Harpoon at a Venture
Gavin Maxwell
HARPOON AT A VENTURE
GAVIN MAXWELL
THIS BOOK
IS DEDICATED WITH GRATITUDE
TO THE NINE
WHOSE GENEROUS ENTERPRISE IN 1945
MADE THE ADVENTURE POSSIBLE
*
But as to risings, I can tell you why.
It is on contradiction that they grow.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
Up was the heartening and the strong reply.
The heart of standing is we cannot fly.
WILLIAM EMPSON
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Maps
Illustrations in the Text
List of Photographs
I STEPPING-STONES TO ADVENTURE
II BEYOND THE FORD
III THE FIRST KILL
IV PREPARATION: WINTER 1945–6
V MOONEN BAY: MAY 6–20, 1946
VI LOCH SCAVAIG AND LOCH HOURN: MAY 20–JUNE 2, 1946
VII THE OUTER ISLANDS: JUNE, 1946
VIII THE OUTER ISLANDS: JULY, 1946
IX ISLAND OF SOAY SHARK FISHERIES LTD
X THE 1947 SEASON
XI DECLINE AND FALL: 1948–9
PICTURE SECTION
APPENDICES
I HERE BE DRAGONS
II THE BASKING SHARK
III CONTROVERSIAL MATTERS
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
List of Maps
(Drawn by K. C. Jordan)
Soay, Malllaig, Rhum and Canna
Soay to Moonen Bay
Soay to Loch Hourn
The Outer Islands
Scalpay and Shiant Islands
Illustrations in the Text
(Drawn by the author, unless otherwise stated)
“Mobile and aggressive towards sharks”
Harpoon heads, 1945–8
The first kill; Mallaig harbour
“Tex was indestructible”
Atlantic storm
Uishenish Lighthouse
The Hilary “monster”
(From The Case for the Sea-Serpent, R. T. Gould 1930)
A dragon
The outline of the head in young Basking Sharks
(From The Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, Vol. 120, Part III)
“The one that got away was this long!”
(From a postcard from Hartley, 1945)
List of Photographs
1. The approach to Soay.
2. The last mile; the main Cuillin ridge, Soay showing in the left-hand corner.
3. Heather-burning at Soay East Harbour.
4. Midwinter; looking north over Soay village to the Cuillins.
5. Midsummer; from near the same spot, looking eastward towards cloud-capped Blaven.
6. A very large shark passing the boat.
7. Explanatory diagram.
8. Five sharks at the surface between Soay and Skye.
9. In the Sound of Soay; looking almost directly into a shark’s open mouth.
10. A male shark that has passed under the boat.
11. The first successful shot.
12. The first shark, beached in Mallaig Harbour.
13. Mallaig in winter.
14. The Dove and her dinghy at anchor in Soay South Bay.
15. Dan MacGillivray, mate.
16. Tex.
17. Bruce, skipper.
18. Neil Cameron.
19. Donald Ritchie, cook.
20. The author, hailing Neist Lghthouse.
21. The author reloading the gun.
22. Jockie Wiseman at the engine-room controls.
23. The Sea Leopard in action; the author at the gun, Dan and Tex ready to throw the rope and barrel overboard.
24. Last-minute change of direction.
25. The last second before the shot.
26. Circling to approach a shark from the port quarter.
27. The Gannet’s gun aligning on a shark.
28. The Gannet picks up the buoy of shark harpooned hours before.
29. The lashing tail must be lassoed with a steel hawser sling.
30. The perfect chance; the hawser is flung over the tail fin.
31. The hawser pulled tight and made fast to the winch.
32. The end of the struggle.
33. The Gannet tows the shark to the waiting Sea Leopard.
34. The fish rolls belly upwards.
35. Secured alongside the Sea Leopard.
36. The last stages of a fight.
37. The dorsal fin has been slit by the harpoon.
38. In the mouth of Loch Scavaig, close to the factory.
39. From the dinghy the nose-sling is fixed in position.
40. The Sea Leopard with two dead sharks inflated with compressed air.
41. Making a shark fast to the Sea Leopard.
42. Correctly roped for towing.
43. A large male shark towed at speed alongside the Sea Leopard.
44. The head of a young shark, showing the more pointed nose.
45. A Fulmar Petrel, approaching the nose of a dead shark.
46. Looking forward along the back of a dead shark being towed home.
47. Looking down at Soay from the Cuillin in winter.
48. Gulls following the Sea Leopard.
49. The factory site in 1944.
50. The factory in 1946.
51. The first shark brought into the Soay factory.
52. A shark on the repaired bogie.
53. Drawn up on the concrete ready for cutting up.
54. A large male shark at the top of the bogie rails.
55. Skinning a shark.
56. A later stage in the skinning.
57. The first shark must be removed before the second can take its place.
58. The open carcase.
59. The author stands upon a shark’s head.
60. The sexual organs of a male shark.
61. The open mouth of a large shark, the lower jaw uppermost.
62, 63 and 64. The one-ton head is lifted by crane and pushed down a ramp into the harbour.
65. Part of the “bone-yard” on the hill behind the factory.
66. Summer dawn on Soay.
67. Shells on an Atlantic beach.
68 and 69. Two views of the head of a young Basking Shark, showing the proboscis discussed in Appendix III.
70 and 71. Parasites on a shark’s skin.
72. Two sharks at the surface off the Treshnish Islands.
73. The upper half of a Basking Shark’s dorsal fin.
74. The head of a seal basking.
75. The top two feet of a Basking Shark’s tail.
76. Killer Whales, a cow and two immature bulls.
77. Risso’s Grampus.
78. An immature Risso’s Grampus stranded on Morar Sands.
79 and 80. Two views of a school of Risso’s travelling.
81 and 82. Two successive movements in “sounding” when alarmed.
CHAPTER I
Stepping-Stones to Adventure
THE FIRST STONE
THIS story begins in 1940. We were stationed in the South Metropolitan Gas Works on the riverside just below Blackwall Tunnel and opposite the East India Dock; a detachment of three officers and two hundred men as a nominally mobile anti-parachute column.
It was the third week of the Battle of Britain blitz, and we were tired and nostalgic. I had been doing a round of our extensive perimeter. The raid had been continuous throughout the night; at about three a.m. a single note had suddenly become separated from the welter of sound—a falling bomb almost directly overhead. It
caused my Commanding Officer to say briefly, “This is our lot at last,” as we dived for the nearest cover. The noise increased to a sort of gobbling roar, then the ground shook and shuddered, but there was no explosion.
“Another U.X.B.,” he said disgustedly, “and a monster, by the sound of it. Someone’ll have to go and look for that one as soon as it’s light.”
I went out an hour later in the uncanny quiet of the All Clear. The dawns were always the same in that brilliant September—cloudless, calm, with the silver barrage-balloons floating on a pale, radiant sky. I looked for the bomb-hole for a long time without success. Everywhere was the rubble and confusion of former raids; last night a paper factory had received a direct hit, and over a wide area its contents blanketed the ground and the rubble like dirty snow. I was on my way back to report failure when I turned into the churchyard, saw the great well-shaft ten feet across among the gravestones, and remembered with a sickening lurch of the heart that the crypt was in use as a shelter. I ran down the long winding steps and struggled with the door. As it burst open under my weight I was hit by a stifling wave of air so noisome that I retched even at its first impact. The temperature was that of a Kew hothouse, the stench indescribable. As I became accustomed to the dim light I saw that the stone floor was swimming in urine, and between the packed human forms were piles of excrement and of vomit. One hundred and twelve people had been in that airless crypt for seven hours. They were not anxious to be disturbed; abusive voices, thick with sleep, told me to close the doors. I had just time to open both wide before I was myself sick, helplessly and endlessly.
When I came in I went to my bedroom, which had been one of the make-up rooms of the Gas Works private theatre and was lined with mirrors. Coated with the dust of blast, I looked much like the publican whose corpse I had seen removed the day before from the ruins of his pub on the corner. I got a towel and went down to the communal shower-baths; took off my clothes and elbowed my way between two naked Guardsmen, one of whom stood ludicrously to attention. I told him with some embarrassment that it was unnecessary, but he remained as though he had not heard me. After a moment the corporal on my other side said, “You have to speak very slowly, sir; he comes from the Hebrides, and he doesn’t understand very easily.” I tried again more slowly; he relaxed sheepishly and went on soaping himself. I asked him from which island he came. It was a small island in the Outer Hebrides; I did not know it, but I had seen it from the sea, and the name and his soft speech brought a momentary vision of its low hulk dark against a harsh Atlantic sunset.
When I had dressed and gone up to the tiny windowless room which served us for anteroom and mess, my thoughts were far away. One of my brother officers was there reading a yellow-back. I said, “I’ve made a resolution. If I’m alive when the war’s over I’m going to buy an island in the Hebrides and retire there for life; no aeroplanes, no bombs, no Commanding Officer, no rusty dannert wire.”
“And no leave, and no friends, and no pay. But I’ll join you. Let’s look at a map.”
Deep in a spirit of nursery make-believe, we spread a map of Scotland on the floor, and like children lay at full length before it, propped on our elbows. We started at the north of the map and worked down. It took a long time; we found many places that we knew. I remember the atmosphere of the room vividly, and the comparison that my mind drew with the island pictures painted by my hyperactive imagination. In the mess it was stuffy and airless, for the only lighting and ventilation came from a skylight which had to be kept permanently blacked out. The room was lit by gas, whose constant hiss meant to me for a long time only Blackwall and blitz; now the louder hiss of Tilley lamps in boats and in crofts has overlaid that impression with more pleasant ones. There was an intermittent buzz of drowsy bluebottles, and the walls were spotted black with their remains. The room was tiny; my recollection is that we occupied most of it by lying at full length.
We spoke of Hyskeir, Rona, Canna, Staffa; in my mind were high-pluming seas bursting upon Atlantic cliffs and booming thunderously into tunnelled caverns; eider-ducks among the surf; gannets fishing in deep blue water; and, landward, the scent of turf smoke.
After an hour there were rings drawn round several islands. I had drawn an extra red ring round the Island of Soay, an island unknown to either of us, below the Cuillin of Skye. We were still playing at make-believe; Soay was my Island Valley of Avalon, and Avalon was all the world away. Presently the sirens sounded, and down the river the guns began again.
THE SECOND STONE
It was more than two years before I thought of Soay again. In 1942 I joined Special Forces, and found myself stationed at intervals in their training area of the North-west of Scotland. Though it had crossed my mind several times that Soay was not far away, leisure was extremely rare, and it was not often that from the whole week we could call more than a portion of Sunday afternoon our own. But I made friends with the officer commanding a small yacht used in connection with our training, and on the first day of one of my leaves in 1943 he volunteered to take me across to Soay. It seems strange to me now that I can ever have had a first view of a piece of land which became so integral a part of my life, but I remember that first occasion because it was uncomplicated by worry or responsibility, while there remained something of the mood of that dockland September three years before.
I remember that it was a blue day, hot and still, and that it was lit for me with something of the vivid anticipation that belongs to childhood. My companions, whose home the yacht had been in peacetime, were wholly delightful, and the yacht itself had the orderly comfort of a neat cottage. We sailed from Mallaig in the morning. The islands swam in a pale blue sea, Eigg, Canna, and Rhum with white puffballs of cloud balanced above its peaks. There was not the faintest breath of wind, and the whole length of Sleat was mirrored in a still sea dotted with resting birds.
In a little over an hour we rounded the point of Sleat and headed due for Soay, on the same course as I was to follow times without number in all winds and weathers for four years.
At that distance the island was barely separable from the bulk of the Cuillins—one would have taken it for an insignificant promontory of low-lying land at the foot of their long plunge to the sea. The eye was held by the great mountain massifs—to the north the regular scree-covered upthrust of the Red Hills of Skye, opened by Loch Slapin; a little to the west the solitary dark peak of Blaven, and straight ahead the great splintered ridge of the Cuillin itself. Not even North Norway’s Troll Fjord can compare with the hills of Skye as they open, peak upon peak, across those eight miles of sea from Sleat to Soay. (Photographs 1 and 2.)
There was a groundswell now, the long, oily, Atlantic swell that only the longest periods of calm can erase from Hebridean seas, but there was still no wind. The undispelled exhaust-smoke lay white over our wake in a cottony trail, and the Red Hills seemed to tremble in the heat like giant blanc-manges.
We crept cautiously into Camus na Gall, Soay’s east bay, the leadsman calling soundings from the bows. The yacht’s captain, a stranger to northern waters, had the navigational guide in his hand, a long bleat of warning that makes one wonder at any stranger sailing the Hebrides without a pilot. At “By the mark, five,” he gave the word to let go, and the anchor rattled out noisily into the stillness. We were perhaps a quarter of a mile out from the shore of the bay, a gravel-and-boulder shore with a dozen or more houses lined just above the tide-mark, some slate-roofed and some of the older turf-roofed dwellings with rounded walls. Smoke came from a few of the chimneys, but there was no sign of a human being, nor did any appear as we lowered the dinghy and rowed shorewards. We pulled it up in a run that had been cleared of larger boulders, and still no one appeared from the houses.
I was anxious to explore as much of the ground as I could in the two hours allowed to me, so I left my companions and started up the rough path leading over the narrow isthmus to the west harbour. The path climbed steeply over a ridge of rock, from the top of which I looked across t
he neck of the island to the sea beyond. Almost joining the narrow inlet of the west harbour to the east bay where we had anchored was a freshwater loch dotted with white water-lilies, and with a tree-covered island at its centre. The near bank was grown with oak, alder, and birch, whose bark shone silver in the sunlight; on the other side of the loch the hill that forms the east half of the island rose round and purple against a blue sky, the pink rock showing everywhere through its sparse covering of peat. The whole had a vibrant intensity of colour that I had never seen on the mainland.
I climbed to the top of the east hill, and from its four-hundred-and-fifty-foot height could look down over the western end of the island, some two thousand five hundred acres of moorland, with birch scrub and willows growing in its glens and about its numerous lochs. Beyond stretched the sea of the Hebrides, with all its islands spread dim and blue upon the horizon.
I had more than half an hour left before the yacht must sail. I made my way down through a wood of oaks to a small bay on the Soay Sound. The sun was hot on the red, sea-smooth rock. Six feet below me the tide lapped, a vivid intense blue, with the transparency of white sand and sea-tangle two fathoms down. Here on the sheltered side of the island the swell was diminished to a two-foot rise and fall on the red rocks; the surface, mirrored and glassy, reflected the great bulk of the Cuillin a mile away across the Sound. From everywhere on the island the Cuillin seemed towering and imminent, three thousand feet of bitter black rock rising stark and hostile out of the sea. Even then, in the heat of a still July afternoon, white tendrils of mist moved sluggishly among the heights and the glacial nakedness of the corries. Nearer, where the island ran out to a promontory, the water reflected the dense scrub of birch and oak; breaking the reflection, two Black Guillemots sailed in the water, small black-and-white birds with sealing-wax-red bills; through the ripples their splayed legs showed the same colour. Gannets were fishing in the Sound, snow-white against the immense dark of the mountains: shaggy cattle were cropping the rushes nearby; the sound of their jaws, the low slap of the tide, and the hum of bees in the heather, seemed only a part of an immense and permanent stillness.
