We had intended to lift him on to the decks of the Dove with her steam capstan. I think we had very little idea of the weight with which we were dealing, which was certainly several tons. It took about an hour to get up steam on the Dove’s boiler. The rope was transferred again, this time to the Dove’s capstan, and the shark had something like three or four fathoms of rope between him and the boat. He used it at once, turning outwards to the deep water of the harbour, and making the Dove strain at her mooring ropes. We started the vast and antiquated capstan, and he was dragged back foot by foot until his tail was once more below the Dove’s stem. After a great deal of difficulty we managed to pass a rope round the fore-part of his body, attached this, too, to the winch, and heaved him up until he was lying horizontally at the surface alongside the Dove. In this position we meant to drag him up the boat’s side until he would roll over the gunwale onto the deck. Time and again we raised him until most of his body was clear of the water, but each time the winch failed as it began to take the full strain unhelped by the water’s support, the rope drum beginning to whir and slip as the limit of the steam’s power was reached. There was a great sag in his body between the fore and after ropes that were lifting him; his head and tail would come up almost to the Dove’s gunwale, but there were tons of unlifted weight where his belly still sagged down into the water.
It was dark when we gave up the attempt, and the disappointed crowds had begun to disperse.
They reassembled when they learned that the skipper of a boom ship, lying at the big pier, had agreed to try to lift the shark. Two of these ships, which are equipped with huge cranes, were in Mallaig to lift the submarine boom (to prevent the passage of enemy submarines through the narrows of Skye) at Kylerea; and their massive derricks stood out against the night sky like the silhouette of a London dock. It was difficult to manœuvre the Dove alongside them, because with the drag of the shark we could not get her to answer the wheel in that confined space. It was a long time before we got her satisfactorily placed; the crowds grew denser, so that looking up from the Dove’s deck the whole pier was serrated with a forest of heads.
At last we were ready to transfer the shark’s rope to the giant crane above us. The second boom ship turned her searchlights upon the swirl in the black water at the Dove’s bows, where the rope led rigid to the still-struggling tail, and the stage was set.
Inch by inch the crane began to winch in. Even before the shark’s tail broke the surface of the water the sense of strain was terrific. It gleamed and came clear, nearly seven feet wide, black and slithery, all movement stopped by that vertical lift from the water, but deeper and heavier ripples began to surge outwards as twenty feet below the surface the body of the shark still lunged fiercely from side to side.
The narrow neck just below the tail seemed infinitely prolonged; then, very slowly, the girth of the body began to rise. Size always appears greater in the vertical than the horizontal, and by the time fifteen feet of the shark were clear of the water and the girth was still increasing, he appeared literally monstrous, a creature of saga or fantasy, a dragon being hauled from its lair. The darkness, the shifting yellow reflections of the harbour lights, and the white glare of the searchlights, combined to give a stage effect of mystery and magnification. There was an excited gabble from the packed crowds on the pier, gasps and exclamations, and a group of women near the edge panicked and forced their way back into the press behind them.
“Oh, wha’ a crayture!”
“Ye wouldna’ believe it!”
“It canna be a fish!”
The cogs ground on, the ropes creaked and juddered; each sound was one of infinite tension and effort, like sobbing breaths from lungs strained beyond endurance, and the elephantine black silhouette grew to a towering monument.
Then, with twenty feet of him standing clear of the water, there was a slight snapping sound, as a man makes when he steps upon a rotten stick. The crane stopped at a quick order, and for a second there was utter silence—followed by a tremendous crack and a sickening tearing sound as the great carcase plunged back into the water. For a moment the severed tail hung suspended in mid-air; then that, too, fell with a mighty smack into the oily black water of the harbour.
After these six years I can still hear the noise from the watching crowds; feel again the almost unbearable disappointment of that moment, that last unbelievable frustration of Tantalus.
I did not think the shark had been dead; even tailless he would probably wriggle or drift with the tide into deeper water outside the harbour. I felt quite certain that we should not see him again, and not even the tail remained to prove that we had at last caught a shark and brought him to harbour.
I slept aboard the Dove and was out at five-thirty in the morning. For nearly an hour we cruised about round the place which the boom ships had left during the night, but we could see nothing in the now limpid water. We were tying the Gannet up again when an outgoing lobster-boat hailed us.
“Major! He’s here—I can see him!”
The man was bending over the side of his boat, peering down into the water about a hundred yards out from the end of the stone pier. I felt a tremendous leap of the heart, but I was not feeling strong enough to face a second disappointment, and I tried to be sceptical.
“Are you sure?”
“Aye—I can see the ugly head of him. Come out here and look for yourselves.”
It was the shark right enough, lying in about four fathoms of clear water, his mouth half open and glinting pallidly. I had a polaroid filter for my camera lens, to cut out reflection upon the water’s surface, and by screwing this into my eye as a monocle I could see him plainly. I didn’t doubt for a second that we could recover him; we had a shark, after all.
Bruce and Shand, the owner of the lobster-boat, took charge, lowering an ordinary line and fish-hook to grip inside the open jaw. They were fast into him after not much more than ten minutes, and the great carcase, lightened by the formation of gases in the belly, came looming up in the water until it was once more alongside the Gannet. We passed a rope through the gills and out at the mouth, and a quarter of an hour later the Gannet and the dead shark were berthed by the Dove. It was only seven o’clock in the morning.
We were not going to try and lift him again. I went and called on Henderson the boat-builder, and got his permission to beach the shark on the boatyard’s slip. When I got back to the Dove, Bruce and Shand had disappeared. Tex put his head up from the fo’c’sle.
“He wasn’t content—they’re away to look for the tail this time, so the shark’ll be all complete when Mallaig wakes up. Come below for a cup of tea—they’ll be hours yet.”
But it was only twenty minutes before Shand’s boat was alongside us again, with the huge tail shining like patent leather across the bows, and our dragon was complete when Mallaig woke (photograph 12).
With the shark drawn up on Henderson’s slipway we began our first, though superficial, inspection of the carcase, and sent a telegram to Hartley, the biologist. This was our first opportunity to examine a dead shark, and we began by taking measurements. The fish, a female, was twenty-five feet measured in a straight line overall, eighteen feet in circumference, with a tail just over seven feet across. The head, from the tip of the nose to the foremost gill-slit, was four and a half feet; the height of the dorsal fin was just under three. The jaws contained row upon row of tiny teeth, as small and as needle-pointed as a kitten’s; and at the back of the mouth, where the gills opened, were the black broom-like gill-rakers, which sift the plankton from the water as the shark swims with his mouth open, breathing and feeding by the same action. (Photograph 61.)
The skin was as painful to handle as a hedgehog’s, studded with almost invisible spines set in clusters, with the clear runnels between them that make a close-up photograph of a shark’s skin reminiscent of an aerial view of a built-up area. These spines had a continuous direction, so that to pass one’s hand down the length of the body was to feel no mor
e than coarse emery paper; but a reverse movement, against the grain, would leave the hand raw and bleeding. Despite this heavy armour the skin was extensively scarred by parasites, both by copepods (photographs 70 and 71; they are giant editions of the “sea lice” found upon fresh-run salmon) and by lampreys, of which this particular shark had carried so large a specimen.
We began by trying to skin the carcase. A South American manual, titled Guide to Shark Fishing in the Caribbean, had been my only available instructor, and when I reached the words “now turn the shark over” I realised that we were not going to get very much help from that quarter.
The skin itself was irregularly covered with the black mucous slime that I had several times seen and smelt on harpoons; immediately below the skin we found a thick white blubbery layer of connective tissue, and we made the mistake of trying to separate the skin from it, so that the first samples we sent away proved too thin for tanning. Below this white layer was the flesh, not much more than a foot thick on the flanks, for the whole body seemed little more than a case for the gigantic liver. The flesh alternated red and white, much as pork does, the red in the shark being muscular tissue; the liver, yellowish and slippery, weighed no less than twenty-two hundredweight.
By degrees a few hundred pounds of flesh were removed from the flanks; many of Mallaig’s inhabitants took home a shark steak for experiment, and it was served that week in both hotels without protest from consumers. The shark being an elasmobranch, a boneless fish having only a cartilaginous spinal column and no ribs, the flesh was easily accessible once we had removed the skin, and some of the populace brought their own knives and helped themselves.
We did no more than uncover the vertebrae then, those great hunks of cartilage that afterwards littered the hillside behind the factory at Soay. (Photograph 65.) They are amphicoelous; that is, hour-glass shaped, with a hollow at each end, so that when put together there remains a cavity the size of a croquet ball between them.
We had gone back to sea to hunt for more sharks by the time Hartley arrived. He performed protein tests on the flesh, vitamin assays of the liver oil and of the stomach content (which he found to be mainly cannulus and temora), and sent samples of the skin for tanning tests. There was still no equipment available for him to carry out any advanced work, but he did some simple dissections, and I remember that he sent me a description of the minute brain. Hartley never had the chance to do the detailed work of which he had dreamed, for he was recalled to the Admiralty the following spring, and it was not until 1947 that Dr Harrison Matthews and Dr Parker added that new chapter to the book of marine biology.
Ten days later I took the Gannet down the coast to the Treshnish Islands, to spend a week-end with Niall Rankin, who the following year became a subscriber to my experimental project. Twenty miles south of Mallaig we began to see fins scattered over a wide area to the southward, and from there on to the Sound of Mull we were among more sharks than we had so far seen. (Photograph 72.) There were many small fish, varying between ten and fifteen feet, but there were adults too, and the whole shoal seemed definitely to be travelling southward; for the next day, while we were on the Treshnish Islands, they had caught up with us, and there was none to be seen over the course we had followed the previous day from Ardnamurchan Point.
Frank Fraser Darling has written too exhaustively of Treshnish for me to add anything worth saying. They seem an ultimate concentration of sea-bird life; a teeming, myriad mass in perpetual activity, intent only upon the reproduction of their species. Here nature has run riot; not only the numbers but the variety of breeding species are astonishing, and on those often weird geological formations an ornithologist might spend a lifetime without reaching the end of exploration. Of the sounds, I remember best the crying of innumerable kittiwakes from the Harp Rock of Lunga, blending with the surge of the sea between it and the main cliff to make a diapason of sound like the peal of a great cathedral organ. It was in my ears all through the hot still afternoon of that idyllic day as we lay on the cliff-top. We looked down upon the sharks cruising below us in the jewel-clear water; we watched the racing, gliding fulmars as they skimmed the rock wall; fished outraged puffins from their burrows; and in the evening, while Niall’s children dived for coins thrown to the bottom of a sandy bay, the Atlantic seals that breed on Lunga came to stare inquisitively from a respectful distance.
We saw few sharks on the homeward journey, and feared that a general southward migration had taken place and that there would be no more in the Hebrides that summer, but when we went to sea again the following week there were sharks near to Soay itself. We killed two more during the next week, and in those early days that represented success. The very small fish remained after the adults had gone, and we did not kill the last until mid-October.
CHAPTER IV
Preparation: Winter 1945–6
OUR position at the end of the summer of 1945 was that we had caught a few specimen sharks, and had discovered that practically every portion of the fish had commercial possibilities. We thought, erroneously, that we had overcome the catching difficulties. We had not touched the gigantic problem of transporting the carcase from killing-ground to factory, whose necessary equipment now made a formidable list. Yet at the very heart of our policy was a schism that must ultimately be held responsible for the failure of the venture. From the time that the project had first been conceived, my instinct had been to confine ourselves to the marketing of the liver oil, the value of which had been high in peace-time and had now practically doubled. I felt instinctively that the handling of these gigantic carcases, their separation into components and the final reduction of the remnants—the head alone weighing a ton—to fish manure, would present insuperable problems. My advisors, however, accustomed to think in terms of handleable fish, and lacking the firsthand experience necessary to visualise the difficulty of moving or transporting even a small portion of a creature whose weight is measured in tons, were insistent that success could only lie in using every part of the fish. Nothing must be wasted, no possibility unexplored. I see it now as I saw it at first: an ivory-hunter in the deep Congo jungle, standing by the mountainous carcase from which he has cut out the tusks and pondering how he may capitalise the tons of flesh, the hide, the bones—all the apparent and gigantic waste. But so insistent were my advisers, and so apparently experienced in the mass handling of all that comes out of the sea, that I was won over completely to their point of view. The factory, not the ships, was to be the nerve-centre—a nerve-centre doomed from its inception to starvation from blocked arteries. I know now that the shark’s liver is the elephant’s ivory, and felt then that nothing but a movable factory on the whaling-ship plan could ever make profitable the working of the carcase.
But by the end of the summer of 1945 the choice between these two widely divergent policies had been unwisely made, and we intended either to market or to explore no less than ten different products during the 1946 season: liver oil, liver residue, glue from membranes, frozen flesh, salted flesh, fish meal, dried fins, bone manure, plankton stomach contents and glandular products.
It was clear that most of this processing must take place at sea, if the factory were not to become choked, and my programme for 1946 therefore included the buying of a Tank Landing Craft Mark IV, for conversion to a small floating factory which could act either as parent or subsidiary to the shore factory. All this required more money; there was very little left, and the Dove also must be replaced by something more suitable and serviceable.
At this time the programme for 1946 represented an expenditure of a little over twelve thousand pounds. I had been lulled into a state of euphoria upon this question by apparently firsthand information from my intermediary that the necessary funds would be obtainable through the Scottish Development Council, whom I had approached earlier with the fullest details of the project. I was consistently encouraged in this belief until the autumn of 1945, when, feeling that six months was far too short a time for preparation, I tried
to bring matters to a head. The President then told me that, whereas he was extremely interested in the project and anxious to help in any way possible, his Council were in possesion of no funds whatsoever. He put me into touch with the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation, whose terms proved unattractive. The Secretary of State for Scotland and the Fishery Division of the Department of Agriculture, with both of whom I was in constant touch and who remained sympathetic and helpful in the cutting of red tape, advised me that under the existing organisation there were no public funds that could be touched for the purpose. It was clear that the programme would require drastic modification.
I approached the heads of certain great concerns who might have had an interest in seeing the industry develop. Their attitude was in each case the same, expressed with the greatest clarity by the kindest and most human of them in the words, “My dear boy, if we were going in for a new industry like this, we should write off fifty thousand pounds and five years to experiment—you are expecting to make a profit on twelve thousand pounds and one year’s experiment.” This was wisdom, though I did not recognise it—in fact it took three years and the partial misapplication of twenty thousand pounds to bring us tantalisingly within sight of success.
In November I drafted a revised scheme, based upon the bare minimum necessary for continuation, and circularised this draft to such of my friends as I thought might be interested. Nine of them responded with loans for continued experiment. Without their help at that critical moment this book could never have been written, nor the unique scientific work later carried out by Dr Harrison Matthews and Dr Parker have been achieved.
The modifications of our programme, such as cutting out the floating factory, reduced our capital requirements to a possible working figure of about seven thousand five hundred pounds.