The gunmaker reported that the gun and harpoons would be ready by the end of June or early July, and that he proposed to bring them up himself for personal test. The factory, also, was to have been completed by the same date. I wrote to Hartley, the biologist, and arranged for him to arrive at Soay at the same time. But by the end of the first week in July the factory, so far from being finished, was barely half completed, and much of the machinery had yet to arrive. It was difficult to justify the high running costs of the Dove on her carrying work only, most of which could at this stage have been done by a much smaller boat, and I decided that we must kill one shark as soon as possible, so that samples could be sent to the many firms who had asked for them.
But no sooner had we agreed upon a date for the arrival of the gun than the Dove required beaching once more for one of her interminable repairs (she had to wait her turn)—and she was still in dry dock when gunmaker and gun arrived in mid-July.
The gun itself was impressive but useless; just how useless it took us some time to discover. Though it showed plainly the limitations of the sub-contractor’s workshop, it showed, too, his undeniable engineering genius. The barrel was an Oerlikon, the breech fired a ten-bore brass blank cartridge, propelling from the barrel a tubular harpoon which fitted over it. The whole was mounted on a steel tripod with a circular base. The harpoon-gunner’s face was protected from blast by a thick sheet of steel between him and the gun, which had to be aligned by peering through a narrow slit like the port of a tank. It was two hundred pounds’ worth of pretentious nonsense, though I did not recognise it as such at the time.
But it was at the sight of the harpoons that my heart sank. Every one was made in conformity with the gunmaker’s idée fixe, barbless and to my mind innocuous. As with the prototype that I had seen the previous year, the line was attached more than half-way down the shaft, to turn the whole harpoon sideways in the shark after the strain was exerted. I had told him that if he wanted to try out this theory he must also bring some harpoons of my own design, of which I had sent drawings, but he had brought only fourteen of these enormities and no others. Of harpoons in which I had any faith we owned only the two hand harpoons made in Mallaig the previous autumn.
On the first day we began to mount the gun upon the newly-made gun-platform in the Dove’s bows. Difficulties began to crop up at once. Below the barrel of the gun was a wooden box into which the first fifty feet of playing rope could be coiled, to avoid drag upon the harpoon between gun and target. This box prevented a reasonable sideways traverse of the barrel between the safety railing of the gun platform. The railings had to be cut and refitted. Then we found that the backward slope of the platform from the bows prevented a depression of the gun-barrel which would put a shark within range. No sooner was one difficulty overcome than another appeared, and it was more than a week before the Dove was ready to sail from Mallaig with her gun mounted.
We went out into the Sound of Sleat and began some target tests. A fish-box was thrown overboard; we circled it and made a careful approach. This required a great deal of gesticulation, because during the later stages of the approach the target was hidden from the helmsman by the height of the Dove’s bows. The gunmaker was to fire the shot; I was to observe and report upon the result. I tried to visualise the floating box as the high dorsal fin of a shark.
The engines were running dead slow, and the range decreased infinitesimally. Seventy yards, fifty; it looked within range now, but was still beyond the effective range of any harpoon gun ever made. He pulled the trigger at about fifteen yards. The noise was much less than I had expected—not more than that of two barrels of a twelve-bore shot-gun discharged together. The air was full of flying rope, through which I could make out the silver flash of the harpoon heading straight for the target. Then, six feet short of the fish-box, it playfully changed direction and plunged vertically into the water.
In all fairness to the gunmaker, I must remember that he had constantly protested the experimental nature of the equipment, but somehow I had not doubted its capacity until I had seen those harpoons.
I was to fire the next shot, and he was to observe. We began to manœuvre again, and I realised the great problems that would be involved in dealing with even a slow-moving target. I crouched to the shoulder-piece, and put my eye to the rear-sight—a tiny hole in the large guard-plate. The position was acutely uncomfortable, and with the rise and fall of the boat it was not easy to keep the target in the sights. I pulled the trigger at about ten yards. The harpoon struck the water a few feet to the near side of the box—the correct place, for the body of the shark, well below the surface, is the target—and disappeared in a heavy boil of water. A wake like that of a torpedo showed between the point of impact and the fish-box, then the harpoon appeared momentarily at the surface beyond it. We thought it a perfect shot, and foolishly thought no more of the strange result of the previous one.
Sharks were said to be numerous at the other side of the Minch, and we decided to sail the following morning for South Uist, working north from there to the Harris coast. There seemed every chance of having a shark waiting for Hartley when he arrived at the end of the week.
Hope is long in dying; we fired fourteen shots at sharks and five at killer whales—one of these being the only fair chance I have ever had at big bull killer—and not one single harpoon struck home. We started at Uishenish in South Uist and worked north the whole hundred miles to Stornoway. There were not many sharks; we saw two or three each day, and I think that most of them were small. It was blazing hot, the sea and sky were a dazzling bubble of light in which the long chain of islands trembled and distorted themselves to mirage shapes. With the appearance of each distant fin there was at first a leap of excitement, but soon its stirring became numbed by the certainty of anticlimax. By the evening of the second day, when we anchored in Lochmaddy, I had only one thought—to have hand harpoons ready for immediate use. We had one on board, but it required alteration, so I hired a car in Lochmaddy and bumped and jolted across to the west side of North Uist, where lived the nearest blacksmith.
It was my first experience of that amazing island, and greater familiarity has not changed my first impression—a jigsaw puzzle of which every other piece has been removed to reveal water beneath it. The mouth of Lochmaddy harbour is not much more than a quarter of a mile across, but to walk dryshod from one point to the other one must travel nearly two hundred miles. Tentacles of the sea, intricate and winding as a maze, stretch for miles inland; they are as the warp to the woof of the fresh-water lochs which twine among them but never mingle; there is water on every side, and only the colour of the weed to label it as sea-wrack or peat loch. It was as though one looked at some weird map that evening, for the colour had gone from the land, leaving it dark and formless; only the water with its million arms reflected a deep orange sky, and when I reached the top of the watershed the stack of St Kilda forty miles away in the Atlantic was silhouetted against the same unreal colour.
The blacksmith had no tools for the work we required, and at midnight I got back to the Dove in a black depression.
We sailed for Mallaig the following morning, and somewhere off The Fjords we fell in with a school of Killer Whales. The killer (photograph 76) is one of the sea’s enormities. He is the wolf of the ocean, savage, calculating and cunning; nothing that swims, not even the largest of the great whales, is safe from him. Compared to them, his size is insignificant; it is a big bull killer that measures thirty feet, and the cows are little more than half that length. Killers hunt in packs of as many as forty, though I have never seen more than nine together, nor more than one old bull in any group. The cows and young are not particularly impressive, though they are easy to distinguish from the other whales of their size by the clear white patch on the side of the head, showing at each blow. The dorsal fin of the cow is twelve or eighteen inches high, a black, curved-back hook, much like that of several other species of small whale, and conveying no impression of the high exp
losive that moves below. The young bull’s fin is much the same, but rather straighter. Orca gladiator is the killer’s Latin name, and in the adult bull the fin is a sword, straight and vertical, higher than a man, a blazon of ferocity. When the killer is cruising, the fin rises slowly from the water at each blow; a foot, two foot, five—it is as though it would never end. They have been said to reach nine feet, and I thought this first one that I saw was no less. There were seven whales, travelling roughly in line abreast, and from the middle of the line rose the great black sword that seemed to embody all that I had ever read of Killer Whales: the attacks upon ponies stranded on ice-floes, the killing of the great baleen whales by tearing out their tongues, the thirteen porpoises and fourteen seals found in the stomach of one twenty-foot Orca. They are reputed to use this monstrous fin to smash the ice-floes upon which the seals lie, and when the young walrus climbs to safety upon his mother’s back the killer throws him off with the same savage thrust from below. Probably there is nothing in the sea that is unmolested by killers; scars upon the flanks and back of many of the smaller whales are almost characteristic, and I have seen Basking Sharks with the marks of fearful wounds that may also have been the work of a killer’s teeth. There is perhaps only one animal in the sea as ferocious as Orca gladiator—the Leopard Seal, or Sea Leopard, of the Antarctic, that feeds upon other seals and will chase a man across the ice.
The killers swam due south, and for forty miles we followed them along the coastline., They swam slowly—at about six knots—and they blew about every three hundred yards. Time and again we estimated the spot at which they would surface, and time and again, while I was standing tensely at the gun peering down into the water, the harsh blast of their breathing, like the first escape of steam from a train getting under way, would sound from a hundred yards to one side or the other. There was a light breeze blowing from the shore, and when they blew to windward of us the faint mist of their breath drifted to us on the air, a smell fœtid and intensely carnivorous.
We had followed them for more than twenty-five miles when at last the old bull blew right under the Dove’s bows. I could have touched him with a boat-hook from where I stood at the gun. At first he was a great black shadow coming up in the green sea; then, as the fin began to rise almost to my face, I saw his head come clear of the water, and almost dropped the gun. He had rolled a little to the side on his forward thrust, and his eye was looking straight at me—an animal’s eye, sentient and terrifying. His mouth was half open, and beyond the eye glittered the teeth of his lower jaw. I recovered my self-possession in time to fire the gun as he was beginning to sound; where the harpoon went I never knew, and there was no reason for that unique chance to be successful after the repeated failures at sharks. During the next three years, when guns and harpoons were working satisfactorily, I followed killers again and again, but that first chance was never repeated.
Hartley and the gunmaker left before we had caught a shark. Our hopes were very low; we were no nearer to catching the specimen that was so urgently needed to establish markets, and the season was more than half-way through. We made two new hand harpoons in Mallaig, and rigged the traces and ropes so that both could be driven in simultaneously by two harpooners. We heard reports of sharks from the fishermen who had been working the west shore of Rhum, and with this new equipment we set off in the Gannet.
Rhum is only two or three hours from Mallaig, and we regarded it as a day’s expedition, taking with us neither food nor spare fuel. There were three of us on board: Tex, Bruce Watt—my new skipper—and myself. Bruce (photograph 17) had joined us a week or so earlier, and remained my skipper until the middle of the 1947 season. He was a man of my own age, a former Merchant Navy Engineer Officer; a good seaman, solid, reliable, teetotal, and of a native common-sense, an absence of impetuosity, that sometimes made him seem slow in comparison with more volatile characters.
I do not remember the early part of that day clearly, because it has become obscured by the happenings of the afternoon and the night. It was grey and rather cold, with a westerly breeze. We reached Harris Bay about midday, and cruised up and down for an hour without seeing anything. We made sure that if this time we found a shark we should not lose it for lack of forethought. We went over the whole of the gear from the harpoon to the rope’s end, checking for any possible fault. Each harpoon was inserted into the end of a fifteen-foot length of iron piping, whose weight would help us to drive the harpoons in deep. The piping, we thought, would be left in our hands, after perhaps the whole harpoon had been driven into the shark’s body. The first twenty feet of the line was steel rope, which we afterwards came to call the trace, and this branched like a letter Y to a harpoon at the end of each its arms. We had realised that there might be great danger in bad timing, and that if one harpoon went in appreciably before the other there might be some very violent action. We agreed that the second harpooner—the one farthest from the boat’s bows—should give the word, as he might not have a clear target as soon as the other. I was to take the bow harpoon, Tex the second. To the trace was attached eighty fathoms of rope, and after the first thirty fathoms we fastened a canvas net-buoy—a pear-shaped balloon about twice the size of a football—on the end of a separate six-fathom rope. This, if a harpooned shark was swimming ahead, would allow us to judge his direction and movements. Near the other end of the rope we inserted two powerful coil springs to reduce the shock and make a broken rope less likely.
We were about a mile offshore when we saw the shark. It was a huge fin, now standing high and clear of the water, with a foot or two of back showing below it, now almost disappearing in the long Atlantic swell. Bruce brought us up to him very slowly, determined to give us the best possible chance. Tex and I stood side by side on the starboard bow. There was no deck rail on the Gannet, and the swell and the unbalancing weight of the iron piping made it very difficult to stand upright. I thought we should be too much off balance to get any real force into the thrust. During those minutes of approach the suspense accumulated unbearably: this was our first chance with equipment which we had ourselves designed and which we trusted. At the last moment Tex and I had the same thought—our eyes running over the arrangement of ropes and traces, each fearing that we were standing on the wrong side of some vital rope.
The tip of the tail-fin, just awash and moving slowly over a wide arc, appeared level with the bows, passed below me and slid astern; the high dorsal fin approached and was suddenly right beneath me. Peering down into the water, I could make out the great brown bulk a few feet below the surface, white patches glimmering on the back and sides. I thought Tex would never give the word to strike. Then his yell came as though he were shouting into my ear:
“Let him have it!”
I drove the iron pipe down with all my strength, nearly carried overboard by the force of the lunge. There was a fractional resistance; then the harpoon passed deep into the shark’s back and came to rest. Nothing happened; it was the anti-climax of bayoneting a sandbag. I leaned on the pipe and pushed as hard as I could; from the corner of my eye I could see Tex thrusting and shoving furiously. Then suddenly through the long shaft I held I felt a volcanic surge of strength as the tail of the shark swung towards the boat in an effort to crash-dive. Everything was hidden in a great shower of water and spray. As the spray cleared I saw that the rope was running out at tremendous speed. The canvas net-buoy, with its own six fathoms of rope, went overboard and submerged in the same instant. As the first rush began to slow a little we slipped the rope in a half-turn on the drum of the winch, and the Gannet began to be towed slowly ahead in widening circles. We seemed to be firmly fastened to a shark at last.
Every now and again the buoy would appear on the surface for a few seconds. At first we used the tiller to follow it directly; then, as half an hour became an hour, and an hour lengthened to two, we realised that until we started to haul in the rope there was nothing useful that we could do. We waited for the shark to tire himself out—we might as well
have waited for him to die of old age.
We steered an erratic course, but at the end of four hours we were not more than two miles from where we had started. The shark was swimming deeper now, and we had not seen the buoy for over an hour. It was about five in the afternoon when we decided to try to haul the fish up. We all got together on the rope, and Bruce organised our effort to get the greatest possible use from the rise and fall of the boat on the swell. His “Heave!” came each time the Gannets bows dipped into a trough, so that we gained a few feet at each pull. At the end of an hour’s pulling the shark had only six fathoms of rope left, and we could not gain another inch; it was like trying to pull a house. We were all tired; we had been using all our strength for an hour. We took two more turns of the rope round the winch and rested. The two coil springs that we had let into the rope to reduce shock were pulled out practically straight, and the boat began to shoot ahead in crazy jerks. The link between us and the shark was now so short that we were feeling each individual propulsive movement of his body. It was a deadlock; we had not the strength to pull him in, and he could not tear the harpoons from his back. The strain was terrific; something must give way, and it seemed that it must be the rope. We wondered, too, what would happen if the shark tried to dive now—whether he could take the Gannet under with him.
Suddenly it was all over, the rope hung limp in the water, and the Gannet lay hove-to and wallowing. None of us said anything as we pulled in the rope. The last fathom was thick with the same acrid black slime that I had seen on the harpoon at Sleat Lighthouse. It seemed to be coming in too lightly to have two harpoons at the end of it. A moment later we were examining six inches of broken harpoon shaft—inch-and-a-half steel snapped off short at the body of the shark. The second harpoon had pulled out as soon as it took the single strain.
Harpoon at a Venture Page 5