Life in the rhododendron jungle that surrounded the house was even more intense and varied, but was dominated, as the dinosaurs dominated a stage of pre-history, by a vast black sow called Minnie, whose lumbering but querulous form was seldom beyond eyeshot or earshot; and it was, I think, against her exceptional strength and cunning in particular that many of the entanglements, trip-wires, and booby-traps had been conceived. They were in vain, these elaborate precautions; Minnie always won out in the end, and often a meal would be interrupted by a splintering crash followed by the delighted squeals that announced a penetration of the outer defences. They were abandoned at last, and her siesta ground became the veranda, where her vast sleeping carcase was occasionally used as a convenient seat by the younger members of the human family, and through the French windows into the drawing-room she would lollop with bass grunts that turned to outraged and purely feminine shrieks as she was ejected.
Whereas there was definitely traceable farming activity at Morar Lodge, the pursuit of which occupied, indeed, much of the family’s waking hours, it was for their charm or pathos that the livestock were mainly selected, and many odd specimens of sheep and cattle of egregious breeds gave the place something of the air of an agricultural zoo. Two animals of mine were later added to the collection: a Shetland ewe that had fallen into Mallaig Harbour during transport of the flock to Soay and was christened Gavotte in play upon my name, and a vicious Great Black-backed Gull which I had taken as a young one from a rock in the Outer Hebrides, and which it had proved impracticable to keep on the boats. This bird, too, was a cripple, which automatically ensured its welcome at Morar Lodge. Only one obvious animal was missing from that house, but there was evidence of its existence in the past, for on a shelf in the bathroom there stood for a long time a bottle labelled in faded ink “Lotion for donkey’s eyes—I think.”
Every morning, then, I motored into Mallaig, and on calm days it had become a habit to stop at the top of the hill above the harbour and search the sea with field-glasses. West, one looked down over fourteen miles of sea to Eigg and Rhum; when it was calm the sea would look flat and white, and every black dot upon it was suspect. It was hot that summer, and the atmospheric shimmer of the air would play tricks with one’s eyes, distorting a floating fish-box, a shag, or a cormorant, to the rounded triangle of a shark’s dorsal fin. I remember many loudly acclaimed sharks that took wing and flapped heavily away across the sea.
On this morning I searched the nearer water first, and lingered for some time over a motionless object perhaps a mile out before I identified it as a tin can. I raised the glasses higher, and into their field came a great concourse of resting shearwaters spread over the water like a carpet hundreds of yards square. They breed on Eigg, where the cliff-top is honeycombed with their burrows, and these gigantic flocks rest motionless upon the water or skim past the boat at tremendous speed, an endless train of long narrow wings, keen and graceful as scimitars.
From the centre of the flock a patch of birds began to rise, running for a few steps upon the surface with wings held stiffly outstretched. This spread like a ripple from the centre outward, until the whole flock was on the wing, wheeling to reunite; and where the movement had started, a black object began to rise above the surface. It rose quickly, and in a few seconds it was unmistakable, glistening wet with quick flashes of light as the sun caught it. I watched while the tail-fin appeared, moving from side to side with that strange ponderous leisure, and then I became aware that there were other black objects away beyond it. Turning the glasses on to them, I saw that the sea was dotted with fins for perhaps a mile beyond the one that had disturbed the shearwaters. I could count eighteen, and the furthest was very tiny, so that there were probably more beyond the range of the field-glasses.
I got the car started and tore down into Mallaig, where I found that Bruce had already heard from the ring-net boats of a big shoal of sharks lying about six miles out and two miles south of Point of Sleat.
There was a lot of preparation to be done, as we had just moved the Oerlikon gun from the Dove to the Gannet, partly because the Dove was always either out of action or engaged in carrying factory materials, and partly because we hoped that the low bows of the Gannet might help to overcome the deflection of the harpoon which had caused our persistent failures. The gun-platform of the Dove was ten feet above the sea, while the Gannet’s was only three, allowing a shot at point-blank range. But the recoil of the gun firing a heavy harpoon would have split the Gannet’s bows, and a great deal of reinforcement had been necessary below deck. This work was barely finished, and it was midday before we were ready to sail with the gun securely mounted near the starboard gunwale, and two double-barb harpoons that had just arrived from Birmingham. (Fig. D on page 35.)
Besides Bruce, Tex, and a deckhand called John Cameron, we had with us the son of the house where I was staying, Jackie Shaw Stewart, and an Eton friend of his, who succeeded in taking a photograph (11) at the exact moment when our first successful gun harpoon struck home.
The sky had become overcast by the time we sailed, a thin layer of cloud through which the sun diffused over a hushed white sky and sea, so calm that even the floatpods of drifting weed showed hundreds of yards away. There were nothing like the number of sharks at the surface that there had been in the morning. By standing up in the Gannet’s bows I could make out the fins at about two miles—there seemed to be only three sharks, and none of them steady at the surface, though the three were never all submerged at the same time.
We decided to take the first shot that offered, and headed straight for them; when we were still a mile away I saw a great grey shadow as big as the boat pass diagonally below us, and knew that we were on the fringe of the submerged shoal, but no more came to the surface.
We were hardly more than a hundred yards from the fins when for the first time all went down together. I was standing at the gun, trying to accommodate my shoulder to its unrelenting awkwardness, and taking practice sights along the barrel. We had removed the iron protection plate, but even without it the gun was as clumsy to handle as the fifteen-foot iron pipes on the hand harpoons had been. I heard the engine slip into neutral, and the Gannet stole very gently forward towards the rippled surface where the sharks had gone down.
Then, and up to the very last shark I killed years later, this waiting for a shark to re-surface, straining one’s eyes for the faintest ripple or gliding bulk below the water, set my heart hammering savagely against my ribs, as though it were a sort of overture, a roll of drums leading up to the climax—the gun’s roar and the flying rope and the tail towering out of the water in a drench of white spray. This was the first time that it really happened.
The gun was mounted where we had become accustomed to stand with hand harpoons—well forward on the extreme edge of the starboard bow, so that one must approach the fish from astern and to port of him. At first thought it would seem more sensible for the gun to be on the extreme point of the boat’s nose, giving a much wider field of fire, but to use this field of fire the gunner would have to step off the boat and into the sea to keep behind the gun when it turned. But when a shark does not swim on a steady course it is often impossible to make certain of a stern approach—one must take any shot when it comes within range, and that is what happened on this first occasion.
A fin reappeared fifty yards away on the same course, going slowly and straight away from us. The Gannet jerked forward as she went into gear and headed for the shark at half throttle; then I heard Bruce’s voice to the man at the engine, “Dead slow,” then, “Take her out,” and we were drifting up to the shark on a perfect approach.
But at about ten yards the fish turned abruptly left, at right angles to his former course, so that our bows would have passed behind his tail, or at best rammed it. I yelled “Hard aport” to Bruce, but did not feel certain that the Gannet had enough way on her to answer the tiller. She seemed to come round very slowly, but the shark was moving slowly too, and his whole length
was suddenly there, right across the Gannet’s bows, so that she would have rammed him amidships. I had slewed the gun round until it was pointing as much forward as its traverse allowed, and I pulled the trigger-cord as soon as the dorsal fin came into the gun’s field of vision. The photograph (11), taken a fraction of a second after the impact, shows the very tip of the tail fin beginning its first swing towards the boat’s side as the shark tries to dive.
He had been swimming very high; there were only a few inches of water over his back when I fired, and I felt quite certain that the harpoon was in him. The tail behaved as usual, hiding everything with a storm of spray; then, when it had subsided, I saw the shark a fathom or two down in clear water, swimming fast on an opposite course. I could see the end of the harpoon shaft sticking a foot or so out of his side—below the point I had aimed for—and a dark plume of blood trailing from it in the water, like smoke from a chimney. Tex saw it too, and gave his war-cry for the first time, a war-cry that I came to associate with every kill, and which in a later season I remember hearing across half a mile of sea, following the boom of his gun in the summer dusk:
“He feels it! He feels it!”
The shark took fifty fathoms of rope in a rush before he slowed up enough for us to be able to take a turn on the drum of the little band winch. We let him tow us sluggishly for two hours before we began to haul up.
For nearly another two hours the five of us hauled on that rope with all our strength, dragging it in almost inch by inch. Everything worked perfectly. When we began the tug-of-war the rope was leading down from the bow fair-lead at about seventy degrees, and for the first few minutes the shark tried quick changes of direction, the rope leading sometimes ahead, sometimes to port or starboard, then under the boat. But after ten minutes the rope was vertical, as rigid as a telegraph pole, and he was three hundred feet below us in the green dusk of the sea, being dragged inexorably upward.
We had pieces of coloured cloth tied into the rope at ten, twenty, and thirty fathoms; when, after an hour and a half, the ten-fathom mark came up over the fair-lead and came edging down the dripping foredeck to the winch, I left the hold and went up to the Gannet’s bows. I lay flat on my face on the deck and strained my eyes to follow the rope down into the dim water. I could see perhaps twenty feet before it became lost in darkness; the three feet of it between the surface and the Gannet’s fair—lead felt as hard as wood, and if one pulled sideways upon it it would vibrate fractionally, but would not give half an inch. It was some minutes before I could see anything but the tensed rope leading down into obscurity; then, at the extreme limit of vision, I saw something that looked like a gigantic punkah swinging rhythmically to and fro.
I had already seen several sharks at close quarters; I had seen those giant tails sweeping clear of the water to slam down upon the sea or the boat; there was no logical reason for this tail to come as a surprise, but it did. Foot by foot it came higher into the clearer water and defined itself, six foot wide at least, and swinging over an arc of several yards as the shark tried to swim vertically downwards. Every now and again it would foul the rope as it swung past, holding the tail itself vertical for a moment, then it would break free with a shuddering wrench into its pattern of impotent effort.
I could see part of the body beyond the tail now; the body of a dragon, six feet through and showing a glimmering white belly as he twisted and lunged. At the far end of the belly there seemed to be two gigantic flippers—I was unprepared for the size of these pectoral fins, which had been minimised in the drawings I had seen.
As soon as his tail came clear of the surface the power of that punkah action became apparent; at each lunge it exploded a fountain of water from the sea. Several times it struck the Gannet’s stem, leaving gobs of black slime as it struggled free. We were busy with ropes now, and after several near misses succeeded in dropping a noose over the long upper half of the tail-fin as it jammed momentarily against the bows. The next lunge carried the tail below the surface, and for a moment it looked as though the rope would be flung free, but as the tail rose again toward the boat we saw the other half of it slip through, and the whole fin was in the noose. We almost knocked each other overboard in our hurry to pull it tight, but we saw it close firmly on the narrow isthmus of body below the fin, and the shark was ours.
He behaved then as I do not remember any other shark behaving afterwards. The fight seemed momentarily to go out of him; he stopped trying to bore downward, and the whole length of him came up close under the surface alongside the Gannet like a great drowned elephant, rolling belly upwards before he righted himself. As he did so I saw a giant parasite detach itself from his back and wriggle quickly away into the darkness—an eel-like creature that seemed six feet long. Someone made a grab for it with the boat-hook, but it was a second too late, and this monster specimen of Petromyzon marinus, the sea lamprey found on all Basking Sharks, but whose length is not known to exceed a yard, went unrecorded. We all agreed upon its length, nor, in the many that we saw later, did we find ourselves apt to over-estimate their length at first sight.
The shark rolled and twisted as he lay alongside, and on one of these rolls the harpoon came uppermost. For a moment I think we all forgot that we had him securely by the tail—we only saw that the harpoon was practically out of him, turned sideways and holding by one barb just beneath the skin. I know I shouted and grabbed the rope to try to pull the barb in deeper before I remembered that the harpoon phase was over now. Our luck was holding, as it was to hold for the next twenty-four hours, no matter by how narrow a margin.
It was late afternoon before we had made the shark’s tail fast to the stern of the Gannet. He was still alive, and with the boat hove-to he still tried convulsively to bore downward. When we put the engine ahead his nose broke the surface twenty-five feet astern of the boat; we opened the throttle wide and began to move forward at a rate of perhaps half a knot, with a tremendous commotion of water astern. It was like trying to tow a house. We did not know then that we were trying to tow him in an almost impossible position, in which his distended gills were held open by the backward rush of water and formed a brake as effective as a large sea-anchor. Later we learnt to tow sharks tied fore and aft alongside the boat, nose foremost and with the jaws roped closed to give the minimum water-resistance.
There was no other boat in sight, and our powers of invention temporarily failed. We had caught a shark and we were going to get him home; we just kept plodding away at less than a mile an hour over that oily white calm. Most of the shark’s tail was inboard, and we fingered it curiously, examining the strange black slime and the great keel-ridge of muscle that began at each side of its root and ran back to power the thin afterpart of the body.
After an hour’s towing Mallaig seemed little nearer, and Sleat Point little further astern of us. Five miles away we could see the white smoke of the evening train coming up to Mallaig; it ballooned out and hung motionless in the air as the engine passed through the short tunnel. Some small boats were beginning to put out for the evening mackerel fishing at Point of Sleat, and as the first of these passed half a mile to northward of us it turned and made south, a man standing up in the bows. With the field-glasses I made out that it was Ian Macintyre, the marine engineer who had made most of our hand-harpoons. Within hailing distance his voice came from between cupped hands:
“So you got one at last!”
“Yes, but not with your trash, Ian.”
“Just for that I think I’ll away and fish mackerel and leave you to it. Is he a big one?”
“Too big for us—it’s all wake and no way. Are you on?”
He was on, and with his boat tied alongside the Gannet and both our engines full ahead we began to move at three or four knots. Until now we had believed the fallacy that this would kill the shark, that the back pressure of water through his gills would make him unable to breathe. It was a surprise to see that after several miles he was still very much alive.
It was near dusk
when we reached Mallaig. It was the tourist season; Mallaig was performing its brief seasonal function of Gateway to the Hebrides, and the train had disgorged its cargo of holiday-makers, would-be mountaineers in huge climbing boots and swathes of rope, brightly-tartaned Highlanders from Glasgow and the industrial cities, earnest hikers with gigantic rucksacks and skinny legs, and sad-looking elderly couples who seem to visit the Hebrides annually to lament the climate. Word had reached Mallaig that the Gannet was bringing in a shark, and the attention our project had received from the daily press had thronged the piers. As we passed the big stone pier where the island steamers berth, and headed on for the inside of the fish pier where the herring catches are landed and bid for, I remember that parts of the crowd began to run back to intercept us before we reached our berth beside the Dove. There were something like fifteen hundred people crowded on to that short pier by the time we churned laboriously round the end of it.
With some difficulty we transferred the shark’s rope from the Gannet to one of the uprights of the pier. First we made the rope fast to it, then took the knot from the Gannet’s hand winch. This almost cost Bruce his right arm, as the shark took up that extra six feet of line suddenly allowed to him. The rope slammed taut with a noise like the plucked strings of a double bass, catching the boat’s gunwale a hundredth of a second after Bruce had snatched his arm away.
Tied there, the shark was evidently very much alive; again with slow rhythmic lunges he tried to bore down to the bottom. His tail was about a foot below water now, and from its hidden sweeps great ripples spread outward over the still harbour and slapped small disintegrated waves among the supports of the pier. From above we could see perhaps the first ten feet of him; beyond that there were distant glimmers of white where his skin had been torn in the long struggle.
Harpoon at a Venture Page 7