The Great Fish
The Shoals of Capricorn. By F. D. Ommanney. (Longmans. 21s.) FROM the evidence of these three books, there is an unfailing fascina- tion in hunting the great fish of the sea. All three contain first-hand accounts by those who have made this their occupation, and Major Maxwell's, which is almost wholly concerned with the subject, is the best of the haul. A resolution made at the height of the London air-raids to buy an island and live in peace and independence if he - survived the fighting is the start of Major Maxwell's story. When illness cut Aloft his military service in 1944, he had already bought the tiny island of Soay, off the coast of Skye, and was puzzling over the problem of finding a home-industry for its declining popula- tion. One day, while exploring the neighbouring waters, he had his first encounter with a basking-shark, fired 300 rounds from a machine- gun into it at point-blank range without appreciable effect, and tried, absurdly, to catch it by the fin with a boathook.
In recent years basking-sharks, which are surpassed in size only by the whale-sharks of the Pacific, have become regular summer visitors to the coastal waters of the Hebrides. They are valuable prey, the liver-oil alone being worth over £100 a ton. The excitement of the chase combined with prospects of rich profits decided Major Maxwell to set up on his island a factory to extract this oil and other products. At the start almost nothing was known about the nature and habits of these monsters, and one of the positive fruits of the venture was the opportunity it gave for research. An appendix to the book contains a summary of the conclusions reached by Dr.
• Harrison Matthews of the Zoological Society and Dr. H. W. Parker of the British Museum (Natural History) after visiting Soay, accom- panying the hunters at sea and examining the catches as they came in. The largest basking-sharks they caught- were thirty feet long, and, in the absence of any means of measuring accurately, they judged the weight at over six tons, excluding stomach-contents of up to a ton of plankton, the minute organisms on which these enormous creatures feed.
The problems confronting Major Maxwell were to find a way of catching the fish and to set up an organisation to extract and market the products. With little previous knowledge to guide him, his experience was gained at the expense of much time, money and disappointment. A suitable harpoon and a gun to fire it, a means of hauling the struggling victim to the surface and securing it alongside the boat, and of towing it back to the factory, landing it and extracting and processing the products, had all to be found by experiment. Setting up the shore organisation became a long fight against post- war shortages and restrictions, against bad advice and lack of capital. Major Maxwell tackled all the obstacles with the relentless deter- mination of a man whose whole energies, money and enthusiasm are devoted to a single aim.
In the end he failed. Three seasons of trial and error produced workable fishing equipment and methods, but the problems of financial backing proved insoluble. Failure makes an unsatisfactory ending to any undertaking, but it does not spoil Harpoon at a Venture as a book, since it has been largely confined to the seafaring, shark- catching side of the business at which they grew increasingly skilful. The author writes well, and manages to convey the excitement of fishing for shark. He also finds time to stop and remember the beauty of the island-studded waters in which it all took place, and has collected over eighty photographs of outstanding quality.
Mrs. Hadman's more personal story also has the wild beauty of a mountainous coastline for its background. It is the story of life in the fishing communities of Alaska, where she went on a visit to her brothers, but stayed to marry a fisherman and to make her home. There is satisfaction in an existence from which all the superfluities of civilisation have been stripped, leaving only the fundamental battle with nature for food. It is free of complexity ; it is arduous, but success and failure are measured simply by fat years or famine. Mrs. Hadman fell under the spell of Alaska, its wild scenery and friendly people, and the life of the salmon fishermen. She is moreover a painter (though the illustratibns in her book can hardly do her justice), and finds in the Far Northwest the artistic inspiration that she needs. She writes with gaiety and spirit of a hard and often dangerous existence, and has plainly found a way of life with which she is content. As the Sailor Loves the Sea has a certain awkwardness of style and downright-horrible typography, but it is a refreshing book, for the author faces her many adventures with vigour and courage and is surely a happier person for having fled the doubtful attractions of more organised society. To establish, on behalf of the Colonial Office, whether or not the fishing justified commercial development, Dr. Ommanney recently spent two years investigating the ocean shallows between Mauritius and the Seychelles in a 45-ton motor fishing vessel. It was an unusual experience, but the_ book which results differs little from the standard travel accounts which journalists produce of their flying visits round the world. There is almost nothing about the scientific investi- gations, and very little about the months spent at sea. By far the greater part of the book is devoted to the islands and their inhabitants, and is compiled of spoonfuls of gossip, history, politics, general knowledge, and personal experiences told in an amused this-sort-of- thing-always-happens-to-me kind of style. There is considerable interest in much that Dr. Ommanney has to say, but unfortunately few things he experienced pleased him much and he shows a marked inability to see any point of view but his own, which seldom coincided with that of the isolated communities lying scattered across the
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