Risk in the Hebrides

HARPOON VENTURE (304 pp.)--Gavin Maxwell--Viking ($4.75).

In a Hebrides bar, a grizzled trout fisherman turned to a young fellow in an old sweater and asked: "Any luck?"

"Yes ... I got four, two large and two small."

"What did your biggest weigh?"

"I think he'd be about six thousand pounds."

The old fisherman was not having his leg pulled, as he huffily assumed. Gavin Maxwell, the young man in the sweater, was not a fisher of trout but of basking sharks--creatures "as large as a London bus," that roam the bays and lochs of western Scotland. Harpoon Venture, Maxwell's account of four years of shark-shooting, is a natural for vacation reading. But it also has a secondary theme that many people will find more interesting than the main one.

This theme is Gavin Maxwell's personal history. In 1945, aged 29, he was demobbed from the British army with the rank of major. Like many another veteran, he was dead set against living out the peace at a desk; unlike most vets, he had a few thousand pounds of capital. He spent some of it to make one dream come true: he bought a small island in the Hebrides, with salmon rights and a commercial fishery. It was while exploring the neighboring waters of his little kingdom that he first saw "a ripple with a dark center" breaking the surface--a ripple that grew into "a huge fin, a yard high and as long at the base," a "great black sail, the only visible thing upon limitless miles of pallid water."

"My Dear Boy." Maxwell knew nothing whatever about the basking shark. He fired more than 300 light machine-gun bullets into its hide--without apparent effect. Intrigued by such a doughty creature, Maxwell began to bone up on it. He found that though the basking shark's liver is known to contain hundreds of pounds of valuable oil, no one had much else to say about the great fish. Here, in short, was a veteran's dream, "an unexplored field, an amazing blank upon the . . . map of the world's natural history."

Maxwell sank the rest of his capital into building a shark factory on his island and buying war-surplus navy boats, gear and harpoons. Interested friends subscribed more money. He collected a crew consisting partly of local fishermen, partly of hard-boiled seadogs, whose language often depended solely upon "all the monosyllables . . . used in turn, as nouns, adjectives and adverbs." Would-be adventurers clamored to join the project; their letters often told an old familiar story:

"I've only got -L-800 in the world, but I'll put it all into your business if you'll give me a job and keep me there. I thought the war was hell and I had a breakdown and then I looked forward to getting home. Now I've got there, it's back to a wife ... I never wanted and never wanted me--I guess you shouldn't get married that young; I'm only 22 now . . ."

"My dear boy," a coolheaded businessman warned Maxwell, "if we were going in for a new industry like this, we should write off -L-50,000 and five years to experiment--you are expecting to make a profit on -L-12,000 and one year's experiment." The businessman was right, but Maxwell was too excited by his venture to take cautious advice. His next three years were an adventurer's mingled dream and nightmare: long days chasing and harpooning the shark, long nights filling out, at least in triplicate, the countless government forms and permits that have just about replaced yellow fever and cannibals as the young British explorer's most terrifying enemy.

Lively Shark. Maxwell's method, slowly evolved over four years, was to shoot the shark with a barbed, nickel-chrome harpoon, winch it to the ship's side, kill it with a shotgun blast in the brain, and tow it to the factory. There it was split up into barrels of precious liver and chunks of flesh for anybody interested in shark meat. Few were interested for long. It was the shark's habit, Maxwell found, to stay "alive" for days after it was dead: Billingsgate purchasers flinched in horror on opening their sample cases to find huge "blocks of flesh . . . twitching."

Like many an eager amateur, Maxwell became a cool professional at the very moment when the last of his capital went down the drain. He went through the misery of seeing his ships and gear sold in bankruptcy, just as he was becoming confident that he had learned his business and that handsome profits awaited him. Others go out after the basking shark now. Author Maxwell is settled at a desk, writing another book.

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