Large congregations such as this were the exception rather than the norm, and may have been due to the existence of a sea ‘front’ where clear ocean water met turbid inshore water and produced a high concentration of the plankton on which the sharks liked to browse. Possibly, too, the concentration of individuals along these ‘fronts’ enabled the sharks to form breeding shoals, though whether such shoals represented discrete population groups or random concentrations of individuals roaming gipsy-like round the coasts of Europe was a matter of speculation.
The size of a shark might make it an easier target, but not necessarily an easier catch. The biggest basking shark Gavin ever encountered was a vast and solitary individual halfway between Lochboisdale in South Uist and Castlebay in Barra in July. The shark’s dorsal fin was much higher and thicker than any Gavin had ever seen, and its tail measured at least ten feet across instead of the usual seven. When Gavin fired the shark dived at a tremendous speed, and a thin trickle of smoke rose from the three-inch-thick rope as it raced through the metal fair-lead, the manila almost catching fire. The rope, which had a seven-ton breaking strain, snapped off at its tie-ring when the shark was still some ten fathoms from the bottom.
In his diary entry for 9 July 1946 Gavin tried to work out his own reactions to a question he felt must present itself to every averagely sensitive person who kills great creatures – the question of pain and its offspring, cruelty, a subject which, as a man who loved wild creatures and yet slaughtered them wholesale, troubled a part of him deeply. ‘All this harpooning has its unpleasant side,’ he wrote. ‘If a warm-blooded animal were concerned, and more especially if it were a land animal, ninety-nine people out of a hundred (of whom I should be one) would hold it to be unthinkable cruelty. Yet is one justified, because this monstrous bulk of flesh and muscle is cold-blooded and directed by a brain which could almost be enclosed in a match-box, in assuming that the experience undergone by the shark is so widely different from our own?’
The biological purpose of pain, Gavin was sure, was to act as a deterrent to self-destruction on the part of the animal that felt it. What was less clear was the exact degree of pain animals at different evolutionary levels were capable of experiencing, though Gavin was convinced (and no doubt reassured) that this had nothing to do with size.
The size of the animal involved is completely unimportant, and one who is moved to pity by the sight of a stranded thirty-foot shark suffocating on a beach should be moved a thousand times more by the sight of a thousand herring suffocating in the hold of a fishing boat; or one who is revolted by the idea of a ten-pound steel harpoon in a thirty-foot shark should be equally revolted by an inch hook in the jaw of a salmon. And perhaps both these facts can be brought into fair proportion only by the realisation that at every moment in the sea millions and millions of fish are being pulled into bloody pieces by millions and millions of other fish.
Perhaps for a true comparison between shark pain and human pain, Gavin argued, one should look at the theoretical difference between sentience and consciousness – the ability to feel as opposed to the ability to translate it into experience. The problems of pain were complex, he acknowledged, but they were crystal clear by comparison with those of cruelty – ‘indifference to, or delight in, another’s pain’ – virtually the exclusive preserve, he thought, of the human species.
Hunting the basking shark was an unpredictable business, but by the middle of the 1946 season Gavin and his crew had worked out an efficient modus operandi for the run-up to a target shark. A shark’s black, sail-like dorsal fin could show over the surface up to two or three miles away, and though once or twice a year the sharks might collect in great shoals, two or three fins was the most the catchers were likely to spy in an average day. As soon as a fin was sighted Tex Geddes would yell ‘Muldoan!’ and the ship’s buzzer would screech the alarm. The buzzer was just above Gavin’s bunk, and if he was asleep it would scream so shrill and urgent in his ear that he would be out of his bunk and up the companionway before he was fully conscious or properly dressed, or even dressed at all. As he ran up the Sea Leopard’s deck towards the harpoon gun in the bows a man would pass him a harpoon-stick, wad and powder charge through the wheelhouse window, and eventually the crew became so practised that within three minutes of the alarm going off every man would be at his station and Gavin behind the gun and ready to fire.
The tension on board at these times was terrific. The boat would move to within four hundred yards of the shark and then drop down to half-speed. At a hundred yards the engines would be throttled down to a soft purr. At forty yards both engines would be cut and the boat would drift forward, rolling with each wave and rapid turn on the helm as it came up on its quarry from astern. Though the target was large and slow-moving, it was surprisingly difficult to track. One moment the shark would appear with the whole dorsal fin clear of the surface, the next it would be totally submerged, changing course each time it dived and reappearing on an opposite parallel course on the wrong side of the boat. To Gavin it often seemed the sharks had a precise sense of the manoeuvrability of the boat and the range of its gun, for time after time they would suddenly change course at the last moment or slowly dive at exactly the distance that made a miss a mathematical probability. In his diary entry for 9 July 1946 Gavin recorded:
I killed one fish today that I did not expect to hit … He was submerging rapidly when I fired, aiming at the base of the edge-on dorsal fin, but as the water cleared I could see the great fish a fathom down, swimming away from the boat with blood pouring in a dark stream from a white-edged hole in his back where the steel trace entered it. He made off slowly, almost as if unconscious of the deadly wound; the eye could follow him far under the surface, a vast grey shadow with glints of white.
Gavin and his crew were pioneers who had no corpus of acquired knowledge on which to base their actions; every day produced its crop of new experiences, its unforeseen surprises, and the shark-fishers advanced with many a backward step, learning the hard way by trial and error. For Gavin, as the owner and business head of the venture, this was a painful and costly way of proceeding. In the first two months of the 1946 season he was operating at a loss because too many sharks were either missed outright or lost after they had been harpooned, and too many days were wasted taking successful catches back to the factory on Soay. In July the strike rate went up when Gavin came across a sea full of sharks off South Uist, and for a week or two the shark-hunters went desperately short of sleep as they hunted by day and towed their catches back to Soay by night, returning to the killing grounds in the early hours of the next morning.
Gavin fished for another two months, but he had had the best of the season. For a month the wind never moderated and the sea was too rough to tell whether there were shark in it or not. During that period the average catch was only two sharks a week, and even that proved more than the Soay factory could handle. Fewer than seventy-five sharks were caught during the entire season. Financially, the running loss was not too disastrous, but the enterprise showed a hefty capital deficit, and though every hunt was still an adventure, fears of failure and bankruptcy became daily more oppressive.
Inevitably the story of one man’s bid to found a new industry on a tiny Hebridean island by wrestling with the monsters of the deep attracted considerable media interest. Many press reports were wildly, even comically wide of the mark. But there was one notably well-informed exception. Late in July 1946 Picture Post, the mass-circulation news picture weekly, sent a twenty-nine-year-old red-haired, buck-teethed, freelance journalist, John Hillaby, and a staff photographer, Raymond Kleboe, to do a feature story about Gavin’s shark-hunting venture in the Hebrides.
It proved to be a remarkable adventure. Gavin sent the Gannet to pick Hillaby and Kleboe up from the railhead at Mallaig on the morning of their arrival; but it was blowing a gale and the party were storm-bound in harbour throughout the morning, whiling the time away with the help of a bottle of Scotch thoughtfully sent over by
Gavin from Soay. ‘We drank and we drank and we drank,’ Hillaby recalled,
and eventually Gavin’s boatman said, ‘Ach, hell, let’s get out!’ So about two in the afternoon, in an extraordinarily pissed state, we struck out. I don’t think I’ve been in worse seas in my life. There was a huge tide-rip going across between Skye and Soay and we were tossed about all over the place. My photographer became very seasick but I stuck it out and eventually we beached on Soay at some time in the night – goodness knows when, I had so many drams inside me by this time that I had no idea of the time. And the chap at the helm said to his mate: ‘Jock, hold the wheel. If God got us across the Sound of Sleat, I’ll do the rest myself.’
Next morning all was quiet, and John Hillaby met Gavin Maxwell for the first time. ‘The intricacies of Maxwell’s character would exercise anyone’s powers,’ Hillaby was to recall. ‘An aristocrat, a naturalist, a bisexualist, a bit of a buccaneer – he was a very complex character.’
There was serious manic-depression there, and though I didn’t find him a particularly magnetic personality, he was very deep. He could become absolutely tyrannical towards his crew – but they revered him, because on the other side of the coin there was also his niceness, his generosity, his humanity. He was very extravagant with money and the Sea Leopard was littered with expensive gear – Leica cameras, Shetland jackets, oil paintings, Gobelin tapestries rotting with sea water on the walls of his luxuriously appointed cabin in the fo’c’s’le, mahogany bookshelves full of a hundred or more rare editions, mostly about the Hebrides (Lee’s Sea Monsters Unmasked, Pennant’s Tour in Scotland 1769, Boswell’s Tour to the Hebrides). And he tended to flash rank and put on a heavy aristocratic act. I was a very unsophisticated sort of person, the son of a bourgeois family from Leeds, a hard-up freelance journalist who didn’t know his arse from his elbow, and when he found out I was just a lowly ex-Gunner in the war he would take every opportunity to remind me that he had been an officer in the Guards.
At first he was very aloof, very off-hand with me – or else he was highly combative, always challenging everything I said, and petulant if I disagreed with him. I had to find some sort of equality with Maxwell in the time I was with him, keep my end up with this curious, presumptuous aristocrat, living this piratical sort of life, telling these stories, doing these things. I had to fight to do it – it wasn’t easy. But eventually I found a rapport with him through natural history. We were taking a walk round the island when suddenly I heard a strange bird cry.
‘That’s a sea eagle,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘so you’re an ornithologist, are you? There may be a pair nesting at the end of Skye – but we don’t want that talked about.’
I wasn’t really an ornithologist, but I was good on recognition and very good on voices – a dickybird-ologist. Maxwell realised I knew seabird noises and this was our rapport. Then another bird went up.
‘Good God,’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s a rock pipit.’
‘Oh, you do know your birds,’ he said.
Then I quoted a line from Virgil: ‘Happy is the man who understands his surroundings.’ That transformed him – because he was a bit of a cultural snob himself.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘and you’re a wandering scholar, too!’
‘This is a strange island,’ I went on. ‘Are we on the schist basalt of Skye or what?’ Maxwell was a bit peeved by this, because he thought I knew a bit more about something than he did.
‘Well, I’m not a geologist,’ he replied. ‘I’m fundamentally a naturalist.’
I think he was really at heart a poet, but he was a talented naturalist, quite erudite, and brimming over with curiosity. His grandfather, Sir Herbert, was a great naturalist, and I got the impression that Maxwell was constantly trying to keep up with him, and always trying to justify himself to me. Kleboe, my photographer, a working-class lad and a very nice person, got on very badly in this company and didn’t understand what we were talking about half the time. But my own relationship with Maxwell intrigued me enormously – I never knew where I was with him, and he was never sure what I knew and what I didn’t know. This was what in physics they call a tensile relationship – the gravitational forces that keep the planets apart and in their order. So we were for ever skating suspiciously around each other, though in due course we became friends of a kind, and on Christian-name terms. I remember thinking, ‘Stick close to this man, you may be able to learn something from him,’ and I would have many long talks with him about everything under the sun. Usually we ended up cracking a bottle of whisky. He rarely talked about himself, but he was very boastful about his lineage, though never boastful about his achievements.
Hillaby was fascinated by the industrial end of the shark-fishing business – the Soay factory, where the carcases were cut up with saws, axes and knives. Spine-covered, elephantine hide was removed using armoured gloves, the liver cut out and put in the oil-extraction plant, the flesh cubed and put into the ice-house or pickling tank for export abroad (mainly for starving Germans in British-occupied Germany), the fins, tail and head thrown into glue tanks, and most of the rest put into the fish-meal plant. The gigantic cartilaginous vertebrae were strewn about the ‘boneyard’ behind the factory to be dried for bulk shipment for manure.
Part of the factory’s problem was due to the sheer weight and bulk of the sharks. The liver alone could weigh three-quarters of a ton, the head a ton, and the flesh a ton and a half. The bogie-truck would capsize under its five-ton load and tip the giant fish back into the shallows. One false incision could release half a ton of glutinous tomato-red plankton mash over the unfortunate factory hand who made the erring cut. John Hillaby recalled:
At the shark harbour I stopped and watched the men cutting up the carcases and extracting the livers. They threw the guts into the water and this attracted a lot of conger eels which fed on the guts and grew to an enormous size. Conger eels are foul things like barrage balloons – not slim and eel-like but fat and pig-like. I could look down into the clear water and see them congregating on the bottom – a monster about twelve foot long among them. ‘Heavens!’ I thought. ‘These are the most dangerous waters in the world. Don’t fall in there – they’ll bite your arse off.’
Shortly after his arrival Hillaby boarded the Sea Leopard in Soay East Harbour and put out to sea for a sharking cruise. It had been a very bad season so far, and few sizeable shark had been harpooned, with the result that Gavin was running out of money and borrowing heavily from his mother to keep the enterprise afloat. The crew seemed somewhat agitated, and Hillaby got the feeling that their wages had not been paid. He was also aware of an underlying battle of wills between Gavin and his skipper, Bruce Watt. ‘Bruce was worried about Gavin’s attitude towards boats and his tendency to take unnecessary risks,’ Hillaby recalled:
Bruce Watt was a very steady, rather dour man, and he knew the limitations of the boat and was not prepared to take risks with it, but Gavin was all for derring-do. There were not infrequent arguments between them about whether the Sea Leopard could get into such and such a harbour or whether it had enough fuel to reach some island or other. Sometimes Bruce got so frustrated he would say to Gavin: ‘All right then – you take the wheel.’ And then there’d be all hell to pay. In some of those tiny harbours there was barely room to manoeuvre and Gavin would charge in – reverse-forward-reverse-forward – and then BANG! – he’d crash into the jetty so hard he’d almost shake the end off the boat. He was possessed by the idea, you see – and the boat had to fulfil it.
It was a strange, piratical sort of voyage. All the time I was on board we never got a decent shot, never caught a shark worthy of the name, and Gavin was always having violent arguments with his mercurial harpoon-gunner, Tex Geddes. Then he began to get a bit buccaneer. He was obsessed with the orca, the killer whale, which he regarded as the most terrible creature of the sea, the very embodiment of evil. So one day, when we overhauled some small shoals of orca, he started banging away at them with hi
s old-fashioned, muzzle-loading, converted Sven-Fyne whale harpoon-gun in the bows. Another day he got so fed up with catching no shark that he struck out for Rockall, way out in the North Atlantic, miles from anywhere. We never got there, of course – the boat had nothing like the range – but on the way we got into a whole sea full of pilot whales leaping this way and that – a fabulous sight. There was always something to look at. Schools of small whales called Risso’s grampus would signal danger by slapping their tails on the water like a volley of champagne corks going off. And when the sea was calm Gavin could summon up families of cheery dolphins by lowering a bucket full of pebbles into the water and waggling it about.
The arrival of the Sea Leopard was treated like a gala event by the girls living on some of these remote little Hebridean islands, and there’d be six or eight of these avid, forlorn young females lining up on the quay waving madly to Maxwell’s lusty crew, waiting for them to come ashore and jolly roger them in the bushes. The whole crew would go ashore and disappear into the dark with the girls. Only Bruce and Gavin would stay on board – Gavin in his cabin, working his way through a bottle of Scotch, waiting for his crew to come back.
Many of the eccentrics of the isles were his chums. One day he said to me: ‘I’m going to introduce you to two of the most interesting people I know in the Inner Isles.’ So we went ashore at Canna to have dinner at the grand house of the bonnet-laird of the isle and his wife – friends of Gavin by the name of John Lorne Campbell, a Gaelic scholar and lepidopterist, and his wife Margaret. It was a remarkable dinner. There was a tremendous tradition of ancient ceremonial, and a tremendous amount of whisky consumed – especially by Gavin, who was always popping up to give Gaelic toasts, though he didn’t know any Gaelic. The wife had ‘the sight’ and with hazel twigs and salt she exorcised boggarts and banshees that plagued their sheep and cattle. And there was a lot of talk about sea monsters, sprites, pixies and things like that.
Gavin Maxwell Page 14