Besides Foxy, I had with me John Winter, the international sailing-dinghy champion, who was spending a leave at Morar. It was a bright but rather blustery afternoon; a choppy dark blue sea beginning to break white. Winter and I were sitting talking on the foredeck when there came a great yell from Foxy at the tiller.
“Major, Major, sharks!”
He was pointing inshore to a little bay; a reef practically closed it from the south, and the water broke viciously over other black teeth of rock in the bay itself. But were they all rocks? Suddenly one moved with a flash of light on a smooth wet surface; and with a leap of the heart I saw it turn into the broad dark triangle of a shark’s dorsal fin. Then another, and another; there were half a dozen sharks in the bay.
For a few minutes everything was confusion: Foxy getting entangled with the ropes he was trying to prepare; I struggling with the engine, which had jammed in gear; Winter trying to help both of us and at the same time calling out a running commentary on the sharks. At last I got the gear-lever into neutral, and we lay hove-to and rolling uncomfortably while things were made ready according to our lights. We made the end of the rope fast to a cleat amidships, which had we actually become firmly attached to a shark would most certainly have capsized us.
We turned the Gannet and headed into the bay. The fins were not always visible; there was a big surge of water coming in past the reef, which washed over them from time to time, and sometimes they submerged to reappear on a different course. The first to come within range of the boat-hook was quite unexpected; a fin surfaced almost alongside and on a parallel course, and it needed only a push on the tiller to bring it within a yard of where Foxy stood. He, being very much the strongest of us, had been chosen to push the harpoon home.
There was no question this time of seeing the fish below the surface—the water was dark, opaque, and moving; only the fin stood high out of it, a little ragged and feathery at the tip. Foxy drove the boat-hook down with all his force into the water a few inches to the near side of it. I could see the boat-hook shudder with the impact upon the solid mass below the surface, and saw Foxy pushing on the shaft for a final thrust. Then came the fountain of water shooting up from the sea, and the shark’s tail, obscured by spray, lashed down upon the water with several tremendous slaps.
Through all this Foxy was shouting, “Got him this time. Right in the b—— this time!” and he was dancing to keep his feet clear of the rope as it whipped out at tremendous speed from the coil in the hold. It was a full coil, eighty fathoms; we were in only eight or nine fathoms of water—I expected to see it change direction for the open sea, and began to turn the boat to lessen the wrench when the rope’s end was reached. But the rope did not change direction, and suddenly it stopped running out, and went slack. Tentatively, I began to haul in; a fathom came in without resistance—
“Is he still there?”
“I’m afraid not—I think–––”
As I spoke, the rope was whisked from my hands as though attached to an express train, and the palms of my hands were skinned. This time about four more fathoms went out, and again it went slack. I began to haul in, more cautiously this time and ready to drop the rope at the first sign of life at the other end of it. Three fathoms, four, six, then I felt the slight drag of the harpoon’s weight, and knew that the shark was lost. In silence we lifted the harpoon in. There was no sign of the boat-hook to which it had been lashed; later we found small fragments of it floating in the bay. The harpoon itself was unrecognisable. It looked like a corkscrew which had been bent double and then crushed in a vice. It was coated with a dark viscous slime which gave off a bitter and as yet unfamiliar smell. There were small fragments of white flesh at the bottom of the ring-slot, showing that the harpoon had penetrated about a foot into the fish.
We took a sounding; the depth was exactly the length of rope that the shark had taken out. It was clear that he had gone straight to the bottom and rolled on the harpoon. At first, perhaps, this had driven it deeper into his back, but there was nothing to hold it there, and his one short rush through the water had pulled it free.
Foxy’s disappointment took the form of anger.
“Ach to hell! The harpoon was no good. I would have been better putting salt on his tail. And I was in the bastard, fair in him. I tell you, Major, there’s not a f—g one in Scotland could have put it in further.”
All the way home Winter and I discussed what a shark harpoon should be like, scratched diagrams on the paint of the foredeck, covered envelopes with scribbles and measurements.
A firm determination to catch a shark was growing in me; it seemed a challenge. And then, quite suddenly—without, I think, any conscious build-up—I thought that here was the industry for Soay, the occupation I required, new and utterly absorbing.
I had my first harpoon made in Mallaig a week later. The essential of a harpoon with holding-power seemed to me to lie in movable barbs: something that would enter the shark in the form, as it were, of a furled umbrella whose spokes would open inside the fish and make withdrawal impossible. In the case of a hand harpoon, the spokes or barbs must fit very close to the shaft, since the force with which it could be thrust in would be limited, and any unnecessary protuberance would lessen its chance of deep penetration.
The possible variations upon the “umbrella” are almost unlimited, and the first hand harpoon I designed was T-shaped when open inside the fish. The horizontal top of the T hinged back to form a straight line with the upright, making a single fairly narrow rod. One arm of the horizontal top of the T was sharpened to a point to be driven into the shark, the other flattened and slightly “scooped” to give additional holding power. The other end of the harpoon was round, to fit it into the end of a twenty-foot length of iron piping. The weight of the piping would give extra power to the thrust, and the whole pipe would—I thought—be left in the hands of the harpooner after the harpoon itself had been driven into the shark. (Fig. B on page 35.)
I did not have a chance to try that harpoon until the following year; it was now late September, and I did not see another shark. A month later our orders came to close establishment.
Before then I had begun to make intensive enquiries into the commercial possibilities of sharks, and when in November I found myself a civilian I had finally made up my mind to experiment in commercial Basking Shark fishing. I had gone further than that: I had taken the first false step, and bought a worthless and entirely unsuitable boat.
I had made up my mind that we should need at least one sizeable craft, so as to be better able to deal with large sharks, to extend our range, and to carry to Soay materials for building a small factory. I was in a desperate hurry to get the whole venture started the following year; I was trying to do a great many things at once, and as a result I made some serious blunders and put the project under a handicap from the outset.
That I bought a largish boat without seeing it sounds imbecile, but I had no expert knowledge and did not feel that my ignorant personal inspection could serve any good purpose. I sent an expert to survey an advertised boat, and accepted his assurance that she was a bargain at a thousand pounds. She would have been expensive at as many shillings.
The Dove was an ex-sailing drift-net boat of the Stornoway fishing fleet; at forty-five years old she was still younger than many of her sister ships. She was a seventy-foot “zulu,” lugsail-rigged, and with two Kelvin paraffin engines, a sixty-h.p. and a thirty. For a year it was as if these two vied with each other as makers of trouble and delay, and there seemed a tacit understanding between them that in no circumstances would they work simultaneously.
When I bought the Dove she had already started the winter fishing from Stornoway, and I naïvely left her to carry on under new ownership until the plans for the factory were complete and I had work for her to do. In a short time she had accumulated a heavy loss; then, early in January, she collided outside Stornoway harbour with a boat of her own type called the Lews Castle. After more than a year’s
litigation the circumstances of the accident remained obscure; the only indisputable facts were that the Lews Castle was a total loss, sinking with all gear in a little under a quarter of an hour, while the Dove had only slight damage about her bows. It was a fortunate accident for the Lews Castle, older and more heavily insured than the Dove.
The details of marine law are intricate, and to the usual complication of legal phraseology is added a babel of spiky nautical terms, many of them archaic and otherwise in disuse; the eye rattles and bumps over whole pages that contain no recognisable word or phrase. From this confusion emerged an uncomfortable point of law; if the insurers of the Lews Castle could prove my skipper to be incompetent, I could be sued for a sum much larger than that covered by my insurance policy. It was with that cloud upon the horizon that I began the new year.
Meanwhile my enquiries had revealed steadily widening possibilities. In the autumn I had spoken of my intention to John Lorne Campbell of Canna, and he was able to add a good deal to my knowledge. Before the war he had himself been enough interested in the sharks to find out the average oil-yield from a single fish and to obtain a quotation from Glasgow oil-buyers. He also told me that Anthony Watkins, brother of the explorer Gino Watkins who died in Greenland, had caught sharks in Loch Fyne during the three years before the war and was planning to combine shark-fishing with herring-fishing after his discharge.
The oil-buyers with whom John Campbell put me in touch quoted me fifty pounds a ton for the oil extracted and barrelled. It was a rising market—in 1946 we sold for eighty pounds a ton, and in 1947 for a hundred and ten pounds. We could expect eight hundredweight of oil from an average fish.
As a result of this approach to the oil-buyers I received a letter from Gordon Davidson, a senior partner in the Glasgow firm of J. N. Davidson, who handle everything even remotely connected with fish. He afterwards became a director of Island of Soay Shark Fisheries, Ltd., formed in 1947; until then, while I worked alone, he was the mainspring of the marketing side of the business.
In this first letter he told me that he considered the shark to have many commercial possibilities besides its liver oil, and that he would be interested to see them investigated. He told me that he expected the flesh to be marketable either salted, fresh, or as fish-meal, that manure could be made from the refuse, that glue could probably be extracted from the membranes, that the skin should have a high market value, and that there must be many more possibilities at present entirely unexplored. He was enthusiastic and encouraging, and offered his help in designing a small factory at Soay.
With him and the local contractor I planned the layout of a factory in Soay West Harbour, to include at first only oil-extraction and fish-meal plants, and a small laboratory where a chemist or biologist could do experimental work. The building of the factory began early in the New Year of 1945. (Photographs 49 and 50.) It was expected to be completed by June, and we hoped to catch a few sharks during the latter part of the summer.
The question of catching-equipment seemed to raise much greater problems. I had begun by writing to an arms expert and collector; he replied by sending me the name and address of a firm of manufacturers who, he thought, might be able to produce a harpoon gun suitable for catching sharks. After some correspondence, they sent on approval a weapon about the size of a shot-gun and firing (from the shoulder) a tiny harpoon about a foot long. I saw at once that it was intended for much smaller fish and was entirely useless for our purpose. The harpoon, however, incorporated a personal idea of the maker’s, which in the light of later events I would describe as an idée fixe, whose final elimination cost me untold time and money. Briefly, the harpoon was a perfectly straight rod without barb, the line being attached to it more than half-way down the shaft. It was intended that the whole harpoon should bury itself within the target, and that the strain upon the line should then lever it round until it was at right angles to the course on which it entered. (Fig. C on page 35.)
The makers of this gun undertook to build something heavier for me before the summer, but the pressure of Government work in their factory remained too great, and soon after the New Year they subcontracted the building of the heavy harpoon gun to the expert whom I had first approached. This was to be built in his own private workshop, using a 20-mm. Oerlikon barrel as a basis, and was necessarily experimental. The contracting firm were to make the harpoons for it, as well as a few hand harpoons to my own design.
We now had both a factory and a gun under construction, and two boats which we believed to be serviceable.
By this time I was installed in a tiny office in Mallaig. My days were spent in dealing with a mail which had grown to an average of nearly forty letters a day: permit forms, Ministry applications, correspondence dealing with the factory equipment, the catching equipment, the establishment of markets, the Dove’s accident, and a hundred other matters. I had no secretary and no assistant; it seemed as though I must be swept away by that flood of paper. The humble little pier, for example, which we were to build at Soay Harbour—a mere jetty of a few square feet—needed the approval of the County Council, H.M. Customs and Excise, the Admiralty, the Board of Trade, and the Ministry of War Transport. Each of these authorities required plans and applications in triplicate, and this was but a single example of what had become a daily routine. The water supply for the factory required the endorsement of a Ministry of Health analyst, and the assurance that it had already been the water supply of several crofts for more than a hundred years did nothing to alter the necessity. After a time I began to realise that these officials were as busy as I was myself. At first tentatively, then with a growing assurance, I began to ignore some of their demands. To myself I made the water supply a test case. The sample which I collected for dispatch to the Ministry of Health was so green and fungoid in appearance that I thought there was a real risk of its being turned down, and it was clearly simpler not to send it. The days passed, I ignored the repeated clamour for a sample, the Ministry letters referring to it became fewer and more widely spread, like the last drops of a summer shower. Eventually the subject was dropped; three years later that sample of water still stood in a whisky bottle—and dark enough to be whisky—on a shelf in the Mallaig office.
I soon found out, too, that the Scottish Home Department were willing to help me to cut much of the red tape which threatened to strangle the project in its infancy. I first discovered this in connection with the telephone, whose installation in the Mallaig office had been quite firmly refused to me. The Fisheries Secretary made the necessary recommendation, and the telephone was installed in five days. It was a doubtful economy, as the telephone bill incurred in bullying other Government departments soon approached ten pounds a week.
The Secretary of State for Scotland continued to give me really valuable help and encouragement in every possible way short of actual financial assistance. The Department was naturally interested in the project; it held the possibility of a new industry in one of Scotland’s problem areas; it promised the production of oil and foodstuffs at a time when both were desperately short, and the reduction of a pest by which thousands of pounds’ worth of herring-nets were destroyed every year.
With a price already on the head of every shag, cormorant, and seal, it seemed to me that the Herring Industry Board should have offered a small subsidy on the killing of each shark. They refused, I suspect, because it must have been plain to them that no larger number of sharks would be killed as a result of such a subsidy. No one would go to the lengths of killing a Basking Shark and producing evidence of having done so merely for the five pounds for which I was asking.
There were a few times during that winter of early preparation when pieces of the jigsaw seemed to fall into place in a neat and orderly way. A biochemist to work in the Soay laboratory appeared as though conjured up. I had been spending a week-end with Frank Fraser Darling (then Director of the West Highland Survey) at Strontian. During my visit an entirely coincidental letter to him arrived from a certa
in Gilbert Hartley, who had read in Frank’s Island Years of the wasted potentialities of the Basking Shark and the absence of scientific knowledge concerning it. Hartley was a marine biologist who wanted to do original work; his letter asked Frank if he knew of anyone who might provide the material for research on the Basking Shark. I wrote to Hartley at once, and told him of our plans to begin catching sharks at the end of the summer. We arranged that he should come up to Soay when we began the fishing, so as to make certain of material in fresh condition, and he prepared for me a list of the minimum equipment for the laboratory.
But such coincidence did not often come our way; as a rule every day was a losing struggle with paper and time, and when at last the Dove arrived from Stornoway in February, it became clear that we were still at the very beginning of our troubles. From the moment I set eyes on her I knew, and at the same time tried to conceal from myself, that I had made a really gigantic blunder. She was in roughly the condition one might expect of Noah’s ark were it thrown up now by some subterranean upheaval, nor would the engines have made one marvel at Noah’s mechanical genius. With her arrival I engaged the very first employee of the shark fishery. Tex Geddes (photograph 16) had served with me in Special Forces; he had spent most of his life in Newfoundland, and as a boy had been with the Newfoundland fishing fleet. He was in his late twenties at the end of the war, and it was difficult to fit into his years the variety of experience with which he was credited—lumberjack, rumrunner, boxer, knife-thrower, Seaforth Highlander, are only a few samples. He could handle a boat well, and had a keenness for adventure which appealed to me; on the debit side were a rather violent temper and a periodic liking for drink.
It was some years before I succeeded in disentangling Tex’s true history from the mass of assiduously cultivated rumour that surrounded it. His parents both came from Peterhead, on the east coast of Scotland. His mother died in giving him birth, so his earliest recollections were of his father and grandfather, who was a shipwright and also owned schooners trading to South America. His grandfather seems to have been a man of diverse activity, for he was a fisherman too, and Tex remembers hearing of his clinker-built Zulu, which he converted to carvel-build between fishings. Soon after the first World War he sailed in one of his schooners to South America, and returned lamed by slashes acquired in a knife-fight. That was his last appearance in Peterhead; he stayed only to refit his vessel, and went back to South America, where he was knifed again. This time it killed him.