Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow)
I’m currently editing Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Scotland 1772 and Voyage to the Hebrides, Part 1 for Curious Travellers Editions, and annotating this wonderful, pioneering travel account of Scotland’s West Coast has sparked off a host of personal memories. Especially Plate 13, ‘View of Loch Ranza Bay in Scotland with the manner of taking the basking shark’ (see below), based on a drawing by Moses Griffith, and Pennant’s accompanying text describing this ‘perfect monster’ as seen with his own eyes. Framed by the hills of northern Arran, and the ruins of Loch Ranza castle on the shore, the print shows a rowing boat full of sailors approaching a gigantic basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus), as the harpoonist prepares to sink his weapon into the shark’s head.
As a boy back in the sixties my family would holiday at Carradale, across the Kilbrannan Sound from Arran on the Mull of Kintyre, where my granny Isobel Macleod had grown up during the First World War. My father would rent a boat and we’d go out line fishing: we never caught much, but I remember on several occasions the sight of giant dorsal fins circling our boat, about fifty yards from the shore in shallow water, which made a strong impression on me. The Carradale man who owned the boat reassured me that the gigantic fins belonged to a basking shark, a species which fed on plankton and were entirely harmless to humans. The only risk was that the shark might capsize the boat by rubbing the keel to scratch its back in order to dislodge some irritating parasite, but fortunately this never happened.
So the imminent destruction of this harmless, benign marine giant in Pennant’s plate made me a bit melancholy, but as I researched the story of the basking shark to annotate this passage, a stronger feeling of repugnance took over, which I’ll explain below. I was delighted to learn that Pennant coined the name ‘basking shark’, and was the first to describe it scientifically in English, although the Norwegian naturalist Gunnerus had preceded him in 1765. In the 3rd volume of British Zoology, Pennant notes that the basking shark is often confused by English writers with the ‘luna’ or sunfish: the Irish and Welsh give it a cognate name in their respective languages (the Scottish Gaelic cearban seems to be unrelated). Such names are derived from the shark’s habit of ‘lying on the surface of the water’, so in coining his neologism to avoid confusion with the sunfish, Pennant ‘took the liberty of calling it the basking shark’. (BZ III 78) We now know, of course, that it’s not ‘basking’ lazily, but rather feeding, as one of three plankton-eating shark species (along with the whale shark and megamouth shark). Pennant continued (endearingly): ‘they have nothing of the fierce and voracious nature of the shark kind, and were so tame as to suffer themselves to be stroked: they generally lay motionless on surface, commonly on their bellies, but sometimes, like tired swimmers, on their backs….Their food seemed to consist entirely of sea plants, no remains of fish being ever discovered in the stomachs of the numbers that were cut up, except some green stuff, the half digested parts of algae, and the like. (BZ III 79)
Notwithstanding its gentle nature, the basking shark had considerable utility and commercial value for its sole predator, mankind: ‘The liver was of a great size, but that of the female was the largest; some weighed above a thousand pounds, and yielded a great quantity of pure and sweet oil, fit for lamps, and also much used by the people who took them, to cure bruises, burns, and rheumatic complaints. A large fish has afforded to the captors a profit of twenty pounds… They were taken with harpoons with long lines fixed to them in much the same manner as whales are, and when struck go off with vast rapidity, and dart instantly to the bottom, taking with them forty or fifty fathoms of line, and are a long time before they are quite subdued’. (BZ III 80)
At the time of writing British Zoology, Pennant confessed that ‘it has not been our fortune to see more of this fish than fragments of the skin, jaws, and what is styled whalebone’, admitting his information was second-hand. (He also believed that basking sharks ‘have now in a manner quitted the coast, scarce one in a summer appearing in those seas’.) (BZ III 81) Hence his excitement, on 20th June 1772, upon arriving at Loch Ranza on Arran, to be told that a basking shark ‘had been harpooned some days before, and lay on the shore, on the opposite side of the bay. Cross over to take a view of a fish so rarely to be met with in other parts of Great Britain’. At last Pennant was able to provide an eye-witness description: ‘This was twenty-seven feet four inches long. The tail consisted of two unequal lobes: the upper five feet long: the lower three. The circumference of the body great: the skin cinereous: and rough. The upper jaw much longer than the lower. The teeth minute, disposed in numbers along the jaws. The eyes placed at only fourteen inches distance from the tip of the nose, the apertures to the gills very long, and furnished with strainers of the substance of whalebone’ (Tour 1772 I 169)
However, Pennant’s tone changes as he describes the difficulty of catching and killing this shark, whose brain is about the size of a dogfish’s. ‘They are very tame or very stupid; and permit the near approach of man: will suffer a boat to follow them without accelerating their motion, till it comes almost within contact, when a harpooner strikes his weapon into the fish …as soon as they perceive themselves wounded, they fling up their tail and plunge headlong to the bottom, and frequently coil the rope round them in their agonies, attempting to disengage themselves from the weapon by rolling on the ground, for it is often found greatly bent. As soon as they discover that their efforts are in vain, they swim away with amazing rapidity and with such violence that a vessel of 70 tuns, has been towed by them against a fresh gale’ (pp.169–70). When finally landed, the liver was removed and ‘melted into oil in vessels provided for that purpose’, each large fish yielding eight barrels of oil. Pennant’s Voyage to the Hebrides was of course intended to boost the ‘cornucopian’ potential of Scotland’s impoverished and economically undeveloped Highlands and Islands, so he regrets here that public investment by the Board for the Annexed Jacobite Estates has failed due to human mismanagement, and that shark fishing was conducted only by ‘private adventurers’.
Despite my boyhood memories of the 1960s, basking sharks are now rarely to be seen on the West Coast of Scotland, having been hunted until as recently as 1994. Classified as vermin because of the damage they do to the nets of herring fishermen, their livers were boiled down to produce ‘squalene’ for cosmetics, perfumes and lubricants. Not before time, they now appear as an endangered species on the IUCN red list, and are protected in British and European waters. Pennant might carry a share of the blame for this state of affairs, although he cannot have guessed the level of exploitation that would become possible with improved technology and resources.
Ironically, the forced disappearance of basking sharks from Hebridean waters was accelerated by none other than Gavin Maxwell, the otter-loving author of Ring of Bright Water (1960), perhaps the first nature writer whose work I ever read. In an earlier book, Harpoon at a Venture (1952: rpt. Birlinn, 2013) Maxwell identifies himself as one of Pennant’s ‘private adventurers’, who established a basking shark fishery on the island of Soay, off the coast of Skye. In his Guardian review of the Birlinn reprint, Robert Macfarlane recaps the story: ‘between 1945 and 1949, Maxwell hunted basking sharks off the west coast of Scotland, and he tried many different methods of slaughter. As well as deck-mounted machine-guns, he used shotguns “at point-blank range”, aiming “between the eyes” in order to “completely obliterate” the brain. He experimented with [manifold] harpoon designs’. He concludes that Maxwell ‘demonstrates an awesome lack of interspecies empathy, and a broader insensitivity to affect that verges on the psychopathic….The Hebridean seas become a new kill-zone, in which Maxwell can surround himself with men and weaponry and resist the “ennui of peacetime”.
As Macfarlane points out, this is a world away from today’s ‘ethically well-intentioned nature writing’, certainly qualifying the perception of Gavin Maxwell as a hero of conservation who had lived ‘in harmony with the wild world’. ‘Harpoon is about blood and bone and blades and ledger-books; about how chunks of shark flesh continue to quiver eerily for hours after death, even if the “entire fore-part of the head” has been severed with a hatchet’. Hence my repugnance in reading about Pennant and the basking shark, mentioned above. But let’s not forget that wonderful earlier description in British Zoology: ‘They have nothing of the fierce and voracious nature of the shark kind, and were so tame as to suffer themselves to be stroked: they generally lay motionless on the surface, commonly on their bellies, but sometimes, like tired swimmers, on their backs’.
Works Cited.
Basking Sharks Scotland, https://baskingsharkscotland.co.uk/basking-sharks/
Frank Fraser Darling, Natural History in the Highlands and Islands (London: Collins, 1947).
Gavin Maxwell, Harpoon at a Venture (1952; rpt. Edinburgh, Birlinn, 2013).
Robert Macfarlane, ‘Shark Attack: Gavin Maxwell’s Harpoon at a Venture’, The Guardian, 19th July 2014.
Thomas Pennant, British Zoology 3 vols, (London: Benjamin White, 1768-70)
———————Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772. Part 1 (Chester: John Monk, 1774)