the field-glasses far out towards the Shiant Islands. The Gannet drew alongside us to discuss our further action, and in the course of comparing notes on the day’s work we discovered that we were a shark short. Up to this time in the evening the Gannet claimed to have killed four sharks and lost two; one of which had pulled the harpoon out after being buoyed for three hours, and the other had gone off with its rope—unfortunately, the nylon rope, worth thirty-five pounds—which had been insecurely fastened to the buoy. From the Sea Leopard I claimed to have harpooned seven sharks, and lost one through a leaking buoy. The Moonlight had four strung alongside her and was now hauling up a fifth, yet there were only five barrels within the most distant view of the field-glasses. Each of us stuck to our figures, each was unshakable, and eventually we decided to take the Sea Leopard for a wide sweep in the direction of the Shiants to look for the missing shark.
We described one semi-circle about five miles from land and found nothing, then another, more than a mile further out. The sea was white and motionless, and midway in the northern part of our arc I thought I could see something about two miles further out, almost due north to the Shiants. It did not, on the other hand, look quite as a shark should. There was a large dark object that might be the barrel; there were smaller objects not far from it that might be sharks’ fins, but among these there was something longer and thinner, like a spar canted over at an angle. We turned and headed for this indeterminate blot, that looked in the heat-shimmer like a small but significant hieroglyphic upon the unmarked white sheet of sea and sky.