Tex’s father was a seaman and a timber-worker. He was fishing from Port Gordon when one of the great herring rows took place, ending by the police being thrown into the harbour, and as a result he and a number of his fellows left the country. He went to Newfoundland, taking with him Tex, then two years old. He found work as a lumberman at Three Rivers, and five years later he was killed there, blowing up a log-jam in a big river drive. Tex was left an orphan at the age of seven, and was brought up by his father’s foreman, a Frenchman whom Tex knew as Peter.
Peter sent him to school, but when he was twelve he was expelled as unmanageable. He was afraid to go home to Peter, so he made for the woods and joined up with a lumber camp. He got a job as a “monkey,” or “topper,” one of the boys who are employed at a pound a day to climb with irons to the tops of the great trees to lop them off.
“If you didn’t keep on sawing till the very last minute,” said Tex, “the top would break and the branches would chew you up, or a spike of the main trunk go right through you. I saw boys killed that way; that’s why we got that pay, and it was huge money in those days.”
This phase was followed after a year or two by his first sea experience, which, in the light of what it led to, must remain still partially veiled. The boat of whose crew he was a member was at the time in question in the Straits of Belle Isle, between Quebec and Newfoundland, and she could not be said to be fishing. At Belle Isle were metal-ore mines, but the mines were not paying, and there was a profitable alternative in rum-running to the mainland. There were many methods of smuggling; one of the least ingenious being, perhaps, the commercial traveller carrying sample wedding-cakes filled with concentrated rum essence. In due course the large numbers of wedding-cakes excited suspicion, and the gaff was blown.
Tex, being one of a crew engaged in rum-running, got the danger signal to disappear, and a few weeks later he found himself back in Scotland. So far he had specialised in highly paid professions, and he was a wealthy and lawless youth with the world his oyster. He was sitting in a Glasgow pub, pondering the next step in his career, when he met a soldier. The soldier talked to him of life and adventure in the Far East, and Tex’s imagination kindled. That, he thought, was the life for him. The next day he joined the Seaforth Highlanders.
“I wasn’t in the Army five minutes till I was in gaol for insubordination, and when I came out I decided to clear out of it just as soon as I could. The Colonel sent for me and gave me a pep-talk; he must have been a bit of a psychologist, that man, because he chose the right line of approach straight off, and that wasn’t easy to find with the frame of mind I was in. But he said I wanted to quit because I wasn’t man enough to stick it, and that got me feeling the way I had to show him it wasn’t true and that I could stick more than the next man. So I stayed on, and it had made me ambitious too, so I got a stripe after ten days. I used to have a pretty good time on the whole; I was always getting excused duty for athletics or shooting or fencing or boxing, once they found out I could do those things, though the stripes on my arm were always coming unstuck as fast as I got them stuck on—well, you know me. Then after the war started I got my leg bust up in Commando training, and found myself working in the same show as you, and here we are.”
Tex summed up the Dove: “There’s a year’s work there. And she’s as full of rats as a town is of people—black rats, and carrying the plague, I shouldn’t wonder. And when you start scraping the filth in the galley there’s no wood under it, only more filth. And the Stornoway crew brought her down on one engine—the other’s all mucked up. You’ve been had for a sucker this time.”
We caught sixty rats in the first two days. They were the first black rats I had ever seen; they seemed to me far less repulsive animals than the brown; they were neat and tidy, with rather mole-like fur and very long tails, lacking the scaly and diseased look of a city gutter rat. I drowned our catch with some reluctance.
Catching the rats meant taking up a good deal of boarding, and every piece of wood so revealed proved to be rotten. There was very little in the whole ship that did not need renewing; only her massive timbers seemed to be sound. She spent three costly months in harbour before she was fit for sea. She remained in Mallaig, while boat-builders and marine engineers revealed more and more of her senile decay, and the bills mounted daily.
Through that early spring I worked steadily in my tiny office, gradually assembled equipment and gear, and came to know more of Mallaig and its people than of any other community. It is a strange town, a boom town, a Klondyke, a Dodge City; it is new and growing, but its newness and growth seem not those of this century. Sixty years ago the fishing port of the district was Tarbert, half-way up Loch Nevis, and with no road within thirty miles of it. There was a thriving community and a church, long before Mallaig had one. Now in Tarbert there is only one inhabited dwelling, and Inverie, its one-time rival, is a small crofting community dependent upon Mallaig. Mallaig was a group of a few crofts, unknown and rarely visited, approached by forty miles of dust road, hardly more than a track, from Fort William. Then in 1901 the railway came to Mallaig, and everything was changed. Richer than any gold-mine, the sea was in front and the rail behind, a rail that led to Billingsgate, and to the industrial towns of the south. And the coming of the railway meant that Mallaig became the main port for the Hebrides. But Mallaig harbour (photographs 12 and 13) has remained unchanged since the early years of the railway, and there has been no enlargement to cope with the steadily increasing flow of traffic. The local boats were twenty-two feet long in those days; now they are forty-eight feet and there are many more of them.
The ground, steep and rocky almost to the sea, was an utterly unsuitable site for a town, and the L.N.E.R. owned the only flat ground. They had staked their claim and were expanding rapidly; a railway pier beyond the station and a fish pier, and behind them the ground rose steeply to rock and heather. So houses began to spring up in crazy disorder and without a central plan. Some balanced precariously on pinnacles of rock, some wallowed in soft peat, into which they threatened to sink. Small contractors came, and became rich men in a few years; the ring-net herring fleets came to Mallaig for the summer fishing from Ballantrae, Oban, Tarbert (Loch Fyne), and Campbeltown; and the east coast fleets came from Fraserburgh, Peterhead and Lossiemouth. A Glasgow firm built a kippering factory, another an ice factory. Between the railway and the sea grew “Chinatown,” Mallaig’s slum—mostly of wooden huts, and inhabited by the fish-girls. Every inch of ground near to the water-front was now taken, and this had the curious effect of producing trade monopolies. A boat-builder, a marine engineer, a carpenter, once established, was secure from all competition. The fishing fleets must come to Mallaig, the boats must be serviced—and serviced in a hurry, for in the middle of a good fishing every day in harbour may lose several hundred pounds. When the necessary repairs to some boat’s engine should cost as little as twenty-five pounds, it might well be worth two hundred pounds to the boat’s owner to get the work done at once and go back to sea.
Against this background fortunes are made or lost with extraordinary rapidity. A man may have saved and borrowed for years for the price of a modern ring-net boat, between four thousand and five thousand pounds at the time when I lived in Mallaig. The age of the Kelvin paraffin engine was on its way out; every fisherman wanted Diesel power. But these new engines in the old hulls would have been new wine in old bottles, and the boats were built from scratch, rather larger than before, on the east coast. The Mansons, the greatest and luckiest of Mallaig fishing families, brought the first new ring-netter to Mallaig after the war; when, as old Manson put it, the old one was “growing far too wee to cross the Minch.” Such a boat may earn her whole value in a few weeks’ or months’ fishing, or the pocket whose lining has already been explored for the last of those pounds may remain empty week after week while the gales blow and there are no herring.
Perhaps the worst of all is when the money is there to be lifted from the sea, and the boat must li
e in harbour waiting her turn in the repair queue, while her crew watches the fish-buyers bid on the pier for the huge catches of other boats. In these circumstances a skipper is in danger of losing his crew. A ring-netter’s crew works on a share basis, and in a big fishing a member of it may be earning between fifty and a hundred pounds a week for himself. The number of shares into which the boat’s takings are divided varies; as a rule a skipper-owner receives about half of the total. The boat, the gear, and the skipper have a share each; besides him there will probably be five of a crew receiving a share each, or more often one of these will be a boy, with only a half share. For good ring-net crews the demand, as with certain of the Mallaig trades, is greater than the supply. Among those who often change boats a frequent trouble is drink; they may be good enough workers otherwise—indeed, some of them are the best of all—but unreliable on this account. The euphemisms, and the precise degree of unreliability that they imply, are many. “He takes one now and again”; “He likes a drink”; “He takes a good dram”; “He’s all right when he’s off it”; “He’s aye fou.” It is to this last category that a skipper may have to turn in the end, if his crew have become impatient with too much waiting in harbour. To the “aye fou’s” the more days in harbour the better.
The actual consumption of alcohol in Mallaig is probably a good deal less per head than in any industrial town, but because the people are at sea for the greater part of the week, often under conditions that a factory worker can barely imagine, they tend, as do most seamen, to make up for lost time while there is money in their pockets at week-ends.
The people have, in the main, a great friendliness and a natural generosity that is often unexpected; one and all, too, seem to share a common motto: “I’ll not see you stuck.” I was always on the verge of getting “stuck,” and I heard those words, and saw them proved, many times.
To the tourist, Mallaig may be its poster self—the gateway to the Hebrides; to me and to many it is a town of a different sort of romance: of herring scales and a million gulls, of energy and squalor and opportunity, of feud and fortune, the “end of steel”—the railhead—beyond which all is gamble.
It was late in April before the Dove was ready for her trial trip. The ring-netters were already started on the spring herring fishing, and it was difficult to collect a crew. I had a temporary skipper, Foxy, Tex, and two boys. One of these was a deckhand, seventeen, and as strong as a man; the other, fourteen and new to the sea, was ship’s cook. He would have been more correctly described as ship’s tin-opener.
I do not remember why we sailed at dusk, but I remember the evening, clear and still, and how soon after the last of the sun’s light had gone the sky was velvet black and brilliant with stars. We sailed north, up past Isle Ornsay and Sandaig Lighthouses and on into the narrows of Skye, the hills huge on either side of us and the quick south-running tide chattering about the bows. We were at sea at last, and whole loads of care slipped away.
We put into Kyle in the middle of the night. We sat in the cabin with the steady hiss of the hanging Tilley lamp above us, and drank black tea that tasted of paraffin, ate fried mackerel that tasted of paraffin, and when we rolled our blankets round us they, too, smelt of paraffin. The cabin, with bunks on each side of it, was aft, and separated from the engine-room just forward of it only by a rickety sliding door. Beyond that door the antiquated machinery groaned and hammered, so that when the ship was under way it was always difficult to make oneself heard, and from the engines and the cooking-stove came a dense, suffocating heat, laden always with paraffin. When the engines were at rest there was a fictitious illusion of comfort only because that awful din had stopped. The Dove was no luxury yacht; she had been one of that grim black procession that sails in line ahead from Stornoway to the distant fishing-grounds, each skipper in turn stepping out from his wheelhouse to spit as he passes the ring-netters from the south.
That night I found we had not cleared the rats from the ship; before going to sleep I laid the contents of my trouser pocket upon a convenient but dark ledge in my bunk, and my hand came away foul with rat dung.
I went on deck at the first light, a pale primrose dawn on which lay the giant black silhouette of an aircraft carrier at anchor a quarter of a mile to the north of us. We sailed north towards the Summer Islands; the sun came up in a clear sky, and by noon it was boiling hot, with a sea-shimmer like July. Off the Summer Isles we met a party of surrendered German submarines being escorted in by destroyers, then further north we met two great ocean-going U-boats coming in unescorted with their flags at half-mast. Foxy hoped that they would surrender to the Dove, but, to his great disappointment, they passed one on each side of us without so much as a glance from the officer in the conning-tower.
The Dove gave us no trouble on that trip; she too seemed to inhale the coming summer and the end of the war. We returned to Mallaig the next evening, and the same week we began to carry factory materials to Soay: bricks, wood, cement, gravel, and machine parts. A week later we landed an eight-ton boiler at the factory site, without pier or jetty to run alongside. It was my first object lesson in the advanced use of lever and pulley, and had the apparent impossibility of a conjuring trick. At this stage the factory site had become recognisable as such; blasting had cleared a “stance,” and there was now a flat floor of concrete some fifty feet by thirty on which our past cargoes lay covered with tarpaulins. Our chief shortage was of wood—we had failed to get licences for anything like the required amount, and decided to spend the next week salvaging. The western shores of all the Hebridean Islands are piled high with drifted timber on every beach where it can lodge, and after five years of sea war some of the lonelier bays had begun to look like Canadian logging rivers. All this wood, though it would otherwise lie forever where it is, remains the property of the Crown, and the salvager must pay for its cubic bulk as assessed by a representative of H.M. Customs and Excise.
To Rhum we went the following week, equipped to raft the timber and tow it back to Soay in bulk. Rhum is a strange place, eerie and haunted if ever a Hebridean island was. It is all mountain—hills as dark and savage as the Cuillins themselves, and falling for the most part as steeply to the sea. The hills even carry the same group name—the Cuillin of Rhum and the Cuillin of Skye; but they seem to have a different soul, something older and more brooding, almost evil. Their names are mainly Norse, given them long ago by the raiding Scandinavian long-ships—Askival, Ainshval, Orval, Parkival and Hallival—and if there is a place where I could believe every Gaelic folk-tale and wild superstition it is in their shadow. I know a man who found himself in a high corrie of Askival with a dead stag after dusk. His coat was clutched and he felt himself being dragged uphill, while from right below his feet a voice screamed as if in an extremity of fear.
The hills fall in precipice and scree to red sea-cliffs, split and columned as though by some terrible torsion. At the top of the cliffs are tongues of vivid grass, on which in summer the hinds and their calves are warm orange-brown dots. They feed to the very edges of the cliffs, and upon the green ledges and gullies that lead down among them, picking their way among the teeming puffin burrows. Below them the cliffs are white with bird guano and partly veiled by myriads of kittiwakes, endlessly wheeling, drifting and turning, like a snow scene in a glass paper-weight. At the cliff-foot there is a swell even on the calmest day, a long oily swell which flashes up the red cliffs with a sudden sword of foam. In the cliff line there is one broad and shelving bay, perhaps half a mile wide: Harris Bay, where the Atlantic flotsam lies thick enough to hide the shingle. Behind it Glen Harris is a wide and empty cup in the hills, and just above the tide-line is the tomb of the late owner of the island, a palladian mausoleum of pink marble whose voice of anomaly is subdued to a bat’s squeak by the vast hills and the moving sea.
It was bright sunshine when we came to Harris Bay, and the sea was as nearly calm as it ever is there. I had added another boat to the Dove and the Gannet, a very solid little fifteen-foot lif
eboat with a seven-h.p. engine, to act as tender and general messenger-boy. I do not remember her name now, but I know that it never stuck to her, and during the years I owned her my crew would never call her anything but “The Button.” We went ashore in her, leaving the Dove anchored well out in the bay. We picked our way through that fantastic litter on the tide-line as one might explore the rubble of some recently ruined city. There were ships’ rafts, tanks of high-octane fuel, bales of raw rubber, great hunks of tallow, R.A.F. rubber dinghies, lifebelts—and timber, timber everywhere, like a fallen forest. We worked all day, carrying beams and planks to the water’s edge, lashing and nailing them into rafts to be towed behind the Dove. Once, while we were extricating a massive beam from a pile, a hail from the Dove made us turn—to see a black fin cruising between her and the shore. We watched it for a long time; it passed close enough to the Dove to make the skipper, left aboard her, struggle to rig a hand harpoon to a rope. All that afternoon the fin was close by whenever we looked up, a stimulus to effort, a reminder of adventure ahead.
We made several of these salvage trips; by degrees the pier at Soay began to take shape, and the equipment for the factory was assembled and transported. But by the end of May it was clear that the factory could not possibly be finished before September at the earliest. I decided to wash out all idea of trading in 1945, and to devote the remainder of the summer to learning more about the catching of the sharks.
Harpoon at a Venture Page 4