On matters maritime

The Greenland shark has to be one of the most fascinating creatures of which you’ve probably never heard. Growing sometimes to 25ft, it is the largest flesh-eating shark, longer even than a great white. It dwells in the deepest northern oceans. It eats seabirds, huge fish and seals, most of which it probably surprises and devours on the seabed. The youngest Greenland shark of reproductive age is 100 and the oldest may have been alive when the Mayflower set sail. It is, thus, the longest-lived vertebrate life form on the planet.

Whalers and the native people of the Arctic have hunted it for centuries, primarily for the immense oil-rich liver. Yet catching one is no easy business. As the author notes, the teeth are like ‘over-sized steel traps’. The outer skin is structured so that if you rub your hand along its body in a tail-to-nose direction it cuts you like razor blades. The Germans once imported and used it as a form of sandpaper.

The eyes of Greenland sharks are riddled with large burrowing worms that leave most of the creatures blind. Its flesh smells of urine and contains a nerve gas, trimethylamine oxide, which can have a powerful hallucinogenic effect; hence the title Shark Drunk. If the meat is not prepared properly it can even be fatal, but Inuit once fed Greenland sharks to their huskies, and the mutts could be paralysed for days.

So why on Earth would anyone set out to fish for it in a rubber boat armed with a gaff, 1,000 feet of high-strength line and large chunks of rotten bull flesh as bait? Part of the joy of this strange but utterly engrossing book is that we never quite learn what drives the central narrative thread.