Veritable Geysers
Freshwater Fishes of the World. By Gunther Sterba. Translated and revised by Denys W. Tucker. (Vista Books, 70s.)
THE sheer enormity of men attempting to kill a gigantic creature many times as large and heavy as the small open boats in which they hunt it gives whaling its heroic stature as a subject for any book---To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and en- during volume can ever be written on the flea. . . Thus Melville, and even in a lesser book about whaling like Douglas Liversidge's The Whale. Killers something of this heroic enormity comes across. Why have men hunted the whale? For money, a Norwegian gunner assured Mr. Liversidgc: shore-based gunner could now earn £5,000 in a season, and double that if attached to a factory- ship. But great as the rewards may always have been, there are obviously other reasons why men have risked death to capture whales; these are brought out in the whaling stories, most of them belonging to the period before the introduction of the harpoon-gun, which form the larger part °f the book. The author's personal experience seems to have been limited to a day-trip in a catcher and inspections of the flensing plants and boiling sheds at various Antarctic stations. The style used in The Whale Killers is flat and prosaic, adding colourless journalistic colouring to a subject which pointedly does not need it. Thus when the narrative is occasionally broken to quote from a contemporary source s, for instance, from Owen Chase's account Of the open-boat voyage, an4 the cannibalism which occurred on it, after the wreck of the cssex in 1820) the contrast is very marked. The author is best when a factual approach suits his Material, as when he describes Svend Foyn's invention of the harpoon-gun. The sight of whale blowspouts coming appar- ently from the middle of a desert led to the naming of the species of Erie Stanley Gardner's title. Further investigation from Charles Scam- incon's whaler resulted in the discovery between sand-dunes of a shallow channel hidden from the sea and leading to a large lagoon which grey whales had chosen as a breeding-ground. ,J he whales proved aggressive, and bomb-lances had to be used instead of normal harpoons. The ,Yield was .rich, however, and Scammon made ;,wo Journeys to his private whale fishery before the rest of his home port's fleet trailed him to discover his secret and share in the harvest. There followed one of the indiscriminate ex- relitations which seem to occur in any rapidly ,eloPing country, and within a short time the uiesert whale disappeared from Scammon's "agoon and was thought to be extinct. „, few years ago, however, the grey whale 0,s again noticed to be breeding in this part the Pacific coast of Mexican California. The pir °sPeet of being the first man to photograph une feeding was enough to make Erie Stanley ar_dner throw off Perry Mason and 'the chains „ to do a Hemingway into territory "filch is still partly unexplored. But with what differences. Mr. Gardner took ptwhole retinue of camp-followers and masses orlquiPrnent: drivers, guides, secretaries, inter- inter- preters, gnarled old prospectors, gnarled old spect tors' iters sons, twin-engined boats, type- , radios, four-wheel-drive pickups, dictat-
ing machines, orange crush, helicopters, aero- planes (only small ones, though), every kind of photographic equipment, and special little motor- cycles with huge tractor tyres on their back wheels.
About his journeys and discoveries in this part of Mexico he has produced a most dull and unmemorable book. Even as a piece of craftrnanship it is very bad : 'Munoz literally burled the plane down the runway . .
he tells us, and that within one or two hours' flying time of Los Angeles there are those blue waters, literally filled with fish.' That hurling and that fullness I should be grateful to have seen. 'Veritable' is another of his favourite words: we are assured of the authenticity of all sorts of things—sandstorms, babbles, deluges -- but the perfect setting for this gem is in his description of blowspouts: `Occasionally veritable geysers of water would seem to erupt.' And these
are only a few of the comic solecisms: there are far more which are merely painful.
The few photographs which are not of care- fully rugged members of the retinue or of out-of-focus-and-humour whales show land- scapes of great solitude and beauty, but Erie Stanley Gardner just has no words to describe them. He has only synthetic responses to convey the synthetic life he continued to lead in a new environment. 'I have seen things no other writer has ever seen,' he says at the end of Hunt- ing the Desert Whale: as far as I am concerned, Mr. Gardner, no writer has yet seen them.
After these two, it's a relief to read Gunther Stcrba's book, by an author who really knows his fish. This liberally illustrated volume will ob- viously become an indispensable work of refer- ence for aquarians and river fishermen besides professional ichthyologists.
HENRY WRIOTIIESLLY
Previous page
