For the man at the Sea Leopard’s wheel there were a number of things to be done at once when sharks were first sighted—sounding the ship’s alarm, orders to the engine-room through the copper speaking-tube, change of course, an immediate look-out for other fish, possibly nearer at hand. The Sea Leopard’s twin engines and propellers allowed her to turn on her axis like a polo pony, and the order “Stop starboard, full ahead port” brought her surging round to an opposite course with a cream of white foam under her bows, the Gannet following on the end of her towing-rope like a cat swung by the tail. The alarm buzzer sounded thin and distant below decks, and by the time our new course was made good with “half ahead both” the crew were tumbling up on deck with their mouths full.
The sharks were making eastward into Loch Scavaig; we overhauled them quickly, and at two hundred yards we hove to and I went aboard the Gannet to steer for Tex. With all those fins showing—fourteen fish in that one group, and other parties showing far beyond them—the temptation was to “brown the covey,” and it was difficult to remember that a fish must be singled out of the pack and approached with as much care as if he were alone—greater care, in fact, for the accidental bumping of one shark might make the whole shoal submerge.
It was the first time I had entered a tightly packed shoal, and it was the most extraordinary sensation. I chose a shark toward the rear of the party, and tried to concentrate on him to the exclusion of the others. But when we were still ten yards from him, another, a little ahead and on our port side, changed direction to cross our bows, and I saw that if I held course we were bound to ram him before any came within the gun’s arc of fire. I sheered off to starboard, to the accompaniment of a stream of invective from Tex, and the fish we had avoided submerged without much disturbance. I peered over the boat’s side to see whether he had been alarmed. What I saw was comparable in its effect only to that first shark I had seen off Isle Ornsay Lighthouse two years before.
Down there in the clear water they were packed as tight as sardines, each barely allowing swimming room to the next, layer upon layer of them, huge grey shapes like a herd of submerged elephants, the furthest down dim and indistinct in the sea’s dusk. A memory came back to me from childhood—Mowgli and the elephants’ dance, and the drawing of the great heaving mass of backs in the jungle clearing. My face must have showed my feelings; Neil, crouched at the engine and watching me for instructions, shouted, “What’s up, Major? What do you see?” and his voice recalled me to the moment.
I looked up to see Tex’s angry face turned back towards me. There were sharks all round him, and I was giving him just the sort of inefficient tiller-work that used to make me mad when I was at the gun myself. I pulled myself together, chose another fin, and did my best to follow it. We were right in the middle of them now, and they were amazingly undisturbed. Close alongside where I was at the tiller, a huge bull fish swam lazily, almost brushing the boat’s side; beyond him and below him were more and more—great yawning mouths and mammoth backs. I thought, “This is a shoal of fish—fish.” The words were meaningless; they might equally well apply to mackerel or herring as to this herd of giants that seemed to belong to a different world and age.
Even if the boat had been unguided, Tex could not have avoided getting a shot sooner or later, and he got it in about thirty seconds. It was barely audible, for only the caps had gone off, but his voice was very audible for some minutes afterwards. We stopped the boat and forced fine powder down the nipples in front of the caps; while we were doing so the submerged rear half of the shoal went on passing below us in a seemingly endless procession.
The top layer was still at the surface a few hundred yards ahead of us when we were ready to go in again. This time I did not allow myself a glance down into the water as we came up astern of the fins. We made a normal approach, as if to a single shark. At the last moment I felt the boat bump on something solid below us; a second later “Sugan” had gone off with a roar and a lot of smoke,’ and only then did I look over the side. Neil had automatically taken the Gannet out of gear as soon as he heard the gun go off, so that the rope should not foul the propellers, but our forward way had brought the harpoon rope into my field of vision. I saw it leading down among the tightly packed sharks, running out steadily, then, as I watched, it changed direction, and in doing so managed somehow to loop itself round the gills of another shark nearer to the surface. This fish dived, too, his tail rising just to the water-line as he did so. At one moment the Gannet was floating high on a calm sea, at the next her bows were dipping almost to the gunwale under the pull of two big sharks sounding simultaneously. It might have been three or more, for all we could tell; it was difficult to see how any one fish in that pack could have a rope attached to him without gathering in his neighbours. I have not the slightest doubt that the Gannet would have gone under then if the rope had not cleared itself from the other fish. When it did so the boat bounded up again so freely that we all thought we had pulled out of the harpooned shark, but a second later there was the familiar steady strain, and a wood-hard rope leading vertically downwards from the boat’s stem.
We were growing more confident now: we took a double turn on the winch almost as soon as the rope tightened, and handed the shark over to the Sea Leopard within ten minutes.
We set off in pursuit again. There were patches of sharks’ fins showing all the way into Loch Scavaig (photograph 38); it was, as Dan said, a shark-fisher’s dream. But as truly “Sugan” was a shark-fisher’s nightmare. Again and again she misfired as we ran into the dense shoals, again and again she would fire perfectly if she was not aimed at a shark. It was mid-afternoon when the last fin disappeared below the surface, and we had killed four sharks, where with the technique evolved in later seasons we might well have had twenty.
Bruce had been experimenting with the first shark we handed over to the Sea Leopard. He had hauled the tail right inboard over the stern, and towed him round and round at full speed to see if he could be killed outright by drowning, and the fish was seemingly lifeless by the time we had handed over our third shark. When the fishing was finished I had gone aboard the Sea Leopard, and Tex and Neil began to tow the catch singly over the harbour bar and into the factory; it was half tide, and there was not enough water for the Sea Leopard to pass. They began with this apparently dead fish, and he showed no sign of activity when they secured him to the stern of the Gannet. Once inside the harbour they put the boat’s nose into the shore at the first convenient rock close to the pier, and prepared to tie the shark’s rope to it. Neil jumped to the rock from the Gannet’s bows, and as soon as he was ashore Tex threw him the rope to which the shark’s tail-sling was attached. Neil was steadying himself to make the rope fast when he found himself holding with his bare hands to a rope at the other end of which was a very live shark weighing several tons and swimming firmly for the open sea. Tex saw what was happening, and tried to get the rope back into the Gannet, but it was impossible for one man to make it fast again without anyone at the engine controls. Neil got a turn of the rope round the rock, but he could not hold on, and for a time it seemed as though that first shark of the day, harpooned seven hours before, would swim away with the harpoon and the whole eighty fathoms of rope. At last Tex managed to bend a new rope on to the old, and while Neil slowed the passage of the last few fathoms, he secured this rope firmly to a rock. After that it was all the Gannet could do to haul the shark back to shore again, and the factory workers told us afterwards that the fish was still alive when the tide left him high and dry the following morning.
But “alive” was a meaningless term where those carcases were concerned. We found later that there was no way in which at any rate local muscular movement could be stopped quickly. If the brain was blown out with a shot-gun it had no apparent effect; even the severing of the entire fore-part of the head, from a point several inches behind the brain, sometimes produced no change for several hours. One Billingsgate firm to whom we sent samples of flesh wrote jocularly t
o say that they had asked for the sample to be fresh, not alive. The blocks of flesh, each no bigger than a large book, had been twitching in a disgusting way when the cases were opened in London, and had continued to do so for half a day afterwards.
We had a few more days’ fishing at Moonen and the Dhusgeir before, in the last week of May, our temporary engineer allowed one of the Sea Leopard’s engines to run dry of oil, and we had to put back to Mallaig for repairs. We sailed again on June 1, a dirty dark day with a blustering north-west wind. There were a few sharks at the Dhusgeir, but they would not remain for long at the surface, and we never got a shot. The next day was a Sunday, and it was still blowing when we sailed from Mallaig at midnight. We had a visitor on board, one of the nine men who had subscribed to the season’s experiment, and for the very first time that summer we saw no sharks at all. We made a long circuit—Dhusgeir, Canna, Rhum, Eigg—and had seen no fin in a hundred and twenty miles when we went into Canna Harbour for the night. Next morning it was blowing a full southerly gale with lashing rain, and we did not sail until it began to moderate a little after noon. We returned to the Dhusgeir then; there was a heavy grey swell right up the Skye shore, and we saw nothing. It seemed that we were wasting time and fuel, and we went back to Mallaig in the evening.
We heard very soon after we berthed that the ring-net boats had seen sharks in Loch Hourn, a long and precipitous sea loch ten miles north of Mallaig. Loch Hourn—the word means “hell,” and it is a grim-looking chasm at most times—was one of the few places that would be sheltered from that southerly gale, and to spend the next day there seemed preferable in any case to lying at Mallaig pier.
The weather was no better in the morning; there was a touch of west in the wind now, and speeding grey clouds above a leaden sea breaking white—as black a June morning as any of us had seen. Inside Loch Hourn it was dark but amazingly calm; all the noise and confusion were going on outside, and the loch was like an unused city alley-way at night, from which a man may watch the surge of crowds and traffic outside.
We cruised up and down Loch Houm for the better part of the day without seeing a shark, and in the afternoon we landed on the bird-rocks at the head of the loch. It was early evening when we decided to go back to Mallaig.
We towed the Gannet simply because we thought she would never make Mallaig against that head sea under her own steam, but as soon as we turned out of the shelter of Loch Hourn and into the Sound of Sleat it was obvious that we should have our work cut out. For an almost landlocked piece of water the savagery was amazing. It had been blowing a gale from the one open quarter for two days, and the tide was against the wind, so that the water was all white, troughs and crests alike. Tex and Neil were aboard the Gannet, towed by a four-inch-thick rope which had been spliced into an eye at each end for quickness of taking on and off when we were fishing. This towing-rope was a little short for a heavy sea, and the Gannet was in difficulties from the start. The waves themselves were near the limit of what she would stand—perhaps fifteen feet high, and all breaking water.
But it was the towing-rope that brought disaster. The Sea Leopard would stagger up the face of a wave with the rope slack, and as she lurched down the other side of it the rope would slam taut with a wrench that seemed as if it must tear the Gannet apart. The eye of the towing-rope was fast to a small hand-winch in the Gannet’s stem—we never used this as a winch, but it made a convenient bollard or cleat—and the other end was on the bitts of the Sea Leopard’s square stern.
Bruce and Dan and I were on the bridge when I noticed Tex gesticulating fiercely to us. I could see his mouth open and his hands cupped, but no sound reached us above the roar of the water and the wind shrieking through the Sea Leopard’s rigging. Tex was seeing the Gannet’s deck beginning to lift and crack under the force of those tremendous jerks, and was yelling that he was about to cast off. He crawled up the deck on his belly, and from the Sea Leopard it looked touch and go whether he could keep a grip. Those sudden violent tensions made it impossible to lift the rope off by hand, and he was carrying between his teeth one of the big skinning-knives from the factory, to cut through the rope in front of the winch.
Had he remained on his belly all might have been well, but there was always some imp in Tex driving him to the spectacular and dramatic. The boat steadied for a moment in a trough, and he swung his legs round till he sat astride the boat’s nose like a figurehead. In this position, with the winch behind his buttocks, he took the knife from his teeth and began to cut. Neil was in the engine-room, following Tex’s instructions to have the engine going and ready to make away for shelter. Dan was at the Sea Leopard’s stern, ready to haul up the cut rope and keep it free of the propellers.
It was at this moment that the winch tore out of the Gannet’s deck. The Sea Leopard had reached the crest of a wave, while the Gannet wallowed on a slack rope in the trough; then the rope yanked taut again as the bigger boat slid down the wave’s back. The Gannet’s deck gave way, and Tex was shot forward into the sea under her bows. From the Sea Leopard it looked as though he had gone completely, and his recovery was amazing. The Gannet was well down by the bows, and in the breaking water we could not see that one hand had never lost its grip of the stem-post. His other hand came up, and he hauled himself vertically from the water to reboard—in this position he had his back to the Sea Leopard and his chest and belly pressed tight up the whole height of the Gannet’s stem, his head just level with her decks.
The Gannet was now on the crest of the same wave that had started the trouble, and she came charging down the slope towards our stem with Tex as a human battering-ram on her bows. The effect was sickening; Dan was yelling to Tex to jump, but Tex could hear nothing above the noise of wind and water, and the Gannet was bearing down on us at a terrifying speed. I think there were not more than ten feet between the two boats when Tex heard Dan’s voice and looked round. His reaction was instantaneous; he kept his head and jumped at once, where many men would have clung on a second too long and been smashed. He disappeared in a turmoil of broken water, and the Gannet’s stem, to which he had been clinging, rammed the Sea Leopard’s stern squarely in the middle with a smash of splintering wood.
At that moment there was only one thing to be thankful for—the Sea Leopard had a water-tight bulkhead between the stern locker and the after quarters, so that she herself was not disabled as a rescue boat.
Neil, who had been squatting at the Gannet’s engine at the moment of impact, hit his head a tremendous blow on the paraffin tank, recovered himself to get a brief glimpse of Tex in the sea, and, thinking that the Gannet was wrecked, he began to strip off his oilskins in preparation for abandoning ship himself. Tex’s head showed once or twice on the Gannet’s port quarter, and we were bawling at Neil, with his oilskin half over his head, to turn the boat and pick him up. It seemed minutes before he understood the real situation, but probably it was only seconds. He leapt back to the engine, only to find that the shock of collision had jammed the gear lever astern. He wrenched and kicked at it unavailingly, and then began to unship the Gannet’s mast to throw to Tex. But Tex was no longer in sight.
When Tex had jumped from the Gannet he had gone under with no fear of drowning, but in terror of being cut in pieces by the Sea Leopard’s propellers. He let himself go down; it got dark very quickly, and he felt that he was in a great depth of water. Illogically, his thought was for the shore nearly a mile away, not for the boats. He fought back for the surface, and his head hit something hard above him. He put his hands up and gripped the keel of a boat, felt his way along it, and recognised it as the Gannet. His legs were swung from under him by the wash of her propeller; he let go and came to the surface ten yards away. He had a blurred vision of Neil struggling with the gear-lever before a big wave broke over him and pushed him under again. The next time he came up it seemed to him that he was in much the same position, and Neil was trying to unship the mast. He had a clear thought that if Neil were to stop the Gannet’s engine the
boat would be lost, and he tried to shout this through the water that kept breaking over him. Then his big leather sea-boots began to fill, and he went down again into the darkness, pressing and muffled. His oilskins, which had at first spread like a crinoline and given him buoyancy, were now waterlogged too, and he felt himself dragged down as by a great weight. He began to fight to get the boots off, but when he had kicked the last one free he was far down and in pitch darkness.
“Eventually,” said Tex afterwards, “I did get them off, and I found I was in great order then altogether; I seemed to go shooting up like a damn rocket. There was a bit of my Balaclava that kept jamming up my mouth, but I got my teeth in it at last and ripped it away. I could see the Sea Leopard when I came up, but every damn one of you seemed to be looking the other way. She seemed a hell of a long way off, and I started to try to swim to her, but each wave began to break before I reached the top of it, and tumbled me back down the slope. I got tired, and turned my back on the sea and just waited for the Sea Leopard to spot me. I was still getting slapped under by the waves, and just when I saw that you had spotted me at last I took an extra heavy one on the head and I was right down under in the dark again. I was quite sure I was going to drown then—it wasn’t frightening, and I could hear and see, only I was seeing big trees in a wind and hearing music and bells, bells for evermore.”
While Tex was hearing his bells, Bruce was getting really worried for the first time. He had kept a fair idea of where Tex was from momentary glimpses of head or arm, but Tex had been astern of the Sea Leopard, and she had to turn on an opposite course before we could do anything. By the time she was round, one engine full ahead and the other full astern, Tex had gone down for that last time and was listening to his bells, and it did not look as if he were going to come up again.
It seemed a very long time before he reappeared, and in that mad mass of breaking water it did not appear possible that we should reach him in time if he showed again. I felt, too, that he would come up under the boat’s keel, and that we ourselves should be holding him under. But Bruce’s judgment was perfect, and when at last the top of his head showed in the trough of a big wave, it was only a few yards from us on the port bow. A boat-hook, a rope-sling round his body, and he was hauled up on deck, not one minute too soon.
Harpoon at a Venture Page 13