A Sea Monster's Tale by Colin Speedie

Author:Colin Speedie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The books

No account of the hunting of the Basking Shark in Scotland from this era would be complete without some mention of the various books written by the hunters detailing their exploits. After all, not only did they leave the most comprehensive individual accounts of the pursuit of the animal through the centuries so far, but as Phillip Kunzlik rightly suggested in his useful pamphlet on the Basking Shark, they ‘may well have proved more remunerative than the fisheries themselves’ for the authors.

These are not books that would gladden the heart of an ardent conservationist, recounting as they do the wholesale slaughter of a now much-loved, iconic species. But these were accounts from a period of want, and although it is probable that most of the oil from the Basking Sharks killed in the Scottish fishery ended up in margarine, in the immediate postwar era that wouldn’t necessarily have been seen as a bad thing. The hunter-gatherer was still looked upon as a natural component of a wild world considered almost inexhaustible, and the stories of the derring-do of the hunters were at that time greatly enjoyed. That only one of them apparently questioned the long-term viability of their activities isn’t therefore entirely surprising, when seen through that prism.

That the men who wrote these books at times found the gory business of killing sharks appalling is understandable, but the public at that time were more used to killing and dressing game, fish and livestock than today’s supermarket-reared generation. The authors certainly didn’t expect (or, in fact, receive) any public opprobrium as a result of telling their tales. These were first and foremost adventure stories, and were products of their times, and if with hindsight we might wish the history they report to have been different, nonetheless they should be seen in historical context.

Harpoon at a Venture

The first to put pen to paper was Gavin Maxwell. Following the disastrous failure of the Soay venture, Maxwell was to all intents and purpose destitute. Attempts to set himself up as a painter and a poet were only partially successful, and eventually he turned to the idea of writing a book about his time spent hunting sharks in the Hebrides. His friend Kathleen Raine told him that he wrote better than he painted, and having listened to him as he ‘talked of Soay and the romance of his disastrous shark-fishery venture’ she told him he should write the story.

Besides, as his biographer Douglas Botting suggests, Gavin Maxwell seemed to be a changed man after the bloody years of slaughtering such a harmless creature:

As for Gavin, he seems to have undergone a sea-change. Perhaps as contrition for his ravages among the sharks shoals, perhaps in acknowledgement of the fact that his love for wild creatures was now stronger than his urge to kill them, he rarely hunted wild animals again except perhaps on a few occasions.

Could it be then, that the book was also driven by a need to set the record straight and enable

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