180 Man and Shark 



mated that a 400-pound Tiger shark would produce 112 pounds of 

 edible meat, 20 pounds of dried meal, 8^ gallons of liver oil, 3 pounds 

 of salable fins, $1.50 worth of teeth suitable for sale to curio dealers, 

 and a hide worth at least $3. 



The trick is to catch enough sharks and then prepare them for 

 market. Set your net or your Hne and you get only whatever species 

 happen by. Shark meat spoils quickly. Livers begin turning bad as soon 

 as the shark is dead. Hides can go sour if skinning is delayed as little 

 as 6 hours. And after a full day's shark fishing— or, in the lairs of 

 nocturnal sharks, a full night's fishing— the fishermen are too tired to 

 put in another day's work immediately after they land. So they hire 

 a work crew, thus driving up expenses. 



Though sharks may be abundant in a given area, they are known 

 to become will-o'-the-wisps and vanish inexplicably from the places 

 where, theoretically, they should be prevalent. 



Take the Basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus) for a bankrupting 

 example. This huge, potentially valuable, and relatively easy-to-catch 

 monster can afilict fishermen with acute economic anemia. Basking sharks 

 run to at least 30, and perhaps 40 or more, feet in length; they weigh 

 up to several tons. They are too colossal to be weighed accurately. They 

 have immense livers, heavy with oil, and it is this oil that men have 

 sought for centuries. 



For many years, the oil of the Basking shark played a part, with the 

 oil of the whale, in lighting many of the lamps of the Western world. 

 Most Basking sharks caught were stumbled upon by whalers, who were 

 equipped to handle gigantic carcasses and would take on a Basker if it 

 happened by. Not until modem times did single-minded men go after 

 Basking sharks with any hope of making a living from them. 



One of these men was Gavin Maxwell, a British Army officer who set 

 up a shark fishery on Soay Island in the Gulf of the Hebrides in 1947. 

 Maxwell planned to get from the Basking shark liver oil, liver residue, 

 fish meal, king-sized fins for shark fin soup, fertilizer, and chemical 

 products from the great shark's enormous load of plankton. He caught 

 a good number of Baskers and even sent some samples of the flesh to 

 Billingsgate. But, as Maxwell later reported, the flesh merely appalled 

 the dealers, for they found it "twitching in a disgusting way when the 

 cases were opened in London." The twitching chunks of Basking shark 

 were somehow symbolic of Maxwell's venture. He found the sharks 

 hard to kill, hard to find a use for, and generally eerie, in an enormous 

 sort of way. The venture failed. 



Another seeker after Basking sharks in Scottish waters was Anthony 

 Watkins, a London clerk who put down his pen one day and took up 

 a harpoon. Watkins usually harpooned Baskers from an open dinghy. 



