We did not know then that where there is one shark there are probably others, so we turned for home—northwards, to pass between Rhum and Canna. It began to rain, and the hills of Rhum were blotted out in a cold grey mist.
We had not gone a mile before we saw another shark. He was perhaps a quarter of a mile to seaward of us, the fin rolling in the run of the increasing swell, and travelling slowly westward.
We had only one harpoon left; I fitted it to the iron pipe and disconnected the useless second trace, while Bruce turned the Gannet’s head for the fin. There was very much more motion on the water now, and I could stand upright upon the foredeck only by using the iron pipe as a lever against the boat’s side. The pipe was enormously heavy, and my arms were already tired when for the second time in that day I found myself fairly placed for the harpoon thrust. It requires an entirely different grip on the piping to drive a harpoon vertically downwards from that necessary for a thrust at, say, forty-five degrees, and we had run very much more closely over the shark than I had expected. I had been ready for a thrust outward from the boat, and when I found myself directly over the fish it was too late to change my grip. I seemed to strike the body too low down, and the thrust lacked power; I had no confidence in the result. Again the rope ran out quickly, the buoy submerged and never reappeared, and the shark began to tow us slowly south-westward. We made some tea on the primus stove, and sat back to wait.
At the end of three hours the situation was unchanged. The light was going fast, and we were nearly stationary some three miles west of Rhum. There was a breeze coming up from the south-west, bringing ragged grey clouds against a primrose sky. The sea was of that blanched absence of colour that is seen only at dusk.
It seemed to us that we had lost the last shark because we had not allowed him to tire enough before trying to pull him in, and we were determined not to make the same mistake again. This time we decided to let him tow the Gannet all night.
Just before dark some ring-net boats passed to seaward of us, heading north for Canna Harbour. One of them, a boat of Manson’s, turned off her course, and a figure came out from the wheelhouse to hail us. The voice came faint across the water.
“You’d better get the hell out of here and make for Canna—there’s a gale warning on the wireless.”
But it would have taken an earthquake warning to make us lose that shark without a struggle. We made up our minds to try to hold on.
Saying, “Well, you’re warned, anyway,” the figure turned back into the wheelhouse, and the boat went on northward into the dusk.
Two lighthouses were visible: Sanday light on Canna, and Hyskeir, a lonely, windbeaten rock ten miles to the south-west of it and the same distance north-west of us. These two lights flashed yellow in the thickening dusk; gradually Rhum was blotted out behind us, and they were the only visible things in inky darkness.
After an hour the breeze began to stiffen and it became very cold; then with the night and the breaking seas came the most beautiful of all the sea’s jewels: the phosphorescence of noctiluca. Each breaking wave glowed with pale opalescent fire, and when the water, slapped against the boat’s sides they were left sparkling with a thousand tiny lights.
I crawled up the foredeck to feel the position of the rope; it led ahead at an angle of forty-five degrees, and from it streamed a trail of phosphorus which told me that our speed was increasing. We were heading west nor’west, and making about five knots into a rising sea. Except for the sound of the breaking water, the night was very quiet; the Gannet had no rigging for the wind to play tunes upon. We sailed a dream sea in the dark and the eerie phosphorescence, towed by the wounded shark far below us in the dark water.
One of us at a time was to remain awake and check the bearing of the lighthouses by the boat’s compass. My watch ended at midnight, when Hyskeir Light bore due north and our course was about westward. The wind was rising steadily; we were a long way from land and being towed further seaward, with a small fuel supply and no food. I was too tired to care when I rolled myself in my duffel coat and went to sleep on the floor of the hold, leaving the outcome in Bruce’s more capable hands. The last thing I heard before I slept was Tex’s voice saying, “If we have to do this every time we catch a shark I’ll be needing double pay.”
Through my sleep I heard voices once or twice—when I became conscious enough to understand, I realised that Hyskeir Light was bearing north-east and that Sanday Light was obscured. I roused myself, stupid with sleep and cold, to find that it was nearly two o’clock and that we were in a really heavy sea, the breaking phosphorescence stretching around on every side to the limit of vision. There was a distant undercurrent of sound, deeper and heavier than the nearby breakers, which at first I could not place. Then through it came an unmistakable call, thin and buffeted by the wind, but sweetly familiar, the calling of curlews—curlews that meant rock and reef.
We trusted to Bruce, and Bruce gave the inevitable verdict that we were as unwilling to accept as he to give. We must get free of the shark somehow and at once.
Again I crawled up the foredeck and felt the rope; it stretched out at an acute angle, and thirty yards ahead was a little boil of phosphorescence in the water. We were going fast and nearly due west; the shark must have been swimming almost at the surface.
We started the engine and went hard astern, trying to pull the harpoon out. The rope’s half turn on the winch began to slip yard by yard; we made the half turn a double turn and tried again. It was impossible to tell whether we were making or losing way, but nothing gave. After five minutes it was clear that we could not pull the harpoon out—my bungling thrust had taken firm hold of a shark at last, and nothing would free us from him but to cut the rope. Bruce chopped through it with an axe, seven and a half hours after I had planted the harpoon.
Dawn came as we passed between Rhum and Canna, a bleak dawn with a heavy sea and lashing rain. The journey home took five hours; we were soaked and shivering, and I felt seasick for the first time in my life.
CHAPTER III
The First Kill
WE had lost both of our hand harpoons, and it seemed to us that we could not haul up a hand-harpooned shark without a motor winch, though a gun might drive the harpoon far enough into the fish to touch some vital part, or at least weaken him. The winch had been on order for a long time, and the gunmaker was constructing a more sensible type of gun harpoon, but meanwhile we had no equipment to use. We spent ten days in Mallaig, while the Dove went on carrying factory materials, and we had two more hand harpoons made locally. At the end of that week I got a telegram from John Campbell of Canna saying Huge shark off Compass Hill. Compass Hill is the highest, north-facing, cliff of Canna, and is so called because the metal ore it contains draws a ship’s compass several points. It is a stupendous precipice, six hundred feet high and overhanging in places, covered everywhere with seabird colonies. From the summit one can look down almost vertically to the sea, and I knew that John must have seen not only the fin but the whole body of the shark, like a submarine below the surface.
We sailed for Canna at once; there was some talk of a drifting mine in the neighbourhood, and as we put out from Mallaig Harbour an incoming ring-netter hailed us, “Best find the mine and harpoon that for us!”
We saw the shark almost as soon as we had rounded Compass Hill. The water was a mass of young puffins and guillemots, some scurrying in front of the fin as it furrowed the calm water. He seemed to be swimming in a fairly close circle, and sometimes he submerged so that there was only a ripple on the surface above the fin-tip. We made two or three approaches, but each time he submerged completely when almost within range. The tiller of the Gannet was out of reach of the engine, so that if anything more complicated was required than an approach at a constant low speed there had to be one man at the tiller and another at the engine to obey his instructions. As the shark repeatedly submerged we overran him more than once, so I left Tex at the harpoon and went back to the tiller myself. Nothing I coul
d do brought the shark within range of the harpoon. Sometimes he rode high on the surface, sometimes he would submerge altogether, always to reappear swimming round the circumference of that strange, tight circle.
At last the moment came when I had lost him altogether. I did not know whether he was ahead or astern of us, and I peered over the side to see if I could make out his shadow somewhere beneath the surface. As I looked, the Gannet’s side was almost brushing a large whitish object a couple of feet down—at first I took it to be some unfamiliar portion of the shark. Then I saw weed clinging to a nozzle-like protuberance. My reactions must have been desperately slow—my eye had taken in a second protuberance and the giant football below it, now almost touching our stem, before I understood that I was looking at the mine. “Best find the mine and harpoon that for us!”—and out of all the miles of water we had found it, after all. Probably the long-delayed evasive action I took was too late to affect matters one way or another; we escaped, as we had run into danger, by hazard. We left the shark still cruising slowly round and round the mine, and all the way until he was out of sight we looked back over our shoulders, wondering whether he would go that inch too close that we ourselves had so nearly been.
We put in to Canna Harbour, and telegraphed the position of the mine to Mallaig. I wasted several hours there, because I have never mastered a temptation to stay forever on Canna each time I go ashore. It is unlike any other island, and it is entirely beautiful. The hill that is brought up short by the cliff-fall of Compass Hill is of green turf eaten short by a million rabbits. This expanse of green, when the eye has become accustomed only to red and grey rock and dark heather, is like an oasis in a desert, and round the small mansion house are elms as leafy as a deep English summer. The path from the pier, where the rocks are painted with white initials and dates and boats’ numbers, as in England boys carve their initials upon trees, runs along the sides of a shallow bay, where eider-ducks and their broods are as confiding and unconcerned as mallard on the Serpentine. At the other side of the bay is Sanday Island, whose lighthouse we had watched in the dark as the shark towed us out into the Minch from Rhum. Sanday, joined to Canna only by a bridge, is green too, and edged with low cliffs alive with gulls and guillemots. Everything on Canna looks neat, tidy, and appropriate to its surroundings; the mansion house is unassuming and architecturally satisfactory, the use of the land is efficient, and there is none of the dereliction that one must associate with so many of the Hebrides. On Rhum there is luxury, the huge and anomalous Scottish Baronial Kinloch Castle, of dark red stone, sombre and appalling in its surroundings. It is said that when Kinloch was built, Sir George Bullough received two specimens of stone for his approval; both were the red Torridonian sandstone, but one came from Rhum and the other from the Isle of Arran, a hundred and fifty miles to the south. He chose the Arran stone. The interior of Kinloch is stately and deserted for the greater part of the year; Canna is habitable and inhabited, warm and living; its owner a scholar of all that is Gaelic in tradition, an explorer of every way in which his and like communities may be improved.
Bruce had stayed with the Gannet, and Tex and I, on different errands, had become separated. As I returned down the path I saw Tex at the pier, waving his arms and bellowing something incomprehensible. Following the line of his pointing arm, I saw a big shark’s fin cruising very close to the rocks right inside the harbour. One had the impression that the shark did not want to remain at the surface, and that only the very shallow water of the ebb tide was periodically forcing him high enough for the fin to show.
I joined Tex, panting and blowing, and we shinned down the uprights of the pier to drop into the Gannet’s hold. Bruce was already methodically busy, coiling down the rope and fitting the harpoons into their pipes. We were under way in less than five minutes.
The shark kept obstinately to the line of rocks; sometimes there was barely draught for the Gannet’s keel. The wind ruffled the water’s surface to royal blue, so that we could not see below it or follow the shark’s movements. He behaved uncharacteristically; sometimes travelling a good deal faster than we had seen any other shark at the surface, sometimes nearly stationary, but always changing course. At the end of twenty minutes we had been almost within range a dozen times, but at the last moment he had always either sheered off or submerged. The time came, as it had come with the shark under Compass Hill in the morning, when we had nothing to follow, no idea where he would surface next. The Gannet had a very little forward way on her, almost hove-to, when the shark surfaced on the same course, heading for the shore, right under her bows. The dorsal fin was two or three yards ahead and a foot or two to starboard of us. I could see nothing below the surface, but Tex, who had the forward harpoon, was looking down upon the narrow after-part of the body where it thinned out to the tail. The delay had made him impatient, and he was not going to wait for a better chance.
He raised the iron piping over his head and drove vertically downward. As he did so, I tried to detach my own harpoon from its pipe-shaft, thinking that the useless pipe would carry Tex overboard in the shark’s first dash. I was bending over it when the whole boat seemed to be struck by a high-explosive shell. From the comer of my eye I was aware of the shark’s tail somewhere high in the air and apparently about to slam down right on top of me. I ducked instinctively, and I was on all fours when two objects hit me almost simultaneously. The first was a harpoon pipe, whose end struck me a tremendous blow in the groin. Then Tex, whose body felt like a ton of rocks, fell backwards on top of me, bounced off, and tumbled back in the hold upon the coil of rope, which was streaking out at high speed. I realised dimly that Tex was in very great danger, and that if any part of him got tangled in the rope he would have broken bones before he was dragged overboard. I fell back into the hold myself, and was trying as I did so to lug Tex clear of the rope-coil. He seemed unconscious and had a lot of blood coming from his head. Bruce had jumped forward from the tiller with the same idea, but as he landed in the hold his foot caught in a snarl of rope, and his problem was added to ours. The Gannet’s bows were jerked violently round into the bay, and for a second or two we seemed to be travelling at enormous speed with no one at the engine or the tiller. Then the harpoon pulled out, and the Gannet gradually lost way, while Bruce and I struggled with the situation in the hold.
Tex was semi-conscious and bleeding from a long open gash in his head; Bruce had a wrenched ankle, and I was feeling dazed and sick from the blow I had taken in the groin. It was not until some time later that we managed to reconstruct what had happened.
We were by this time quite familiar with the sideways and upwards lash of a shark’s tail after the harpoon had gone home, but until now the harpoon had always been very much further forward, and not in the part of the shark that was actually lashing. Tex’s harpoon had gone in only a few feet forward of the tail-fin, where the body is narrow, hard, and very muscular. The first lash of the tail had been away from the boat, and had carried the long iron piping with it. Tex was still trying to recover his balance when the tail came back, much higher out of the water, and carrying the pipe with it like a tilting lance. He had ducked just in time to avoid being impaled, but the end of the pipe had caught him a glancing blow on the head before hitting me.
We took Tex up to Canna House, and a guest staying there, a trained nurse, examined his cut. It was long and gaping and obviously required stitches; Tex was given the better part of a tumbler of whisky, and in the warm kitchen among the Siamese cats she stitched it neatly and efficiently.
A fortnight later, in August 1945, we caught our first shark. We had other failures in the meantime; not all as dramatic as these, but the excitement and the bite of disappointment remained as keen.
Our first shark was a worthy climax; no fiction-writer could have invented a longer-held tension, improved upon that eleventh-hour near-disaster, or arranged for a larger audience to watch it.
At that time I was staying with relatives at Morar, four miles from Mallaig,
and used to motor in every day after breakfast. They were a forbearing family; I had arrived to stay for a week after my discharge from Special Forces, and was still there at this time, nearly a year later. In the end that original week’s visit lengthened to an intermittent stay of between two and three years.
Probably it is impossible to describe Morar Lodge as it was then to anyone who did not know it; its passing, or rather return, to more conventional occupants a few years later removed a richness from the face of the West Highlands. In fiction, perhaps, old Mrs Knox’s house as described in The Experiences of an Irish R.M. approached it most nearly; its atmosphere of comfort, kindness, mingled squalor and riches, but, above all, its animals. The house and its environs were inhabited, by invitation, by an infinitely greater number of animals than of humans, and against their amiable but ruthless depredations had accumulated an elaboration of uncouth barricades and defences that seemed to dominate the main elevation of the house, and crept like the spread of green-fly on a rosebush into the very living-rooms themselves. These were occupied by a numerous, indeterminate, and largely floating population of dogs, to which was added at this time my own somewhat bulky Springer Spaniel, and the noise of their disagreements, attempted amours, and harsh protests as they were stepped upon by some unacclimatised guest was one of the more characteristic sounds of the house. At bedtime each armchair and sofa was stacked high with books and other angular objects to pin the dog population to the floor during the dark hours, giving a nightly appearance of the early stages of house-moving. Two pale grey cats, who all night long would pursue each other through the shrubbery with harsh unvarying cries, resulting in the female’s almost miraculously perpetual state of pregnancy, completed the official indoor population; but for a considerable period of my stay a hen also lived in the drawing-room, a scrawny black pullet named Angusina with some miscellaneous deformity which at the moment eludes me, but which had qualified her for the privileged position of trust that she now held.