o sweep the little fishing-boats away, and though a
schooner with five or six dories out hovers about them like a hen guarding
her chickens, sailing a triangular beat planned to include all the smaller
boats, yet it too often happens that night falls with one boat missing.
Then on the schooner all is watchfulness. Cruising slowly about, burning
flares and blowing the hoarse fog-horn, those on board search for the
missing ones until day dawns or the lost are found. Sometimes day comes in
a fog, a dense, dripping, gray curtain, more impenetrable than the
blackest night, for through it no flare will shine, and even the sound of
the braying horn or tolling bell is so curiously distorted, that it is
difficult to tell from what quarter it comes. No one who has not seen a
fog on the Banks can quite imagine its dense opaqueness. When it settles
down on a large fleet of fishermen, with hundreds of dories out, the peril
and perplexity of the skippers are extreme. In one instant after the dull
gray curtain falls over the ocean, each vessel is apparently as isolated
as though alone on the Banks. A dory forty feet away is invisible. The
great fleet of busy schooners, tacking back and forth, watching their
boats, is suddenly, obliterated. Hoarse cries, the tooting of horns and
the clanging of bells, sound through the misty air, and now and then a
ghostly schooner glides by, perhaps scraping the very gunwale and carrying
away bits of rail and rigging to the accompaniment of New England
profanity. This is the dangerous moment for every one on the Banks, for
right through the center of the fishing ground lies the pathway of the
great steel ocean steamships plying between England and the United States.
Colossal engines force these great masses of steel through sea and fog.
Each captain is eager to break a record; each one knows that a reputation
for fast trips will make his ship popular and increase his usefulness to
the company. In theory he is supposed to slow down in crossing the Banks;
in fact his great 12,000-ton ship rushes through at eighteen miles an
hour. If she hits a dory and sends two men to their long rest, no one
aboard the ocean leviathan will ever know it. If she strikes a schooner
and shears through her like a knife through cheese, there will be a slight
vibration of the steel fabric, but not enough to alarm the passengers; the
lookout will have caught a hasty glimpse of a ghostly craft, and heard
plaintive cries for help,