The Sea My Hunting Ground

By Anthony Watkins

The Sea My Hunting Ground, first published in 1958, is Anthony Watkins’ account of his adventures as a commercial hunter of the basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus), the world’s second largest fish (after the whale shark). The book opens in the late 1930s with the author, no longer able to endure a dull clerkship in London, beginning a small fishing business on the west coast of Scotland. His prey, the basking shark, could be 30 feet long and weigh as much as 6 tons. Watkins recounts an early misadventure when, after harpooning a shark from his dinghy, the giant fish carried him 100 miles out to sea. But learning from his mistakes, Watkins gradually develops a successful fishing business catching and processing these now protected animals (protected in the UK and a number of other countries). Included are 15 pages of illustrations and 4 maps.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phocion Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789128642

Book preview

© Phocion Publishing 2019, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

The Sea My Hunting Ground

By ANTHONY WATKINS

The Sea My Hunting Ground was originally published in 1958 by St. Martin’s Press, New York.

• • •

To AUDREY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 5

CHAPTER ONE 6

CHAPTER TWO 14

CHAPTER THREE 31

CHAPTER FOUR 48

CHAPTER FIVE 61

CHAPTER SIX 75

CHAPTER SEVEN 89

CHAPTER EIGHT 100

CHAPTER NINE 114

CHAPTER TEN 128

APPENDIX 141

ILLUSTRATIONS 147

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 169

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks are due to J. M. Scott, who gave me invaluable advice when the manuscript was in its final stages, to Dr. L. Harrison Matthews, who kindly vetted my zoological appendix, and to Geoffrey Seccombe Hett and others who took the photographs, mostly, I fear, without much encouragement or assistance from me.

A. T. W.

CHAPTER ONE

My job was to post the items from the sales journal into the sales ledgers, and it would take all day. Tomorrow there would be a fresh set of items for me to post. And the next day...and the day after that...

This routine would go on, I calculated, for two years. Then the Office Manager was due to retire, and there would be a general post. I would be promoted to something with a little more responsibility, perhaps writing the invoices into the sales journal.

At twenty-five one expects a little excitement from one’s work, but with the best will in the world I could see none. Then I pulled myself together. I had had five jobs in as many years, and in almost as many countries. I had finally settled down in a good steady position in the City of London. Certainly it was humdrum at the moment, but the more distant prospects were reasonable. And the salary at two hundred pounds a year was not bad. This was in the late thirties when a single man could manage quite well on that. I could be a lot worse off. In fact, I often had been a lot worse off.

I worked diligently, if not enthusiastically, for an hour or so, and then an entry of a sale of two hundredweight of Japanese shark oil to a customer in Scotland made my attention wander again.

In itself there was nothing peculiar about this item, for we dealt in quite a number of strange imports. But it made me think of a curious story which had appeared in the papers recently. A yacht off the west coast of Scotland had suddenly disintegrated mysteriously in a cloud of spray, in broad daylight and in a flat calm. The only clue was that when bits of the wreckage were picked up, they were covered in a black and evil-smelling slime. The bodies of the crew, battered and mangled beyond recognition, had been washed ashore later. They also were covered in slime.

An inquiry had taken place, and a marine biologist, Dr. Seccombe Hett, had given out that the slime came from a basking shark. He had been making a special study of these fish, which were common in the locality. There was little doubt that one of these monsters had jumped on the yacht, or impaled it with his snout as he rose into the air. The papers suggested that the attack was deliberate, and quoted several cases of sharks chasing small boats whose occupants had only escaped by rowing vigorously to the shore.

I had read the account with particular interest, for sharks were something of a hobby of mine. When I was working in Jamaica, shark-fishing had been my chief weekend amusement. The report threw new light on the habits of basking sharks which, if my memory served me right, were rather sketchily dealt with in the textbooks.

It was interesting to learn that they jumped, a very unusual characteristic of any species of shark. It was even more interesting if they did indeed deliberately attack boats. My own experience was that even the so-called man-eating sharks would never under any circumstances do this, even though they might have, so to speak, a professional interest in the matter. A basking shark, certainly no man-eater, would have no motive save maliciousness or irritability, and this suggests the power of thought and emotion, two things which are beyond the range of normal fish mentality.

Now a new thought struck me. If there were lots of sharks off Scotland, it seemed absurd that we had to send all the way to Japan for shark oil. And sharks produced other things besides oil. At an American shark-fishing station I once visited they wasted no part of their catch. The hides were tanned and sold for shagreen and the flesh was turned into fish-meal. Why had no one thought to start a similar venture in Scotland?

These thoughts passed rather idly through my head, but not so idly that I did not take the trouble to spend the next Saturday afternoon at the Natural History Museum library, learning everything that was known about basking sharks.

It was not, in fact, very much. As always with fish which are not the subject of a regular fishery, either for commercial purposes or for sport, the information was vague and unscientific. Basking sharks, it seemed, grew to a length of forty feet or more. They appeared off Ireland in the early spring, and migrated slowly up the west coast to Scotland and on to Norway. They fed on plankton, a generic term which covers all the minute forms of animal life which drift about the sea in great clouds and form the food of most fish and nearly all whales.

In the eighteenth century there had been a regular fishery off the Irish coast for the sake of the liver oil, which was used locally in lamps. It was stated that each shark would produce six to eight barrels, which would amount to a ton or more. No figures of catches were given but it was implied that they were small owing to the extremely hazardous nature of this form of fishing.

Only three or four fish ever seemed to have been examined by trained zoologists. In each case the specimen had been washed ashore and was partially decomposed, and the technical accounts of the anatomy were incomplete. However, there was enough to show that they were true sharks, having skeletons not of bone but of cartilaginous tissue, or gristle.

One modern account by a popular Scottish naturalist stated categorically that the oil had a high vitamin content. This was significant news, for I knew that vitamin oils such as halibut and cod fetched far greater prices than ordinary fish oils such as herring. But the reliability of this statement was impaired by the author adding that basking sharks had a layer of blubber under the skin. This sounded hardly credible. When warmblooded mammals like whales, porpoises and seals take permanently to the sea, they grow an outer layer of oily fat, called blubber, as a protection against the intense cold. But a fish needs no such protection. It has no bodily temperature to keep up and automatically assumes the same temperature as the surrounding water. Blubber on a fish would be as surprising as feathers on a mammal, and could hardly have escaped the attention of those who had examined the odd carcasses washed ashore.

It looked as if Dr. Seccombe Hett, the marine biologist mentioned in the newspaper report, probably knew more about basking sharks than anybody else. I found his name in the London Telephone Directory, having previously searched the Edinburgh and Glasgow directories without success, and rang him up. I said, stretching the truth to its utmost limits, that I was interested in the commercial possibilities of shark fishing, and would like his advice. A genial voice promptly asked me to lunch the next day at the Bath Club.

I was conducted up to a large, imposing man, faultlessly dressed in a rather old-fashioned style. The general air of distinction would have been slightly overpowering but for a very merry twinkle in his eye. He greeted me in such a friendly and jovial manner that I felt instantly at ease with him.

As is often the way when strangers meet outside an office to discuss some particular subject, we talked for a considerable time about anything but that subject. The club sherry, the pictures in the hall, the weather, Hitler—I had some Austrian cousins by marriage and accounted myself unusually well informed on this subject and I remember giving it as my considered opinion that the last thing Hitler wanted was war—these and various other matters were animatedly discussed. It was not until well after the soup stage that one of us casually mentioned the word ‘shark,’ and then Dr. Hett told me his story.

He was, it seemed, a surgeon who had just given up his practice. His hobby was zoology, and in pursuit of this he was now spending most of his time in Scotland. While studying the gannets on Ailsa Craig, he became aware that the sea surrounding it was alive with basking sharks. Without having to refer to the Natural History Museum, he knew that comparatively little reliable information about these fish was available. He studied them closely for several days as they swam about the surface, and then decided to catch one in order to carry out a detailed dissection.

He found a keen collaborator in one Dan Davies, who earned a precarious livelihood taking tourists out fishing in his motor-launch, the Myrtle. Davies agreed to charter out his boat for the purpose and, full of enthusiasm, Dr. Hett sent for his son, Geoffrey, to join in the fray.

They soon discovered that seeing sharks and catching them are two very different things. Their hand harpoons had been lost by the dozen, as well as hundreds of fathoms of very expensive yacht manila rope. It was six weeks’ hard work before their efforts were rewarded and they finally succeeded in catching a shark, after it had towed the Myrtle for fifteen hours.

It was a female, and there was evidence of recent sexual intercourse, boomed Dr. Hett, his professional enthusiasm running away with him and causing nervous glances from adjoining tables. The formation of the organs suggests the young are born alive, and not in eggs. The plankton in the stomach was mainly calanus... Then the fatal accident had occurred to the yacht, a quite innocent bystander, which had not been molesting sharks in any way. But how did you come to be interested in this? finished up Dr. Hett.

Well, it sounds rather ridiculous, I’m afraid. I read the newspaper reports about there being plenty of sharks in Scotland. There are, you know, several shark-fishing stations in the Caribbean and elsewhere, which are quite prosperous. I was wondering whether a similar sort of business could be made to pay in Scotland?

This is most interesting. How can I help you?

Well, obviously the first thing to do is to find out the exact value of a basking shark. Could you let me have samples of the oil, the flesh and the skin?

Unfortunately not. We scientists don’t appear to be interested in the same things as you businessmen. Now if you had asked for a uterus or a caecum, I have two splendid specimens.

Remembering that my own summer holiday was due to start in a month, I inquired whether there was any chance of chartering Davies’s boat and catching another shark. Dr. Hett thought this could be arranged. Business for Davies was pretty slack, he knew, and the Myrtle would almost certainly be available.

What does Davies charge? I asked, somewhat anxiously. My holiday had a strict budget.

Ten pounds a week. You also pay for the fuel and food. It’s pretty cheap really, though she’s not, of course, a luxurious boat. You’ll have to get one more crew. You need four for sharks and Davies has only himself and one deck-hand. You’ll also need harpoons. They’re the key to the whole thing. We were using some made by the local blacksmith and, candidly, they weren’t much good. You ought to try and get something better, though goodness knows how to set about this.

We discussed details for the next half-hour, and Dr. Hett promised to arrange for me to join the Myrtle at Rothesay in a month’s time. As he showed me out of the club he took me by the arm and said seriously: Don’t underestimate basking sharks. They’re more like whales than fish. Watch yourself, and don’t let Davies get carried away by his enthusiasm. You’ll find he’s inclined to be reckless.

The abrupt change of plan for my summer holiday needed a certain amount of organizing. I was already involved in a small party going to Hendaye on the Franco-Spanish frontier. I had to get out of it myself, and also persuade another member to get out of it. For the fourth member of the Myrtle’s crew, though he didn’t know it yet himself, was to be Tommy Wewage-Smith.

He was an unusual character whom I had first met in Bolivia, which was then engaged in a war with its neighbor, Paraguay. I had visited a flying-field just outside La Paz, where some newly-arrived American fighters were being tested. They were Curtis Wrights, as I remember, sensational, up-to-date jobs capable of speeds of over two hundred miles an hour.

The officers of the squadron were all very much of a type, small, wiry and dark, unmistakably Latin, with here and there an obvious touch of Indian blood. There was one striking exception. He stood a foot taller than the others, had fair hair, a red face and an enormous handlebar moustache. He could hardly have looked more English. This was ‘Teniente’ Smith, late of one of the London Auxiliary Air Squadrons.

During the short time I was in Bolivia I made firm friends with Tommy Smith, and we met again in London when he returned to take up the rather surprising position of manager of a shoe shop in Regent Street.

When I saw him later in the week, I wasted no time beating about the bush.

Look, Tommy, it’s about our holiday. There’s been a change of plan. We’re not going to Hendaye. We’re going fishing in Scotland instead.

But good God, Tony, I loathe fishing.

Ah, but this is a very special kind of fishing. You’ve heard of basking sharks?

No.

They are colossal great fish. Nearly as big as sperm whales.

Where do they live? Loch Ness?

No, this is quite genuine. They’re very common right now off Scotland. Didn’t you read about one killing three people a little while ago?

Tommy brightened a little. Why yes, so I did, now you come to mention it. Go on.

I explained how I had suddenly become interested in basking sharks and the arrangement about the Myrtle.

But what about the girls, Tommy demanded. I mean, frankly, can you see either of them on a do like this?

"They’re out, I’m afraid. There’s not room for them anyway. The Myrtle only sleeps four."

They’re going to cut up rough.

We can explain the matter to them. They’ll see we really have no choice.

After some argument I extracted a grudging promise that he would see what he could do about it.

At my lunch interval the next day I went into Hardy’s, the fishing-tackle specialists in Pall Mall. I had never visited their shop before, but I had obtained my shark-fishing tackle from them by post when I was in Jamaica, and first-rate stuff it was too.

A grave and portly assistant came up to me, evidently very conscious of the international reputation of his firm.

Have you got any harpoons in stock? I asked. Big ones.

Harpoons! he exclaimed, raising his eyebrows. Most of our customers consider it unsporting to catch a fish except with a rod and line. In fact one ‘gentleman’, he paused for a second to emphasize the inverted commas, was recently asked to leave the Tunny Club for using a harpoon.

I stood in embarrassed silence. Too late I realized that I might as well have walked into Holland and Holland and asked for a pot of bird lime. My obvious penitence must have had some effect, for the salesman unbent and said: But I may be able to help you. We were offered some harpoons the other day which were meant to be models of the old whaling hand harpoons. I can give you the address if you like.

He gave me the address of an engineering firm on the Great West Road, and I called on them that evening and bought off the shelf two harpoons which were, as Hardy’s said, exact models of the hand harpoons used by the old American sperm whalers. Why they made them I was not able to discover. I should have thought them lucky if they made a sale once every fifty years. They cost £2.10 each and looked like this:

The principle is that the head is free to swivel on the shank and is only kept in the straight position by means of a wooden pin acting as a grub screw. When the strain comes on the line, the pin is sheered and the head turns at right angles inside the whale or fish. This produces a terrific resistance to withdrawal, far more effective than is given by the conventional fixed barb harpoon.

I would have been happier if I had been able to obtain an exact model of the hand harpoon used by the Irish fishermen of old, since it can be assumed that they evolved the best type for the job. In time this would no doubt have been possible, for surely a few of the original harpoons must have survived, either in Irish museums or in the localities where the fishing had been carried on. But the search would obviously have taken months, and I had only a few weeks.

The other items of equipment presented no difficulties. A South Kensington joiner made ash shafts six foot long to fit into the sockets. They were two inches thick, a size which fits the normal hand snugly.

The complete harpoon, head, shank and shaft, was nine foot in length, but when I tried it out for feel it seemed rather light and badly balanced. To correct this I had the rear half of the shaft hollowed out and filled with lead shot. This brought the total weight up to nearly twelve pounds.

The same effect could have been produced more simply by having a shaft of steel tubing, but I judged that a nine-foot length of metal sticking out of the back of a shark might be dangerous just after harpooning, or in the final stages of the struggle when the shark had been hauled up to the boat. It might flick someone overboard, or brain him or even be driven through the bottom of the boat like a huge nail. A breakable wooden shaft was obviously much safer.

For shark lines, I bought two 120-fathom coils of two-inch manila rope. The thickness of a rope is measured by its circumference; these ropes were therefore about the thickness of a man’s thumb. The length was determined by the depth of the water in the area where we were going to be fishing. I had bought some charts and discovered that nowhere was it more than one hundred fathoms, or six hundred feet.

The ropes were four strand, and as soft a lay as I could find. Given time to have the rope made specially, I would have chosen three strand with an even softer lay. A rope is made by twisting a number of fibers together to form a strand and twisting the strands together to form a rope; the greater the number of strands and the tighter the twist, the more durable is the rope, but also the stiffer and harder to handle. In this case, ease of handling was obviously going to be of vital importance, and my lines left a lot to be desired in this respect. But they would never break, I was sure of that.

There was also some paper work to do. First I wrote to Allen and Hanburys, the great Aberdeen specialists in medicinal oils. I asked them, rather timidly, if they would analyze a sample of basking shark oil which I would shortly be sending them, and let me have their opinion on its marketability. They wrote back to say they were always interested in the possibilities of new kinds of oil, and to ask if I would be able to let them have half a hundredweight of the raw liver to experiment with.

I also wrote to Hugh Highgate and Company, of Paisley, in case the oil had no medicinal value. They were, and still are, the largest of the Scottish industrial oil dealers. They also expressed a keen interest. Scorning my offer of a sample bottle, they asked for a forty-gallon drum.

There was, so far as I could discover, only one fishmeal factory on the west coast of Scotland, and this was owned by a Mr. J. M. Davidson of the Fish Market, Glasgow. I wrote to him and received a very full and helpful reply. He was, he said, most interested in the project. There was hardly any doubt that sharks could be turned into salable fish-meal, and he would be delighted to try out the material.

I had also suggested that the flesh might be salable as food. On this point Mr. Davidson expressed doubt. He pointed out that shark meat was not normally considered fit for human consumption in any part of the world, and at the moment it was hard enough to sell even the best quality herring and cod.

There did not appear to be any specialists in the tanning of shark-skin in England, which was hardly surprising, but I did manage to find an ordinary tannery in Scotland, the Bridge of Weir Leather Company, which was willing to see if it could make anything of a sample of basking shark skin which I promised to send. I also discovered a Norwegian firm in Bergen who specialized in fish skins and had often dealt with the skins of the Greenland sharks.

There was one other product which might conceivably have a value, and that was the fins. The Chinese are reputed to eat