Harpoon at a Venture

by Gavin Maxwell

  I took this statement down from Bruce, who was quite unaware that anyone else in the neighbourhood had seen a fish answering to the same general description and had also mistaken it at first for a Basking Shark. John McInerney had given me the following statement a few hours earlier, taken down in shorthand and typed by Tex’s wife:

  On the evening of 12th July we were steaming north from Uishenish Light in flat calm weather looking for sharks. We had reached the tide-rip beyond the light when I saw a black fin astern of us, this I took to be a shark and accordingly made preparations to harpoon it. When we were within fifty yards of the fish I observed that though the day was flat calm the fin appeared to be waving or flapping from side to side. Still thinking it was a shark we approached from the rear preparatory to firing and then I noticed the fin was paper thin although not at all translucent. There was about two feet six inches of it showing above the water and it was quite as broad at the base as it was high. On seeing this I decided it could not be a Basking Shark, but I was still prepared to shoot it. As we came within range it sheered off going at about ten knots. I climbed the mast in order to get a better look at this strange fish and from this vantage point I observed that the fish was approximately fifteen feet long, but unlike a basking shark, where the dorsal fin is situated in the middle of the back this fin was directly over the head which fell away sharply in front of it. The tail was very similar to a shark’s tail. I could see no distinctive markings and the fish appeared to be completely black. The proportions were the same as those of the basking shark behind the dorsal fin.

  We may take it as reasonably certain that these two descriptions refer to a single species, the Ocean Sun-fish (Mola mola), which has a world-wide distribution, though it cannot be described as common. Its appearance in Loch Hourn and at Uishenish is perhaps less surprising than that neither Bruce nor Dan, both widely travelled and with years of sea experience, should have seen the species before.

  It is clear that Bruce got a closer and better view of the fish than did John Mclnerney. The Sun-fish grows to a length of eight or ten feet, and a weight of more than a ton. “They swim,” writes Mr Whitley, quoted by the late Dr J. R. Norman, “by turning both the dorsal and anal fins to one side at the same time.” This is the waving or flapping movement which struck both Bruce and John. The fish is such an entirely improbable shape—Dr Norman describes it as “having the appearance of an enormous head to which small fins are attached”—that anyone seeing it imperfectly for the first time would sub-consciously assume the existence of tail, much as one might assume the existence of legs on a swimming man; and this, I think, accounts for the apparent over-estimate of size in John McInerney’s description. Minus the tail, which is practically nonexistent in the Sun-fish, the size of the Uishenish and the Loch Hourn fish would about tally.

  Despite the discrepancies, the fish is in both cases recognisable in description; there had been an accuracy of observation sufficient to identify it. Should we necessarily assume that it is the accuracy of observation, rather than our state of knowledge, that is at fault when the description fits no known creature?

  Hebridean stories of the “Sea-serpent,” or of some unknown giant of the sea, are common enough to make it pointless for me to quote experiences unconnected with my own island and its vicinity. The stories which follow are of creatures seen by Soay men, of creatures whose description fits no animal known to science, and whose appearance has been exceedingly frightening to these men who know the familiar life of the sea so well.

  I am not entirely clear whether there were in fact two or three such incidents at Soay. I have heard Sandy Campbell, eye-witness of the first, tell the story many times, but I found it difficult to remember the details when I came to write it down, and asked him to send me an account by letter. The story is arid by comparison with his spoken word, and beyond it I have drawn upon certain details that I well remember but which are not included in his letter. The second incident which he mentions may well refer to the story told to Ronald Macdonald (who saw the White Whale) and his brother Harry, by their father, who is now dead. The discrepancy between implied dates has inclined me to treat them as separate experiences; Sandy is alive, and I hope will remain so for many years, so that anyone sufficiently interested may check the details.

  Sandy’s own experience took place when he was a boy. It made a very strong impression upon him; his letter to me ends with the words, “I was only young at the time, but I have never forgotten that night.”

  It was during the early years of the present century, and Loch Scavaig, in common with all the West Coast sea lochs, teemed with herring. It was the custom then for crofters to cure herring for their own use, and scores of boats would congregate where there was a big shoal. One early autumn night Sandy was fishing from a skiff in Loch Scavaig with two men. One, I think, was his uncle, the other was a man called John Stewart; both were elderly, and had had a lifetime of experience.

  They shot their net well up towards the head of Loch Scavaig, close to the small island. There were a large number of other boats in the Loch, but none very close to them. It was dusk; the sky was still light, but the land was dark—a fine night with a light northerly breeze and a ripple on the water. Sandy and the two old men began to haul their net. He was only a young boy, and his arms tired easily; he rested for a moment, and as he did so he noticed an object rising out of the water about fifty yards to seaward of them. It was about a yard high when he first saw it, but, as he watched, it rose slowly from the surface to a height of twenty or more feet—a tapering column that moved to and fro in the air. Sandy called excitedly to the old men, but at first got only an angry retort to keep on hauling the net and not be wasting time. At last Stewart looked up in exasperation, and then sprang to his feet in bewildered astonishment, as he too saw what Sandy was looking at. While this “tail” was still waving in the air they could see the water rippling against a dark mass below it which was just breaking the surface, and which they presumed to be the animal’s body. The high column descended slowly into the sea as it had risen; and as the last of it submerged the boat began to rock on a commotion of water like the wake of a passing steamer. Stewart was terrified; they dropped the net and rowed as fast as they could for the shore.

  Sandy’s letter ends with a paragraph that may or may not refer to Macdonald’s story, but Ronald and his brother Harry date the latter as 1917, long after Sandy’s experience, and while he himself was at sea during the first world war.

  The following summer two old men were fishing lobsters from a coble and rowing towards Rhu when they saw an object about thirty feet in height waving to and fro out of the sea. The day was fine and hot, and they thought they could see the body in the water moving at speed towards them. They got such a scare that they made for the shore at once.

  Macdonald was in a boat at the mouth of Loch Brittle on a bright summer’s day, when the phenomenon passed, travelling north at about five knots, a mile to seaward of him. It appeared as a high column, said to be a great deal higher than the object Sandy had seen in Loch Scavaig, and light flashed at the top of the column as though a small head were being turned from side to side. There was a considerable commotion of water astern of it, but no other portion of the body was visible above the surface. It submerged slowly until nothing was left showing above the sea, and it seemed to descend vertically and without flexion.

  I do not think that the finer details of these stories are important. The points of dissimilarity are fewer than those of similarity, and whereas they correspond to the description of no animal known to science, they do resemble closely a great number of descriptions given by honest and experienced seamen from all corners of the ocean. Sandy and Macdonald describe an object broadly speaking corresponding to those recorded by Dr Matheson at Kyle of Lochalsh in 1893; by Captain Cringle of the Umfuli, sailing for Cape of Good Hope in the same year; by the Valhalla in 1905; by H.M.S. Kellett in 1923; to the description of the Hoy animal in 1919, and to that given b
y the Third Officer of the Tyne in 1920. This is to mention but a few of Commander Gould’s generally ignored records.[*]

  We have seen how living and unfamiliar objects in the sea are described by people of experience. We have seen that there are often certain inaccuracies and discrepancies, but we have seen, too, that the word-picture is usually complete enough and accurate enough to identify the creature when it is a known species. We may theorise as to the impossibility of the existence of these creatures unknown to us, but we must recognise both the general resemblance between many of the descriptions, and that a number of experienced men of great integrity have believed that they saw very large animals with which they were entirely unfamiliar.

  The feelings of men who offer such testimony to find it rejected are summed up in a letter from Captain Cringle (Umfuli, 1893), quoted by Commander Gould.

  Re the matter of the Sea-serpent.

  I have suffered so much ridicule on this that I must decline to have anything more to do with it.

  Whatever unbelief there is in such a monster’s existence, I am certainly convinced that what I saw was a living creature capable of moving at the rate of ten knots. I chased it for ten minutes at that speed and had got no nearer to it. I had at that time 23 years’ experience in Sail and Steam and was not likely to mistake what I saw.

  Yours faithfully,

  He believed with absolute certainty that he had seen some entirely strange animal, and the explanations which were forced down his throat seemed to him puerile. If Sandy’s story is not believed, I hope it will be of some comfort to him to know that seventy-five years ago Charles Gould wrote: “The West Coast of the Isle of Skye is another locality from which several reports of it have been received during this century.”

  During the centuries when science had not progressed far in the identification and classification of marine species the world had an open ear for stories of strange sea monsters. The general view of natural historians was that anything might exist in the sea, and their efforts were directed more to the correlation of descriptions that might build up more or less complete pictures of animals unknown to them. As more and more species were named and classified (often incorrectly), the tendency by the nineteenth century was to try to relate “travellers’ tales” to creatures already listed. The rapid growth of science gave it the intolerance of an adolescent, and the empiricism which had been one of the most praiseworthy features of the early writers went temporarily out of fashion.

  The positive identification of an entirely new giant sea-creature during the latter half of the century was a heavy blow to many dogmatists. From earliest times a number of “monster” stories had referred to a dragon with many arms of enormous length, which could reach into a boat and drag men into the sea to be eaten at leisure. This creature, almost universally derided by scientists at the time, had become a fait accompli by 1875; it was only then that the Giant Squid (Loligo architeuthis), a ten-armed relative of the octopus, its longest tentacles having a length of more than thirty feet, was finally recognised by science.

  “One might have thought,” writes Commander Gould,[*] “that, since naturalists had been brought to see that a so-called myth had a real foundation, and that the sea held at least one large creature of which they had no knowledge, they might have gone a step further, and admitted that there might be others also. Possibly, some did; but the more general attitude, I think, was that assumed by Lee in his Sea Monsters Unmasked—a somewhat optimistic title—which endeavoured to show that such stories as Egede’s, and that of the Daedalus, were distorted narratives of an encounter with a giant squid.”

  But the Giant Squid was not the last practical joke that the sea had in store for scientists. During the winter of 1938 a fish about five feet long was caught in a trawl-net at a depth of forty fathoms off the coast of South Africa. It was not recognised by its captors, and was preserved for identification. It was, however, immediately recognised by scientists as Latimeria, one of the Cœlacanths that were well known from fossils of the Cretaceous Period, which lasted from a hundred and forty million to seventy million years ago. It was believed to have become extinct by the end of that period, which was dominated on land by the great dinosaurs. In other words, it was presumed to have been already extinct for about sixty million years before man appeared upon the earth. How would the scientific world have received an unsupported claim to have seen it in 1938? The species is now recognised by the name of Latimeria chalumnae, and it seems to me that its portraits have a twinkle in the huge eye and an almost audible chuckle in the archaic throat.

  Many stories of the “sea-serpent” would be treated as barely distorted descriptions of a Plesiosaur were this not a prehistoric animal. The plesiosaurs, however—giant lizards of the shallow seas, with a long neck and tail and four paddle-like flippers—are presumed to have become extinct with or before Latimeria.

  The Mososaurs, too, were contemporaries of this Rip van Winkle of the sea, and they were veritable Sea-serpents; huge rapacious reptiles almost as slender as a snake. So let us “never never doubt what nobody is sure about.”

  A proportion of “sea-monster” stories have for a long time been justifiably recognised by scientists as being the result of ill-informed observation of Basking Sharks. I have several times seen three or more large sharks swimming nose to tail, following each other for long distances and sometimes in circles, and these an inexperienced observer would almost certainly mistake for one creature of great length. It is strange, however, that few who have rightly attempted these explanations seem to have had any idea of what a Basking Shark looked like, and so have misled the public still further by inaccurate drawings.

  For example, on page 213 of Commander Gould’s The Case for the Sea-serpent appear two sketches. The first is a rough sketch by Captain F. W. Dean, R.N., of H.M. Armed Merchant Cruiser Hilary. The second is Commander Gould’s attempt to relate this drawing to a Basking Shark.

  Now (a), the top sketch, requires only the minutest of modifications to make it into an absolutely typical appearance of a Basking Shark, while it would take some really heavy reconstruction for (b) to resemble a Basking Shark even faintly. If I saw the objects in the top sketch, I should immediately suppose them to be the tail (left) and dorsal fin (right) of an ordinary adult Basking Shark, and I should be puzzled only by the absence of a “sub-terminal notch” in the tail fin (see photograph 75). The dorsal fin in Commander Gould’s drawing suggests an immature bull Killer Whale, and the body resembles no fish that I have ever seen personally. He carefully tucks the tail below water, whereas a Basking Shark oftener than not shows a foot or more of tail above water when swimming at the surface.

  The Hilary “monster.”

  Reproduced by kind permission from The Case for the Sea-Serpent, by R. T. Gould (Philip Allan, 1930).

  The bottom sketch (c) would be my own explanation of Captain Dean’s drawing, nor in his lengthy quoted description can I see anything but my old friend the Basking Shark.

  But not all the Sea-serpents can be so easily explained away, and with the resurrection of Latimeria as so recent a reminder of the folly of dogmatism, we should do well to keep an open mind.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Sea Dragons, Hawkins, 1840.

  Sea Monsters Unmasked, H. Lee, 1883.

  The Great Sea-serpent, Oudemans.

  Mythical Monsters, Charles Gould, 1886.

  The Case for the Sea-serpent, R. T. Gould, 1930.

  *. The Dimensions of Animals and their Muscular Dynamics, A. V. Hill.

  *. The Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland, J. G. Millais, 1906, Vol. III.

  *. “Sound Emitted by Dolphins,” F. C. Fraser, Nature, Vol. 160, Nov. 1947.

  *. A History of the Whale Fisheries, J. T. Jenkins, 1921.

  †. The Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland, J. G. Millais, 1903, Vol. III.

  ‡. P. L. Niort, Bull. Soc. Zool., Fr. 74, 1950, pp. 244–246.

  *. The Case for the Sea-serpent, R. T. Gould, 1930.<
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  *. The Case for the Sea-serpent, R. T. Gould, 1980.

  APPENDIX II

  The Basking Shark

  by L. Harrison Matthews, Sc.D.

  Scientific Director, Zoological Society of London, and H. W. Parker, D.Sc.

  British Museum (Natural History).

  General. It is remarkable that the anatomy and biology of a fish so large, conspicuous, and common as the Basking Shark should be practically unknown, especially in view of the fact that it is the subject of a commercial fishery in the British Isles, and consequently is not inaccessible to naturalists. Until 1947 the general anatomy of this fish had been reported on by only four persons: Home (1809, 1813), who examined two adult males; de Blainville (1811), who examined one; Pavesi (1874, 1878), who examined two immature males, and Carazzi (1904, 1905), who examined an immature female. There are numerous observations on the occurrence of the species in various parts of the world, and some authors have described the whalebone-like gill-rakers. In the second half of May, 1947 Dr Harrison Matthews and Dr H. W. Parker visited Major Gavin Maxwell’s shark-fishing station and factory on the Isle of Soay, off the coast of Skye. They examined and dissected a number of sharks, and were able to go to sea in hunting-craft. The machinery used in dismembering sharks at the factory was an invaluable aid to the work, for sharks are not easy subjects for dissection, the size and weight of the individual organs making handling difficult; and woe betide the anatomist who inadvertently punctures the stomach and releases something like a ton of semi-digested plankton over his dissection. A large amount of information was collected and much material fixed and preserved for subsequent examination. A special study was made of reproduction and internal anatomy, food and feeding habits, and of parasites. Their results were published in two memoirs presented to the Royal Society and the Zoological Society of London, and printed with many illustrations.