Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  One day in August, in the midst of these preparatory chores, the crew had their first kill. Driving into Mallaig from Morar one morning, Gavin spied from the hill above the harbour a large shoal of basking shark some six miles out. It was midday before the Gannet was ready to put to sea, with two teenage boys on board – Gavin’s Morar hostess’s son, Jackie Shaw Stewart, and a school-friend of his from England by the name of Raef Payne. By the time they had reached the spot many of the shark had vanished from view, but they managed to locate a likely quarry and made a perfect approach from astern. At point-blank range Gavin fired the harpoon gun and scored a palpable hit. He could see the shark a fathom or two down in clear water, the harpoon shaft sticking out of its side and a dark plume of blood trailing from it like smoke. Tex saw the great fish, too, and gave a war-cry of triumph: ‘He feels it! He feels it!’

  For four hours sharkers and shark engaged in a herculean tug of war. At the end of that time the rope was still as vertical as a telegraph pole, the shark three hundred feet down in the green dusk of the sea. Gavin lay flat on the deck and peered down into the dim water. He could see the rope stretching down, and then, at the extreme limit of vision, something that resembled a giant punkah swinging rhythmically to and fro. This was the tail of the shark, some six feet wide, and so powerful that when it came clear of the surface it beat the water with such force that the sea exploded like a fountain.

  At length, late in the afternoon, they managed to slip a noose around the lunging creature and make the tail fast to the stern. The shark was theirs. Jubilantly they set sail for Mallaig, towing their prize at less than a mile an hour across a white, oily calm. It was near dusk when they reached Mallaig. Word had gone round that a shark was coming in, and a crowd some fifteen hundred strong thronged the pier to watch. It was evident that the shark was still very much alive, for time and again it tried to bore down to the harbour bottom. It was also evident that it was inordinately heavy, for the steam winch was unable to lift the creature out of the water, and the sharkers had to seek the assistance of a nearby boom ship equipped with massive cranes. The crowds grew denser as the rope was transferred to a giant crane under the glare of searchlights.

  The crane began to winch the fish up, and as it was slowly hauled clear of the water its monstrous girth was revealed to the excited crowd.

  ‘Oh, wha’a crayture!’

  ‘You wouldn’ believe it!’

  ‘It canna be a fish!’

  When twenty feet of the shark was clear of the water there was a snapping sound, and the crane stopped lifting. For a moment there was silence, then a terrific crack and a tearing noise as the shark’s body snapped in two at the tail and fell into the oily water of the harbour, followed a second later by the severed tail and a groan from the watching crowd.

  The shark was recovered next day and served as shark steak at Morar Lodge, where it was pronounced tasteless.

  The first, experimental, season ended in October 1945, and Gavin stood back to reflect on what he had learned and consider his options. He had solved a few teething problems and gained some experience in the practical difficulties of catching basking shark on a commercial basis. He had also reinforced a fatal decision.

  From the outset Gavin had believed that the basking shark’s only real value lay in its precious liver oil. But his commercial advisers, a big firm of Glasgow fish marketeers who had little concept of the handling problems presented by such a gigantic fish, whose head alone could weigh a ton, felt it was a shocking waste to take the oil and abandon the rest of the massive carcase, every scrap of which they felt had some market potential somewhere. Unwisely, Gavin agreed that during the 1946 season his enterprise would attempt to process and market no fewer than a dozen different products from the basking shark – liver oil, liver residue, glue from the membranes, shagreen from the skin, frozen flesh and salted flesh, fish meal, dried fins, bone manure, plankton, stomach contents and glandular products.

  The implications of this decision were substantial. For a start, the factory, not the ships, would form the nerve-centre of the venture; the factory on Soay would have to be extended and a replacement found for the unseaworthy Dove. All this would cost money which Gavin had not got. To work the whole of the basking shark’s carcase required a factory ship like those whalers used. It was to take several years of hardship and tribulation for Gavin to prove to his own satisfaction that he had been right all along.

  The winter of 1945–46 was a period of endless frustration and delays. In an attempt to find something profitable for the Soay factory to do during the long off-season in the shark-fishing year, which lasted at least eight months from October to May, Gavin investigated the possibilities of peat drying, seaweed drying, stone quarrying and a lobster pond, but none of these island resources looked remotely profitable, and in any case the half-built factory was flattened and then bodily removed by a 120 mile per hour hurricane in February, and had to be rebuilt. ‘The early months of that, year were a nightmare,’ Gavin recorded, ‘a dream in which one runs but does not move.’ Factory, boats, catching equipment – all suffered one delay after another.

  The replacement boat for the Dove, an ex-Admiralty Harbour Defence Motor Launch that Gavin bought for £4000 and renamed the Sea Leopard, did not arrive at Mallaig until 20 April 1946, but her élan made up for her tardiness. ‘Lying among the fishing boats she was like a greyhound among bulldogs,’ Gavin wrote, ‘seventy feet long, sleek and graceful, and with Admiralty written in every line of her.’ The large engine room amidships contained two powerful, gleaming 160 horsepower diesel engines; crew quarters were for’ard of it and the after-part of the ship accommodated an officers’ ward room as finely fitted as an expensive yacht.

  This small saloon, measuring ten foot by ten, Gavin took over as his home and office, and within a few days he had furnished it with a carpet, a filing cabinet, a typewriter, a sofa and a mahogany bookcase full of technical works on ballistics, navigation, biology and whale fisheries, along with a score or so of tattered paperback novels (seven of them by Evelyn Waugh) and several literary works, including T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity and Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise.

  By the last week of April Gavin had got together everything and everyone he thought he needed for his first full season as a working fishery. The modified and refurbished harpooning equipment had arrived from the gunsmith in Birmingham – twenty harpoons for the breech-loading Oerlikon gun on the Sea Leopard (the main catching ship) and another twenty for the old-fashioned muzzle-loading whaling gun on the refitted Gannet. A new crew had been assembled, with Dan MacGillivray, a Skye man who had worked on sailing schooners and on an Australian sheep station, replacing Foxy Gillies as mate. An engineer, a deckhand and a cook made up the rest of the more or less regular crew, with Tex Geddes and the deckhand taking over the Gannet whenever she was cast off from the Sea Leopard.

  Only the arrival in Mallaig Harbour of Tony Watkins, brother of the polar explorer Gino Watkins, and his small fleet of ring-net shark boats and a steam drifter factory-ship spoiled Gavin’s departure. Watkins had hunted basking shark in these waters for three seasons before the war, and there was much he knew about the business that Gavin didn’t. Of his first meeting with Gavin, in his cabin on the Sea Leopard, he recalled: ‘Seated at a table was a fair-haired, sharp-featured man of about my own age. He greeted me, I thought, with more than a touch of hostility. “What I came for is this,” I explained, disconcerted by the atmosphere. “As you know, I only use the livers. Perhaps we can do a deal over my carcases. That is, of course, if you produce fish-meal at your factory…”’

  Gavin resented Watkins’ intrusion into what he regarded as his home territory. ‘Well,’ Watkins told him, ‘if there aren’t enough sharks in the sea for both of us, we might as well both give up.’

  ‘Neither trusted the other an inch,’ Gavin wrote, ‘and for all the season our crews vied with each other in the magnificence of their lie
s, forgotten failures and multiplied successes.’

  Watkins was the first to sail out of Mallaig. Gavin’s little fleet followed on 7 May, the Sea Leopard’s bow proudly breasting the rolling Atlantic swell, the salt tang sharp in the air as they headed for Soay and the west-facing coast of Skye for the start of their first professional sharking season.

  EIGHT

  ‘Muldoan!’

  The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea.

  JAMES ELROY FLECKER, ‘The Gates of Damascus’

  The arena in which Gavin sought gladiatorial combat with his giant fish – the Hebridean Sea and the great range of the Hebridean islands – is one of the most unpredictable and unforgiving seas in the world. It is also one of the most sublimely beautiful, and Gavin’s latent painter’s eye and poet’s perception watched it and listened to it enthralled. ‘The sea and the open sky, the sharks and whales and seabirds, were the Sea Leopard’s background,’ he wrote, ‘and my own diary, when I had leisure to write it, is concerned with each almost equally.’

  There was the mist furling to reveal the early sun covering the whole sea with light; the pure savagery of the Hebridean sunsets, the whole dome of the sky a fierce blood-red to every point of the compass, and a wild disorder of purple streamers reflected in an almost unrippled sea; and the brief midsummer nights, when the hills were black and sharp against an apple-green sky, the darkening blue pricked by the hesitant light of the western constellations, the brief two-hour dark burning with the brilliance of the stars and the Aurora flickering in the north as bright as winter.

  Then there were the birds – the peregrine falcons on the great dark lighthouse rock of Uishenish in South Uist; the rock pigeons catapulting out of the sea-caves deep in the rock; and the fulmars, the most consummately skilful of all the seabirds, skimming, climbing, turning and diving in intricate patterns of aerial ballet above the giant cliffs of Moonen Bay. ‘Birds occupy the eye a great deal when one is continuously at sea in Hebridean waters,’ Gavin recalled. ‘They were my first love in childhood, and filled many long empty days on the Sea Leopard when there seemed to be no sharks in the sea, and I would grow tired of the heat and tobacco smoke of the fo’c’sle or of working through accounts and business correspondence in my cabin. The minute actions of birds, the intimate realisation of separate sentient life, have always held for me an almost magic fascination.’

  The Hebridean Sea itself is not only beautiful but awesome, and the more Gavin saw of it the more he came to respect it. The Sea Leopard was often storm-bound in small ports and sheltered anchorages during the summer of 1946. Once, anchored off the small island of Barra, Gavin was astounded to see the vast and orderly ranks of the lead-grey, thirty-foot Atlantic rollers smash into the west-facing shore and bury a whole three-hundred-foot cliff in a fountain of white spray. The wind was mad and irresistible, the sheer noise of the sea stupefying. ‘I was beginning to be afraid of the sea,’ Gavin was to write; ‘that is to say, my landsman’s fear of it was just beginning to be tinged with a seaman’s fear, and with a faint, very incomplete concept of its almost illimitable power.’

  This fear was justified when Tex Geddes almost met his death in a wild sea and raging southerly gale near Loch Hourn in the Sound of Sleat early in June. He was finally snatched with a boathook from the trough of a big wave and hauled on to the Sea Leopard’s deck.

  But Gavin’s skipper, Bruce Watt, was too experienced and canny a seaman ever to wantonly imperil his ship in those treacherous waters, and the shark-hunters’ lot was generally not so much danger and disaster as the dour discomfort that besets every fisherman’s life in northern seas – the chill damp, the saturating, insinuating rain, the ceaseless and exhausting wallowing of the hull, the unfriendly hours and sleepless nights. To this litany of inescapable woes had to be added the state of Gavin’s own health. All through the shark-fishing time he suffered from bouts of acute pain in the duodenum, for which the treatment was bismuth and belladonna, fish and milk. Sometimes the spasms would go on for several days, and then Gavin wouldn’t want to see anybody. ‘He was bad-tempered sometimes,’ Tex Geddes recalled. ‘Well, we were all bad-tempered. But you see he had a hell of a bad gut – duodenal ulcer – and I’d have to feed him on sago and cut out bacon and eggs and things like that, and he’d get bad-tempered over that, though you could hardly blame him. Sometimes, when the buzzer went on the boat to signal a shark sighting, he found he couldn’t straighten up, he’d be doubled up with pain, so he’d pour half a bottle of whisky into himself and then he’d straighten up!’

  Gavin had plenty of reason for nursing an ulcer. He could not disguise the anxiety that the business side of his venture was causing him. The Oerlikon gun on the Sea Leopard had proved useless, and the steel of some of the harpoons was too soft, so that the barbs bent and the harpoons pulled out. That left only the muzzle-loading gun on the Gannet to catch enough sharks to pay overheads of £160 a week and a full crew and factory staff – and even that gun misfired constantly. As early as 17 May Gavin wrote in his diary:

  We have been at work for ten days, the first ten days of what was to have been our first trading season, and every day has revealed more of our ignorance and the inadequacy of our equipment. We should be at school, if there were a school to teach this new trade, not trying to earn money. Every day, almost every hour, teaches us a new lesson, but at a cost we cannot pay. I do not think our capital can carry us beyond this season. We must capitalise in experience every failure and disappointment – nothing now can prevent this summer being full of both.

  The workforce at the Soay factory was one cause for concern. Most of them were Soay men who could find no better job, a disaffected, malingering, feckless lot; and the imported labour from Skye, Gavin noted, ‘only swelled the numbers as dummy figures upon castle battlements did in the Middle Ages’. There were times, too, when his crew grew bored and discontented. Late one evening in June, after two tedious days confined to harbour, one of the crew came to his cabin to voice some private complaint. Gavin knew the man and liked him; foolishly he offered him some rum, and very soon the man grew heated, then angry, then homicidal. When Gavin, reverting to a Scots Guards officer’s manner, told him to get out and come back when he was sober, the crewman pulled out a sheath-knife.

  ‘You’re not in the bloody Guards now,’ he said. ‘Take your eyes off me, and I’ll stap this through your guts.’

  With some difficulty, and the help of a second bottle of rum, Gavin managed to placate his guest, and at about three in the morning the man dozed off. Taking the knife from him, Gavin lugged him up on deck. ‘I plumped him down on the poop deck, and seated myself beside him, staring foolishly at the moon and thinking what a wonderful night it was and what a wonderful life it was. You must have been able to smell the rum a quarter of a mile away.’

  Gavin’s irascibility was tempered by his considerateness, and on the whole he was liked by his crew, for reasons which had nothing to do with his engaging eccentricity or the generous bonus he paid for each shark harpooned. Tex Geddes recalled a typical incident:

  He was a bloody loyal bloke. I remember one occasion when his uncle, Lord William Percy, arrived at Mallaig to spend a weekend shark-fishing on the Sea Leopard. Gavin asked me to go with him to the station to meet his uncle, and of course the uncle got the idea that I was the wee man that picked up the cases, and I told him to jump over the moon, I’m carrying no bugger’s case – I’d carry no man’s bloody case, not even the King’s. Well, the old fellow was hopping mad, and Gavin’s problem was – who was he going to be loyal to, his uncle or me? Well, he chose me, and he picked up the case and carried it himself.

  Gavin had developed a whole network of spies to look out for sharks from one end of the Hebrides to the other. Mostly they were the lighthouse keepers who kept lonely vigil on the top of the islands’ soaring cliffs all the way from Barra Head to the Butt of Lewis, with whom Gavin communicated by loudhailer or elaborate hand and arm signals like a rac
ecourse tick-tack man. Friendly ring-net fishers too would sometimes give him a tip about the location of the shark shoals when they saw them, for they had no love for the muldoan that destroyed their nets. In those years the basking shark kept to a fairly regular pattern of movement. In May they would be off the west coast of Skye in the Inner Hebrides, then in June they would move across the Minch to the Outer Hebrides, cruising slowly north from Barra Sound up the east coast of South Uist to Scalpay Island in Harris and beyond. But even though their course was roughly known, their exact whereabouts was always a matter of speculation, and Gavin could search for days without sighting so much as a single fin, then find himself in the middle of a vast concourse of the creatures.

  An abundance of sharks did not necessarily result in a surfeit of kills. Twice off the Skye coast Gavin came on a sea full of the giant fish, only to be frustrated by a misfiring gun, damp powder, and the difficulty of getting a clear aim and a steady shot from a surging deck in a confused and choppy sea. One of the biggest shoals he ever encountered was in Loch Scavaig, Skye, in May, every fish showing its tail-fin and dorsal high above the surface, the whole mass progressing leisurely into the loch like leviathans strolling in a park. Gavin peered over the side of the Gannet and was astounded at what he saw: ‘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 herds of submerged elephants, the furthest down dim and indistinct in the sea. 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 … I thought, “This is a shoal of fish – fish.”’