Well, I saw at last what whalers used to call ‘the blink of the ice’; that is to say, its bright apparition or reflection in the sky when it is left behind, or not yet come-to.  By this time I was in a region where a good many craft of various sorts were to be seen; I was continually meeting them; and not one did I omit to investigate, while many I boarded in the kayak or the larch-wood pram.  Just below latitude 70 deg.  I came upon a good large fleet of what I supposed to be Lafoden cod and herring fishers, which must have drifted somewhat on a northward current.  They had had a great season, for the boats were well laden with curing fish.  I went from one to the other on a zig-zag course, they being widely scattered, some mere dots to the glass on the horizon.  The evening was still and clear with that astral Arctic clearness, the sun just beginning his low-couched nightly drowse.  These sturdy-looking brown boats stood rocking gently there with slow-creaking noises, as of things whining in slumber, without the least damage, awaiting the appalling storms of the winter months on that tenebrous sea, when a dark doom, and a deep grave, would not fail them.  The fishers were braw carles, wearing, many of them, fringes of beard well back from the chin-point, with hanging woollen caps.  In every case I found below-decks a number of cruses of corn-brandy, marked aquavit, two of which I took into the pram.  In one of the smacks an elderly fisher was kneeling in a forward sprawling pose, clasping the lug-mast with his arms, the two knees wide apart, head thrown back, and the yellow eye-balls with their islands of grey iris staring straight up the mast-pole.  At another of them, instead of boarding in the pram, I shut off the Boreal’s liquid air at such a point that, by delicate steering, she slackened down to a stoppage just a-beam of the smack, upon whose deck I was thus able to jump down.  After looking around I descended the three steps aft into the dark and garrety below-decks, and with stooping back went calling in an awful whisper:  ‘Anyone?  Anyone?’ Nothing answered me:  and when I went up again, the Boreal had drifted three yards beyond my reach.  There being a dead calm, I had to plunge into the water, and in that half-minute there a sudden cold throng of unaccountable terrors beset me, and I can feel again now that abysmal desolation of loneliness, and sense of a hostile and malign universe bent upon eating me up:  for the ocean seemed to me nothing but a great ghost.

Two mornings later I came upon another school, rather larger boats these, which I found to be Brittany cod-fishers.  Most of these, too, I boarded.  In every below-decks was a wooden or earthenware image of the Virgin, painted in gaudy faded colours; and in one case I found a boy who had been kneeling before the statue, but was toppled sideways now, his knees still bent, and the cross of Christ in his hand.  These stalwart blue woollen