Harpoon Venture - Hardcover

Harpoon Venture is the thrilling story of Gavin Maxwell's four years hunting the basking shark. When Maxwell, best known for Ring of Bright Water, acquired a small island off Scotland after World War Two, he decided to hunt the thirty-foot leviathan of the northern waters for commercial purposes. He confronts danger and difficulties of a magnitude to make this a tale of sea chase with very few peers among books of maritime adventure. (5 1/2 X 8 1/4, 328 pages, b&w photos, diagrams)

Gavin Maxwell was born in the south-west of Scotland and was educated at a succession of schools before taking a degree in Estate Management at Oxford. He served with the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, after which he bought the island of Soay. As well as his famous otter books - Ring of Bright Water and The Rocks Remain - he also wrote the critically acclaimed People of the Reeds, an account of the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. He died in 1969.