The shark got clear of the boat with a wrench and a long forward run that took seventy fathoms before we could check him with a half-turn on the hand-winch. I had visions of those soft barbs gradually bending backward, and we handled him with infinite caution, letting him tow the Gannet for an hour, while the Sea Leopard kept close by, waiting to take over and haul him up.
While we were making the transfer I saw boats coming up from the south. There was no need for the field-glasses—a drifter and three ring-netters heading up to Moonen could only mean Watkins.
A mile and a half to southward of us the Gloaming and the Dusky Maid turned inshore and lay hove-to a little to the north of the Maidens. The other two catchers headed straight on up to us at full speed, with quite a respectable bow-wave.
We took the shark-rope onto the Sea Leopard, and the transfer was complete when Watkins’s boats were still half a mile south of us. I stayed on board myself, and told Bruce to get away north into the Bay and try to get another shark as quickly as he could before Watkins’s catchers overhauled him.
But the Perseverance and the Paragon had the heels of the Gannet by several knots. I watched Bruce setting for a fin which was showing close in under the cliffs, but he was still more than a quarter of a mile from it when they passed him one on either side. For a moment, remembering Tex’s temper, I thought there was going to be some ugly drama, but the Gannet altered course and steered out to sea again as soon as they were past. I watched them curiously; through the field-glasses I was getting a good look at the guns and harpoons at last. They were, as Bruce had thought, converted two-pounders, and the harpoon heads showing at their muzzles looked monstrously clumsy.
The two boats kept abreast as though running a race until perhaps a hundred yards from the fish; then I saw signals exchanged between them, and the Paragon began to lose way and sheer off. The Perseverance seemed to run up on the shark at a tremendous speed, and the gunner had to alter his stance completely to get an alignment at all. There was a puff of very white smoke, several high spurts of spray, followed after a few seconds by the report of the gun, rolling in a long echo round the black cliffs.
There was a lot of activity on her deck, and two men ran to the starboard side and peered into the sea. There seemed to be some sort of altercation between them, and then I saw that the harpoon gunner was hauling in a slack rope. The harpoon came up on the end of it, and they all examined it critically.
I turned the field-glasses on to the Gannet, now half a mile to the north of them, and saw Tex doing a sort of war dance on the deck and thumping Bruce on the back. Such a public failure by the Perseverance, while we had a shark visibly attached to the Sea Leopard, was the next best thing to shooting another himself.
We had to haul up our shark under the massed eyes of all Watkins’s crew, and we decided to play for safety rather than show. We brought him up very slowly, and it was an hour before his tail broke the surface under the Sea Leopard’s bows. The Gannet was out of sight somewhere to the north of us, and the opposition catchers had followed her. We lassoed the shark’s tail without very much difficulty, and then tried—for the first time under working conditions—to get a second steel hawser round his gills so that he could be made fast fore and aft alongside. It is a job that requires endless patience, and after forty minutes we were all out of temper. The promised westerly wind began to blow up then, and it was only when, as a result of it, the Gannet came back to us, that we were able to get the hawser into position by the combined efforts of both boats.
Bruce and Tex had not seen another shark, and the Perseverance and Paragon had gone on north up the Skye coast.
I shot the shark roughly between the eyes, where I knew the minute brain to be, with an eight-bore shot-gun, and we set off for Soay, very cautiously, in case some unforeseen accident should rob us of this first success of the season. Even with the Sea Leopard the drag seemed very heavy, and after a mile we stopped to close his gaping jaws with another steel rope. That was another lesson we learnt that day—to tow a shark nose foremost alongside the boat, secured by steel ropes round his tail, his gills, and his jaws. Small Admiralty craft like the Sea Leopard are of light construction, two layers of very thin mahogany placed diagonally one over the other, and we did not know how much strain they would stand. We were unwilling to risk more than five knots that day, so it took us six hours to get back to Soay, and it was dead low tide when we anchored outside the harbour bar at about eight in the evening. Not even a rowing-boat would get over the bar now; the level of water in the harbour was several feet higher than the outside sea, and a little river a few yards wide ran down over the exposed shingle and boulders.
We lay just outside the harbour, getting what shelter we could from a rising wind, and began experiments to inflate the dead shark with compressed air so that he would float easily onto the bogie-truck the next day. Big Diesel engines are started by compressed air, so we were able to lead a long rubber tube from the air-compressor in the engine-room. To the end of the tube we fastened an instrument we had made in Mallaig, a hollow rod six feet long, sharpened at the tip and with a number of perforations for a foot above the point. We drove this into the side of the carcase, as low down as we could reach, and then turned on the compressed air. For a long time it seemed like trying to make a sieve hold water. The air came out at his gills, his vent, the harpoon hole and the small wounds left by parasites; and as we tried more and more positions for the nozzle we left an even greater number of small escape holes. But gradually the air began to collect in the body cavity, and at last the carcase rolled over belly-upwards, as we had expected, and floated with a few inches of the white underside clear of the water over the whole length.
We saw then that the fish was a female, and in the four years we hunted sharks we landed seven females for every one male. The male’s external sexual organs are very apparent; two “claspers,” each a yard long and about eight inches thick, and in clear water it was often possible to see them even before the shot was fired. (Photographs 10 and 60.)
It was still slack tide, and we could not cross the bar to reach the factory, so we tied the shark to the shore and took advantage of the opportunity to paint on a smooth wall of rock a scale of depths in big white letters, so that when we approached the factory in future we should always be able to see at a glance the true depth of water over the bar. We went to bed feeling that we had done a good day’s work.
The next morning I sent off the Sea Leopard and the Gannet at dawn, and went ashore on Soay myself. I wanted to learn at first hand all the problems with which we had to deal at the factory and on the catchers.
I watched from the shore forty feet above, while the factory foreman and a boy set out in the Button to bring the shark in. It seemed a very inexperienced piece of work. The boat was towing a carcase twice as big as herself, and they got into every possible kind of difficulty. The shark fouled the shore, the propeller, the bar; the boat wouldn’t steer, and went round in circles. There was a wonderful flow of entirely unacrimonious bad language—they had to shout to each other above the noise of the Button’s engine, but to us on shore the engine was practically inaudible and their voices stentorian. The boy was only fifteen, but he could have given a bargee points and left him flattened. All the monosyllables were used in turn, as nouns, adjectives, and adverbs in every conceivable permutation. It was nearly an hour before they had manœuvred the shark to the end of the slipway and secured him there to wait for the tide.
It was obvious to me for the first time that the rails did not stretch far enough into the sea to float a shark at anything but high spring tides. It had probably been plain to the factory staff for a long time, but no one had thought of mentioning it to me.
We lowered the bogie-truck down the rails and began to try to float the shark onto it at about noon. By two o’clock we were exhausted; by three we had the shark precariously balanced on the bogie and started the big steam-winch to haul it up the rails. The man operating the winch could no
t see the shark and the bogie—a middle-man had to stand at the edge of the concrete platform and relay signals. The bogie had not gone a yard up the rails before it was clear that the weight was lopsided and bound to overbalance, the carcase lying aslant across the truck and beginning to slide. The relay of the information took a second too long, and with a rumbling crash the bogie turned over onto its side, tipping its five-ton load into the shallow water. The shark lay between two rocks, in a horrible position for us to cut him up. (Photograph 51.)
It was useless to wait for another tide and risk a repetition of that failure. We worked on the carcase all evening where it lay, with axes, saws, knives, and armoured gloves. The tide began to flow, and we were standing up to our waists in water when the Gannet came in about dusk, towing a very clean and beautifully marked fish of twenty-eight feet, well inflated and floating dead straight, belly upwards.
We knocked off for half an hour while we listened to the story of Bruce’s day. It was cold now that the sun had gone, and between water, blood, and liver oil we had not a dry inch among us.
Tex had got the shark early in the day and handed it over to the Sea Leopard; he had got another in the next half-hour, and had to wait to transfer it while the first was hauled up and secured for towing. The second shark was a big male, and had fought savagely the whole way to the surface. When the Sea Leopard had winched him up to her bows the tail had kept on slashing to and fro so that there was never a clear moment to lasso it. They had tried for three-quarters of an hour, during which part of the Gannet’s gunwale had been torn off, before the steel trace broke and the shark went off with the whole harpoon inside him.
We kept on working till midnight on the first carcase. We got the liver into the barrels of the oil-extraction plant, the head into the experimental glue-tanks, and a ton of flesh washed and iced in boxes. When at last I went on board the Sea Leopard I had had no food for more than thirty hours, and having struggled all day in that mountain of soft cold flesh and entrails, I felt that I never wanted to touch any again.
We were out at five-thirty in the morning to load while the tide was high. It was a Saturday; custom decreed that a Mallaig crew must be ashore in Mallaig by midday, and Soay decreed that no Soay man could sail before a minute after midnight on Sunday.
We sent the iced flesh to sixteen firms who were going to try to market it. Samples for U.N.R.R.A. had to be sent to Philadelphia for test before any order could be confirmed.
It was a fretful week-end, with the knowledge that it was useless to go on catching sharks until the alterations to the slipway were made. With the Mallaig contractor I planned its complete reconstruction, but he had not got the necessary wood, and telegrams to all the islands where it might be available produced negative replies. We had to start salvaging wood on Rhum again, while the sharks were there for the catching.
We called at Soay very early on Monday morning, with a miscellaneous cargo of small factory requirements, and dropped off the contractor, a joiner, and an engineer to try to get the fish-meal plant working. We could not send away any more iced flesh until the reports on the marketing of the first consignment were through.
Harris Bay was as full of timber as ever; the crew worked magnificently, and by three in the afternoon we had four bales floated out to the Sea Leopard to be taken aboard. There was a fresh breeze from the sea, and it was a hard job loading, the floating timber trying to break away from the boats the whole time. There were squalls of wind and rain as we came home, and we comforted ourselves by saying that it was no weather for catching sharks, anyway.
At the factory we found that the second shark had been a repetition of the first; the bogie had de-railed under the weight, and the carcase lay totally submerged. The morning’s cargo had not been cleared off the pier, nor had the remains of the first fish been removed. The gulls had gathered in; they swarmed in a gabbling mass over the great heap of carrion, sat in gorged rows along the roof-top and the rocks, wheeled in kaleidoscopic patterns against the grey sky, and filled the whole harbour with sound.
It took all the week to rebuild the slip, and we had every kind of difficulty. There was disaffection amongst the factory staff, some of whom said they were employed only to cut up sharks; there were constant lists of new equipment to be fetched from Mallaig, fifteen miles away; there was a joiner who left on the steamer for more tools and did not return, and an engineer’s mate who never turned up at all. An expert technician, sent out to produce an experimental sample of glue, spread poison round him like a upas-tree. His job, he said in effect, was to advise, not to work; also he had a sore back, and wouldn’t be a labourer for any man. The men we needed to rebuild the slip must be taken off to do the manual labour of his experiments. He was a nagger, a grumbler, and a hyper-trades-unionist, an arch enemy of development and experiment. I could barely keep my hands off his smug face as he prophesied our total failure.
I replied that it wasn’t my crew’s job to haul wood and build slips, nor mine, but no one made a fuss; all were, on the contrary, anxious to help; that I had synovitis of the right ankle, a duodenal ulcer and an enlarged heart, and that he was likely to survive me.
I had a glimpse that week of the folly of building a factory upon a remote Hebridean island, though at that time I had not seen more than a very few of the problems involved. A year later I was writing:
No amount of equipment, no amount of capital expenditure, and no amount of good intentions, will be of any avail in this business without a competent, experienced, and hard-working Foreman Manager at the factory. This man would have to be on the spot during every working hour of the day. Paying Island labour without direct and constant supervision is pouring money down the drain, and I know that outside people are only too easily infected with Island fecklessness. The islanders of all the Hebrides have been going their own way for far too long to take easily to hard work and punctual hours, and have so far succeeded in Soay in taming to their own ways the various genuine hard workers who have come out to the factory. I consider this point to be of absolute and permanent importance. The Foreman whom we eventually have, if we must remain shore-based instead of having a factory ship, must be capable of organising labour which does not take kindly to organisation, and must have an eye on every piece of work that is being done from morning till night.
The logic of selection was against my labour problems; there were hard workers and good men on Soay, but it followed that these were for the most part either already employed by Powrie at the salmon-nets, or had made their own businesses in lobster-fishing. With a few exceptions I tended to get the rejects, and the imported labour from Skye only swelled the numbers as dummy figures upon castle battlements did in the Middle Ages.
But the rebuilding of the slip was finished somehow that week, and when we sailed for Mallaig on Saturday morning there was at any rate nothing to stop us trying to catch sharks the next week. It was a strange spring; we woke that morning of May 18 to see the Cuillins covered by a fresh snowfall, and it began to snow again as we left the harbour, the flakes twisting slowly down into a desolation of grey sea.
It was like winter, too, when we left Mallaig for Moonen Bay before dawn on Monday morning. It blew hard from the north during the whole five hours’ run, and there were heavy squalls of cold rain, so that more than once we wondered whether it was worth carrying on. But the sharks were there, and at the surface, a little north of An Dhusgeir, in a sea almost too big for us to follow them. We boarded the Gannet and set off, drenched through almost at once. The gun, which had been keeping dry in the fo’c’sle, took an interminable time to fit, and with the lurch and roll of the boat its eighty pounds of metal were the most unrelenting weight I have ever handled. Our hands were stiff and blue, the iron of the barrel was so cold to the touch that it seemed to sting, and once we almost lost the gun overboard. It was hopeless to try and keep the powder dry—baths of white spray came sluicing up over the bows and poured down over everything. It took half an hour to fit the gun to the
steel plate on the Gannet’s deck, and the sea was rising the whole time, so that when at last we were ready we could only see the sharks when we heaved up on top of a wave. There were a lot of them, widely scattered, and behaving as we had never seen sharks do. Some seemed to be swimming at not less than six knots, the whole dorsal fins and a foot or two of back showing as they rode up on the waves, some with the whole upper part of the head clear of the water, but no fin showing at all. For the first time I saw pairs swimming nose to tail, and was able to identify the rear fish as a male.
It was difficult to follow anything in that sea; the waves were seven feet high in the runs of the swell, and more than once we rammed a shark that we had been following, without any opportunity to fire the gun. The Gannet would climb up to the crest of a wave that hid the target, and come sliding down the trough to bump a shark whose fin was no longer showing. Tex had to hug the gun to stay on board.
At last we got a poor chance, and Tex, who knew as well as I did that the powder was anyway probably drenched by now, decided to take it. It was a strange shot; nothing but the head of the shark had been showing, and it was just beginning to be hidden by an oncoming wave. The gun fired, the report sounding muffled by the wind, and the Gannet’s bows lifted high on the wave, so that we could see nothing. There was no splash from the tail, and I was amazed to see the rope beginning to run from the coil in the hold.
“He feels it! He feels it!”
And indeed he did more than feel it. The rope slowed up and began to uncoil very sluggishly; Tex took the half turn on the winch, and on a sudden doubt began to haul in. There seemed to be a dead weight on the other end, but one that he could definitely lift a little with his full strength.
“I’ve killed the bastard! That’s what I’ve done—he’s dead!”
The Sea Leopard, whose crew had not heard the shot, had been cruising round us at a distance, blowing her hooter to call our attention to a shark astern of us. We beckoned and gesticulated, and she came up to a cable’s length from us and lay hove-to and rolling hideously. Watching her, I wondered what I had left unsecured in my cabin.
Harpoon at a Venture Page 11