No one knew where or how the basking shark passed the winter. It seemed no one even knew what it ate, or whether its young were hatched from eggs or born alive. It was generally assumed by the fishermen that it fed on herring, because it was usually found where the herring shoals were (in fact it is a plankton feeder), and they complained loudly at the havoc the creature inflicted on their herring nets, and the danger its huge and powerful body posed to small boats. It was known that the basking shark’s liver contained large quantities of valuable oil, and that in times past the people of the islands used to harpoon them from massed formations of small boats in order to extract a winter’s supply of lamp-oil from them. There was almost no scientific data, and few if any specimens had ever been examined by a qualified marine biologist – the rare carcases that were ever washed ashore were simply hailed as sea monsters, and that was that. In sum, Gavin discovered, the basking shark, for all its huge, unignorable bulk and regular sightings on the surface of the sea, remained a mysterious enigma – an almost total blank in the lexicon of the world’s natural history.
Gavin was fired to discover more, and this led him to acquire two traditional barbless, spear-shaped whaling harpoons, with which he hoped to secure a basking shark should he ever encounter one again. It was not until mid-September 1944, when he took his first leave for nearly two and a half years, that the chance arose. It was now late in the basking shark season. Gavin was out in the Gannet with Foxy Gillies and a friend by the name of John Winter, an international sailing-dinghy champion, and his wife and brother-in-law, when they encountered a shoal of some half dozen of the creatures in a little bay at the Point of Sleat, the most southerly point of Skye.
‘Major, Major, sharks!’ cried Foxy at the tiller. They turned the boat into the bay and suddenly a great fin surfaced almost alongside, barely a yard from where Foxy, the strongest of the three men, stood ready to push home the boathook with the harpoon lashed to its end. With all his strength he drove it down into the water, pushing on the shaft for a final thrust into the side of the shark.
‘Got him this time,’ yelled Foxy. ‘Right in the bugger this time!’
A fountain of spray shot up from the sea as the shark’s tail lashed down on the water with several violent slaps, and then the rope attached to the end of the harpoon-shaft began to whip out at a tremendous speed from the coil in the hold as the shark dived down. Then the rope stopped running and went slack. As Gavin began tentatively to haul it in, it was whisked from his hands as though attached to an express train, skinning his palms. After the second dive the rope again went slack, and cautiously Gavin again began to haul it in. But only the harpoon came up. The shark must have dived straight to the bottom and then rolled on the harpoon and worked it free. Of the boathook there was no sign, but the harpoon looked like a corkscrew which had been bent double and then crushed in a vice.
‘Ach, to hell!’ exclaimed Foxy angrily. ‘The harpoon was no good. I would have been better putting salt on his tail.’
On the way home Gavin and John Winter busied themselves with measurements and calculations for the design of a better harpoon. It was then, as Gavin was to recall later, that an idea was born. ‘A firm determination to catch a shark was growing in me,’ he was to write; ‘it seemed a challenge. And then, quite suddenly – without, I think, any conscious build-up – I thought that here was the industry for Soay, the occupation I required, new and utterly absorbing.’
The time was ripe. It was clear that before long the war would be over, and Gavin needed to turn his mind to post-war employment. In October orders came for the SOE training establishments at Arisaig to be closed down. Gavin put his unique collection of foreign small arms into two metal trunks, loaded them on his lobster-boat and took them out to sea, where he dropped them overboard. It was the end of his war. In SOE he had spent his time among congenial people who liked and respected him, living a secure, regular and purposeful life, working at the things he could do best in the area he loved most in the world. Now he was returning to the doubts and uncertainties of private life.
At the beginning of November 1944 he was formally posted back to the Scots Guards, and entitled to remuneration from Army funds again. But rather than return to the dull routine of barrack service in London, he arranged to have himself excused on medical grounds, persuading an old friend of his, ‘Doc’ Rattray, the much-liked but chronically alcoholic local doctor at Mallaig, to write a note to Regimental Headquarters diagnosing an apparently serious medical condition.
On 8 November Gavin attended an Army Medical Board at Inverness and was pronounced to be Category E (permanently unfit for any form of military service). He would be invalided out of the Army and would relinquish his commission with effect from 24 February 1945, with the honorary rank of Major. In the meantime he donned civilian clothes, quit his little SOE billet near Glasnacardoch, and took up residence at the congenial and idiosyncratic family home of his cousins the Shaw Stewarts, at Morar Lodge, a mile or two down the road to the south.
Tucked away inside a rhododendron jungle overlooking the loch, Morar Lodge had been built by the Lovat family in the 1870s as a three-bedroomed, no-bathroomed summer holiday home for their children, and had later been extended to include an extraordinary wooden annexe that housed a laboratory full of ancient microscopes, rats and junk. The house had escaped being requisitioned by SOE and remained throughout the war a haven not only for human waifs like Gavin (who now lived in the dining room), but for a bizarre multitude of stray animals of all kinds.
‘In fiction, perhaps, old Mrs Knox’s house as described in The Experiences of an Irish R.M. approached it most nearly,’ wrote Gavin; ‘its atmosphere of comfort, kindness, mingled squalor and riches, but, above all, its animals. The house and its environs were inhabited, by invitation, by an infinitely greater number of animals than of humans, and against their amiable but ruthless depredations had accumulated an elaboration of uncouth barricades and defences.’
A large floating population of dogs, including Gavin’s own young springer spaniel, Jonnie, occupied the downstairs rooms, and the noise of their disagreements, amours, and outraged protestations as they were stepped upon by some unwitting guest was one of the characteristic sounds of the house. At bedtime the armchairs had to be piled with books to keep the horde of dogs off during the night. Two grey cats, one perpetually pregnant, and a scrawny, disabled black pullet named Angusina which lived in the drawing room completed the indoor population, but outside lurked a more extensive and unpredictable menagerie, including a vast black sow called Minnie, against whom many of the trip-wires and booby-traps had been constructed. But meals were interrupted so often by Minnie’s successful penetration of these outer defences that they were abandoned at last and the veranda became her siesta place, and her vast sleeping carcase was occasionally used as a convenient seat by the younger members of the family.
Many odd specimens and egregious breeds of sheep and cattle, turkeys and geese, gave the place the air of an agricultural zoo, and two animals of Gavin’s own were later added to the collection: a Shetland ewe that had fallen into Mallaig Harbour during transport of the flock to Soay, and a cantankerous Great Black-Backed Gull which he had taken when young from a rock in the Outer Hebrides. ‘Only one obvious animal was missing from the house,’ Gavin wrote, ‘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.”’
At Morar Lodge Gavin busied himself with a preliminary investigation of the commercial possibilities of a basking-shark fishery, and from there, a few days after failing his medical board, he wrote to Major Archibald Pearson, Regimental Adjutant at the Scots Guards, to explain his absence from soldiering duties in distant London:
I am very sorry to think that I shan’t be with the Regiment again, but I think I should be pretty useless, as after 3 years I remember just about as much about Regimental soldiering as about my pre
-natal life.
I am living up here for a time, as I am starting a commercial shark-fishing station for extraction of oil. The work will have to be done with drifters and trawlers which I am buying now, and most of them require some conversion before they can be fitted with the whaling harpoon guns. I seem to be as busy as I was in my job, tho’ I visualised this as a period of ease and idleness! I wish I was better at working out the commercial side of things – the finance, I mean.
So the White Knight embarked on his great quest – and the serious business of tilting with harpoons at the monsters of the deep.
To fund his new enterprise – Isle of Soay Shark Fisheries – Gavin persuaded his mother to advance him as working capital a sum of £11,000 (a vast figure in 1945) set aside for him in her will and due on her death. This represented the sole funding of his company until he persuaded nine friends (among them his ex-SOE friend Hamish Pelham-Burn, the Antarctic traveller and ornithologist Niall Rankin, and the Cambridge classical scholar and future headmaster of Westminster School, Walter Hamilton) to contribute loans of £500 each.
Uppermost in Gavin’s mind was the commercial success of the venture; but it is doubtful that this was the innermost thing in his soul. Kathleen Raine once remarked: ‘Making money was not Gavin’s line of country. Making money was quite incidental to Gavin the knight. It was the wild adventure – he was Captain Ahab after the white whale, after Moby-Dick. And you can’t win against the white whale.’
Practically speaking, Gavin saw himself as a sea-going version of the elephant hunter in the African bush. Liver oil was the basking shark’s ivory. The huge liver could account for up to a quarter of the body weight of the basking shark, and its 160 gallons of oil comprised three-quarters of the liver’s weight. A major component of the oil was a terpenoid hydrocarbon called squalene, which was in great demand in the post-war margarine industry (and is still of value today in the cosmetic, health food and aviation industries). An average basking shark produced just under half a ton of oil. In 1945 this oil could be sold for £50 a ton; by 1947 the price had more than doubled.
Provided he could keep overheads down, Gavin’s plan to concentrate on the oil was commercially sensible. But he was in a desperate hurry to get the venture started, and as a result made some serious errors.
The first and most obvious of these was the boat he bought to serve as his main catcher. The Dove was a forty-five-year-old drifter from the Stornoway fishing fleet for which he paid £1000 without ever having set eyes on her. When he finally saw the vessel he intended to carry the main burden of his sharking enterprise (with his own Gannet in support), he quickly realised his mistake. ‘She was in roughly the condition one might expect of Noah’s ark were it thrown up by some subterranean upheaval,’ he wrote later, ‘nor would the engines have made one marvel at Noah’s mechanical genius.’ Only one engine was in working order, the timbers were rotten, the galley was deep in filth and the whole boat was so overrun with rats that sixty were caught in the first two days. For three months the Dove lay in Mallaig Harbour undergoing repairs which only served to reveal more of her terminal decay.
The qualities of Gavin’s crew compensated for the wretchedness of the vessel. His very first employee in the sharking venture was Tex Geddes, the Newfoundlander from SOE Arisaig, for whom Gavin had formed the greatest respect. Tex was in his late twenties, and had all the attributes Gavin most admired in a man – above all a wild and colourful past. Expelled from school as unmanageable at the age of twelve, he had worked as a lumberjack, rum-runner, boxer and knife-thrower before joining a Scottish regiment shortly before the war. An expert boat-handler and able harpoon-gunner, he was to prove a staunch companion in the ordeals and adventures to come.
Bruce Watt was the next to join. An ex-Merchant Navy engineer officer of Gavin’s own age, he was as teetotal as Tex and Gavin were not, and as solid and commonsensical as they were volatile and impetuous. He was to serve most ably as Gavin’s skipper. Foxy Gillies and a deckhand and a cook made up the rest of the crew for that first 1945 season.
While the small factory on Soay for extracting the shark liver oil and processing the fish meal was still under construction, Gavin busied himself with trial and experiment at sea. For all concerned, shark fishing was virgin territory. There was no more crucial or contentious aspect of the business than the design of the harpoon and the gun to fire it. Here Gavin made a second blunder. If he had gone to Norway to see at first-hand the harpoons and harpoon guns the experienced Norwegians used on their whaling ships, he would have saved himself a lot of trouble and expense. Instead, he started to design his own harpoons and guns from scratch. His first harpoons – ancient, spear-shaped specimens, intended for whaling – proved quite useless, for they were crushed by the sheer power of the basking shark’s body. Subsequent modifications were of varying merit, as were the early models for a custom-built harpoon gun.
In the first sea trials with the newly-designed harpoon and gun the crew fired a total of fourteen shots at sharks and five at killer whales, and every time the equipment malfunctioned. Not a single harpoon struck home. They fared no better with hand harpoons they had designed themselves. Off the isle of Rhum they came across a large basking shark with its huge fin standing high out of the sea. Peering down, Gavin saw the great brown bulk of the shark a few feet beneath the surface, and stood poised and ready in the bow with the hand harpoon, waiting for Tex to give the word to strike.
‘Let him have it!’ yelled Tex. Both Gavin and Tex drove down with all their strength and the harpoons entered deep into the shark’s back. For a moment nothing happened. Then the shark crash-dived in a shower of spray. The rope ran out at a terrific speed, and the shark began to tow the Gannet slowly ahead. They steered an erratic course, but at the end of four hours they were not more than two miles from where they had started. At about five in the afternoon they tried to haul the fish up, but after an hour’s pulling the shark had only six fathoms of rope left, and they could not gain an inch. ‘It was like trying to pull a house,’ Gavin recalled. ‘It was a deadlock; we had not the strength to pull him in, and he could not tear the harpoons from his back.’ The strain was terrific; something had to give, and in the event it was one of the harpoon shafts – the inch-and-a-half-thick steel snapped off short at the body of the shark. The second harpoon pulled out as soon as it took the single strain.
They had not gone a mile before they spied another shark travelling slowly westward, its fin rolling in the increasing swell. Gavin struck with the only harpoon left. The harpoon made fast and the shark began to tow them towards the south-west – into the gathering dusk and an approaching storm. Rhum was blotted out and the darkness became inky.
After an hour the breeze began to stiffen and it became very cold; then with the night and the breaking seas came the most beautiful of all the sea’s jewels: the phosphorescence of noctiluca. Each breaking wave glowed with pale opalescent fire, and when the water slapped against the boat’s sides they were left sparkling with a thousand tiny lights.
I crawled up the foredeck to feel the position of the rope; it led ahead at an angle of forty-five degrees, and from it streamed a trail of phosphorus which told me that our speed was increasing. We were heading west nor’west, and making about five knots into a rising sea. Except for the sound of the breaking water, the night was very quiet. We sailed into a dream sea in the dark and the eerie phosphorescence, towed by the wounded shark far below in the dark water.
The boat was being towed steadily seaward in a rising wind when Gavin turned in, rolled up in his duffel coat on the floor of the hold. At two in the morning he roused himself to find that they were now in a heavy sea, the breaking phosphorescence stretching away on all sides to the very limit of vision. ‘There was a distant undercurrent of sound, deeper and heavier than the nearby breakers, which at first I could not place. Then through it came an unmistakable call, thin and buffeted by the wind, but sweetly familiar, the calling of curlews – curlews that meant rock
and reef.’
Bruce gave the inevitable order. They must free themselves from the shark at once. Gavin crawled up the foredeck and felt the rope; it stretched out at an acute angle, and thirty yards ahead was a little boil of phosphorescence in the water. The boat was being pulled rapidly due west; the shark was swimming almost on the surface, and it was impossible to pull the harpoon out. The only way to free themselves was to cut the rope. Bruce chopped it through with an axe, seven and a half hours after Gavin had planted the harpoon. They had lost the fish, and Gavin felt seasick for the first time in his life.
Though the sharking venture’s proper arena was the sea, much of Gavin’s time was necessarily spent on the land – not on Soay (where he never resided, though he was the island’s laird) but at the shark boats’ home base at Mallaig, then a raw working fishing port, where the weather, and the life, could always turn a little wild, like a West Highland Klondike. In his tiny office in Mallaig Gavin wrestled with the bureaucracy that threatened to strangle his enterprise at birth.
The season for hunting the basking shark was brief. The giant fish rarely appeared in Hebridean waters before the beginning of May. They spent the best part of the summer in the Hebrides, cruising to and fro in search of plankton drifts off the islands, then for no understood reason disappeared for a month in late July, reappearing in greatly reduced numbers in the second week of August to spend another six weeks or so in these waters before vanishing again.
The west-facing shores of the islands were littered with the flotsam of five years of war and scores of torpedoed convoys, with ships’ rafts, RAF dinghies, lifebelts, fuel tanks, bales of raw rubber and timber everywhere, and nowhere thicker than along Harris Bay, on Rhum. Here Gavin sent the Dove to salvage beams and spars for the Soay factory jetty whenever there were no sharks about. When it became clear that the factory would not be ready till September, Gavin decided to write off the 1945 summer as a purely experimental season.
Gavin Maxwell Page 12