Presently my companion woke up and staggered off, mumbling, “Wonderful evening, Major; thanks for wonderful evening.”
It was two years before either of us referred to the incident.
A few isolated days stand out from the remaining month of the 1946 season that I spent with the catchers. One dull afternoon when we arrived at Uishenish Lighthouse there was too much swell for us to get the Sea Leopard close under the rocks and understand what Davidson was trying to tell us. It would be sheltered round the corner in Shepherd’s Bight, but that would mean a long walk for him. Suddenly, we had the idea of firing a message ashore with the harpoon gun. By gesture we made Davidson understand what we were going to do; then we put about, went half a mile out to sea, and hove to. On a piece of paper I wrote:
If this doesn’t hit you, please hold up your right hand if you think we should wait in the Bight until evening. Give us a flat wave of both arms at chest level if we should clear off now. The stick is worth eight shillings so save it if you can.
This we screwed up and pushed into the empty socket of a harpoon stick, where the base of the harpoon should fit, and sealed it over with insulating tape. Davidson watched meanwhile through his telescope. We were rather vague as to what charge of powder should fire this novel form of message, but the cliff was several hundred feet high, and we reckoned that if we aimed the gun at about fifty degrees into the air the message must come down somewhere near to the lighthouse. The stick with its metal-shod end would be as deadly as a rifle bullet, so we aimed for the flat grass a couple of hundred yards north of the lighthouse.
It left the gun far too quickly for the eye to follow, then focused itself high and small against the sky midway between us and the shore. At first I thought it was going to fall short into the sea, then through the field-glasses I saw that it had cleared the cliff-top, as two gulls following the line of the rocks sheered to avoid it. It began to descend, hit the green grass just at the horizon, and bounced high in the air twice.
We were childishly delighted by our little conjuring trick, and watched eagerly as Davidson jumped down from the lighthouse wall and ran towards it. I watched him get the message out and read it; then his right hand shot up and stayed there so long that he began to look like Moses upon the hill of Rephidim. This did not seem a perfunctory invitation to stay; the sharks must be back again in numbers.
We waited in the calm water of Shepherd’s Bight, and as the sun sank below the hills behind us and left the Bight in shadow we saw Davidson take up a position on the headland from which he could watch us. Presently Manson’s boats came in from the south, and began to “feel” for herring. The weighted piano-wire with which this was done has now been generally replaced by echo-sounding devices which record shoals of fish with greater certainty and far less trouble, but they did not become general until the release of the bulk of Admiralty equipment. Manson found mackerel, well up on the south side of the Bight, and prepared to ring, with the two boats together and abreast before one set off to drop the net in a wide circle and carry its end back to his stationary partner to haul together.
He had barely started when a big shark’s fin showed high out of the water very close in to the rocks between the boats and the shore. The ringer stopped, and Manson came out of the wheelhouse to bawl across the water to us:
“Go in and take that damned thing out of it for us.”
The shark was right inshore in a narrow cul-de-sac among the rocks; it was a shot for the Gannet if either boat could get in there.
The Gannet could get in, but there was no turning space for her to get out again, and if we went in and took the shot without room for her to turn, it looked as though she would capsize or be hauled onto the rocks as the shark headed out for the deeper water.
We hung about outside the rocks, not twenty yards from the shark, discussing what we could do, and Manson began to get impatient. In the middle of this the Sea Leopard’s gun set the echoes rolling all round the bay, and we looked up to see her half a mile to northward of us, a drench of white spray all round her foredeck and a big black tail churning up the water round her bows in a series of tremendous slaps. We saw the barrel heaved overboard and Bruce at the gun reloading feverishly. There were two more fins moving slowly in line ahead a little to seaward of him.
“Come on,” said Tex; “we’ll waste all night on this unless we do something. How about we take the boat in stern first and try a shot as he comes out past us?”
We reversed the Gannet in very cautiously. The shark had turned, and lay practically motionless, head to sea and close in against the rocks; there was only just room for him and the boat, much of a size, in the narrow space. As our propeller drew level with his huge distended gills he seemed to notice us for the first time. A long undulation went through the body as he tried to sound, but his movement carried him forwards rather than downwards.
“Look out, Tex; here he comes!”
Tex had the gun slewed round to point as far backward as it would go, and he fired as the whole bulk went by him at a range of inches rather than feet. There could be no question of a miss.
What followed was so unexpected that for a moment none of us took it in. As the harpoon struck, the shark must have tried to sound in earnest, and hit the bottom. A second later the whole fish, with several tons of water and spray, was in the air level with our eyes. He fell, high and dry on the rocks, the great mottled belly towards us, twisted, rolled down into the water under our bows, and shot off at tremendous speed. We were so taken aback that we barely found time to get the barrel overboard before he reached the end of the rope.
The barrel was clear of the ring-netters’ area in five minutes, and the men on Manson’s boats were waving and laughing as though it was the best joke they had ever seen.
We killed four sharks that evening, but, as always, it was a weekend, and when we got back on Monday Davidson reported that he had seen nothing since we left. But in the mouth of Loch Skipport we met two local fishermen from South Uist, who told us that a shark had carried away two drift-nets that they had set on anchors on Saturday. We waited about the Loch, because we had no other reports to follow, and after a time I saw what I thought to be a shark’s fin appearing momentarily about a mile to seaward of us. It was never visible when I got the field-glasses trained on to the spot, but each time as I took them down from my eyes I saw the flash of it again, sometimes much higher out of the water than any part of a shark should be. Someone said it was a killer, someone else said it was something fighting with a shark. We set off to look; the surface was unbroken when we reached the area where it had been, and we cruised around for some time without seeing anything. Then, quite close to the boat, a shark’s tail rose high out of the water, dragging with it a heavy black mass of net which trailed just below the surface after the fin had disappeared. Here was the very shark that had carried off the drift-net, and in that helpless condition it did not seem that he could escape us. Again and again some portion of him heaved up well above the water, sometimes the tail, sometimes the head, and all were swathed in those thick black coils of net; he was wrapped up in it like a mummy, helpless, impotent, and illogically pathetic.
An animal displaying in extremis an instinctive pattern of behaviour from which no help can come rouses pity in me more easily than in any other way: the mole who seeks escape by movements of digging upon the concrete floor; the hedgehog curling up at the last moment before the oncoming car; the wounded brown hare freezing immobile upon the white snow; the lampreys that when taken from the sharks onto the deck of the Sea Leopard would attach their anchoring suckers with terrible avidity even to the boots of their captors.
The shark’s very helplessness made him impossible to approach. He was unable to follow a straight course; unable, it seemed, to remain at the surface for long. Those wild flourishes of the tail that tried to free itself of the snake-like constricting net carried him downward without volition; each movement to escape took him on a fresh course. He appeared at
the surface perhaps once every minute, but always he had submerged before the boat could reach him. After an hour the appearances became irregular, and finally ceased altogether.
It reminded one of the crew of a story. I wish there was room to write all the stories that were told in that fo’c’sle as we crossed and recrossed the Minch, or lay riding out gales in the Outer Island harbours while the wind howled and the rain battered outside.
“They caught something bigger than they bargained for, those two Uist men,” he said; “but not as big as something I once caught,” he added, with a reminiscent chuckle. “I caught a submarine in a salmon-net, and that’s the truth.
“It was during the war, and I was on a trawler that had been fitted out as a mine-layer. We were based, along with some other surface craft and two submarines, close to a famous salmon river. Now, I’m as honest as the next man, and as a rule I respect other people’s property, but all my life I’ve never been able to resist poaching a fish. Some people can’t resist poaching game, and it’s not for the profit of it; it’s something in the blood. ‘It’s my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year.’ I’m that way about salmon, and the more difficult it is and the better guarded it is the more’s the temptation. Well, I found out that the mate of this trawler was of the same mind as myself, and we began to think about this river. Or rather I should say that we’d both been thinking about it since we first found ourselves there. We did a bit of reconnoitring, and found that the best pool was right bang underneath the river-keeper’s house. I suppose that’s why the house was built there. It was like a challenge, and we made up our minds to have a try.’
“We began to make a net in our spare time. It had to be about a hundred and fifty yards long, and materials were a bit difficult to come by in those days; we had to get what we wanted little by little, and work at making it in our spare time. It took weeks before we had it finished, and we were as pleased as if we’d built a house.
“Well, the day after we’d finished it at last I was ashore with Jack—that’s the trawler’s mate—in the pub. It was a great rendezvous, that pub. There were depot ships and all sorts in the harbour, and as soon as every sailor came ashore he made straight for the pub. They didn’t go there only to drink, it was a sort of black-market clearing-house—deals in Navy cigarettes, rum, suitcases full of stuff hot enough to burn your fingers, and plugs of black tobacco rolled up in tarry string. There was often a bit of an old shirt sleeve in the middle, to make them look bigger.
“Anyway, I was there that night with Jack the mate, and as we were going back that evening on the liberty boat I said, ‘Jack, I’d like to get that net of ours shot tonight.’ Now it was finished, after all those weeks, we just couldn’t wait to get it in the water, and we agreed that we’d have a go that very night. We had the Commander of one of the submarines coming to dine aboard the trawler, but we reckoned we’d be back before that.
“We had a boy—Johnnie—along with us, and we set off up the river as soon as it was dark. We had the tide and the river against us, and it was tough going. When we got to the pool it was as black as pitch—you could hardly see the difference between the sky and the land. It was quiet, too, and we had our oars muffled so we wouldn’t be heard from the keeper’s house. We put the lad ashore on the opposite side of the pool from the house, and we set off to make a sweep of the pool ourselves.
“The tide was too strong for us, and we were making leeway the whole time, getting washed down the river, and after a few minutes we thought we’d give it up and try another night, so we let go our end of the net, thinking the boy Johnnie had a hold of the other end. But Johnnie got a scare and thought he saw someone coming up the bank to him, so he dropped his end in the water, thinking we had a hold of our end, and when we got to the place where he ought to be there’s no Johnnie in sight and no net. It was an hour before we found him, away down the river, striking matches like a fireworks display, and the net we’d spent all that time making was away to sea with the tide. You can guess we weren’t best pleased with each other, the way things had turned out, and to make matters worse there was the submarine Commander coming to dine aboard the trawler, and we looked like being late.
“And late we were, by a quarter of an hour, but there was no sign of our guest, not even by the time we’d changed our clothes and smartened ourselves up. He was an hour late by the time he did arrive, and mad as a tiger.
“‘We’ve had one hell of an evening,’ he said; ‘a bloody great net all wrapped up round our propellers, and we haven’t got it free yet. I’d like to get my hands on the silly b—— who let it float away from him.’
“Me and the mate caught each other’s eyes just then, and I tell you we had a job keeping our faces straight.”
Soon after this, in early August, I was required to attend an Army Medical Board at Inverness. We were fishing the northernmost range of the Outer Island sea lochs—Loch Shell, Loch Seaforth and Loch Erisort; the Sea Leopard put me ashore at Stornoway, and I flew from there to Aberdeen, and from Aberdeen to Inverness. From this flight was born the germ of another idea. From the closed aircraft, flying straight and level, I could not be certain that I saw sharks as we crossed the Minch, but more than once I saw shadows in the water at which I should have liked to have had a closer look, and I determined that if the project were recapitalised we ought to have a spotter aircraft to keep us in touch with the shoals.
When I came back from Inverness the Sea Leopard was in Mallaig. I took the secretary and a mass of papers ashore, and nostalgically I watched her sail for Uishenish in response to a message from Davidson. I spent a week ashore, finishing the documents on which we had been working for weeks—detailed statements of our finances and prospects—and set off for Glasgow and London to try to raise the capital for a proper equipment of our venture.
CHAPTER IX
Island of Soay Shark Fisheries Ltd
SINCE early that summer my agents had been doing their best to interest likely firms and private individuals in putting up the money necessary to capitalise our experience, and to reconstitute the shark fishery in a large way. I still tended to regard the past summer as a working season rather than as an experiment that must necessarily show a loss, and towards the end of June I had written to my nine subscribers, stating our policy as clearly as I was able to see it, and asking them to waive the minimum dividend which the form of agreement laid down. They had all replied that they were willing to do so and I was left free to negotiate our future and safeguard their capital as best I might.
My faith in the commercial possibilities of Basking Shark fishing was unshaken, but the supply difficulties, especially in the catching equipment, were so great that I found it difficult to estimate how much more capital might have to be spent on experiment before the fishery could be called a going concern. At the moment we had no attractive balance-sheet to lure the investor, not even a hard-and-fast assessment of the amount that must be spent in further investigation. The whole view was fogged by the mist of that original false judgment: that every part of the fish must be used, and that the commercial possibilities of all by-products be investigated simultaneously. Had we ignored these tempting side-alleys, and drawn up a programme to catch sharks and market their liver oil only, the figures would have been easily computable; other possibilities could have been explored gradually when the business had stabilised itself upon its main product. We had bitten off far more than we could chew.
Our gross revenue for that summer’s catching had been a little over three thousand pounds, a third of which was from the sale of salted flesh and the remainder from the oil. We had no established market for any other product, and the time that had been wasted upon preparing and transporting samples of various portions of the fish might have been spent profitably in catching more sharks.
The Soay factory was the narrow channel through which nothing ever seemed to run smoothly, and to which the greater part of our losses could be traced. Whereas we must have some shor
e base other than a tiny and crowded fishing-port, I realised now that Soay must be a base only, and that in any future programme the boats must become more and more independent of it in the routine work of catching sharks and producing barrelled flesh and oil. This was the idea that I had to sell; a floating factory becoming increasingly free, Soay becoming less and less of a factory and more of a harbour and store base. It was clear that to pay our capital debt and our revenue loss, to safeguard the invested money of the nine original subscribers and to carry on, meant selling everything to one man or firm who would then have a controlling interest in the company. I had already set foot on Soay for the last time as its owner.
By this date we had spent a total of rather more than fifteen thousand pounds, still less than a third of what Lord —— had said he would write off to experiment if his firm were undertaking a new enterprise of this kind, but all of it except the value of the boats must indeed be written off unless I could find someone interested in carrying on the idea. Nothing at the factory could be regarded as an asset except in direct connection with shark-fishing, for the cost of dismantling and transport to the mainland would be prohibitive; no items of the costly catching equipment would be worth a penny to anyone who did not intend to catch sharks. We had only the boats as directly realisable assets, and they were not worth five thousand pounds between them.
Our creditors were mainly local men from Mallaig and the vicinity, and they agreed to wait for payment until I had had full opportunity to try to form a Company and liquidate the debts of the present experimental business.
I sat in the Glasgow train, my brief-cases crammed with accounts, receipts, prospectuses, estimated revenue sheets, trade enquiries—everything that I could carry with me in justification of my faith in the possible future of my new industry. Mallaig and the shining sea slid further and further behind me; Glasgow, with its drab offices and the sharp cynical brains of those who would smile superciliously as they tore my dream to pieces, filled the whole of my mind.
Harpoon at a Venture Page 18