But Disko’s board was the Grand Bank—­a triangle two hundred and fifty miles on each side—­a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog, vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice, scored by the tracks of the reckless liners, and dotted with the sails of the fishing-fleet.

For days they worked in fog—­Harvey at the bell—­till, grown familiar with the thick airs, he went out with Tom Platt, his heart rather in his mouth.  But the fog would not lift, and the fish were biting, and no one can stay helplessly afraid for six hours at a time.  Harvey devoted himself to his lines and the gaff or gob-stick as Tom Platt called for them; and they rowed back to the schooner guided by the bell and Tom’s instinct; Manuel’s conch sounding thin and faint beside them.  But it was an unearthly experience, and, for the first time in a month, Harvey dreamed of the shifting, smoking floors of water round the dory, the lines that strayed away into nothing, and the air above that melted on the sea below ten feet from his straining eyes.  A few days later he was out with Manuel on what should have been forty-fathom bottom, but the whole length of the roding ran out, and still the anchor found nothing, and Harvey grew mortally afraid, for that his last touch with earth was lost.  “Whale-hole,” said Manuel, hauling in.  “That is good joke on Disko.  Come!” and he rowed to the schooner to find Tom Platt and the others jeering at the skipper because, for once, he had led them to the edge of the barren Whale-deep, the blank hole of the Grand Bank.  They made another berth through the fog, and that time the hair of Harvey’s head stood up when he went out in Manuel’s dory.  A whiteness moved in the whiteness of the fog with a breath like the breath of the grave, and there was a roaring, a plunging, and spouting.  It was his first introduction to the dread summer berg of the Banks, and he cowered in the bottom of the boat while Manuel laughed.  There were days, though, clear and soft and warm, when it seemed a sin to do anything but loaf over the hand-lines and spank the drifting “sun-scalds” with an oar; and there were days of light airs, when Harvey was taught how to steer the schooner from one berth to another.

It thrilled through him when he first felt the keel answer to his band on the spokes and slide over the long hollows as the foresail scythed back and forth against the blue sky.  That was magnificent, in spite of Disko saying that it would break a snake’s back to follow his wake.  But, as usual, pride ran before a fall.  They were sailing on the wind with the staysail—­an old one, luckily—­set, and Harvey jammed her right into it to show Dan how completely he had mastered the art.  The foresail went over with a bang, and the foregaff stabbed and ripped through the staysail, which was, of course, prevented from going over by the mainstay.  They lowered the wreck in awful silence, and Harvey spent his leisure hours for the next few days under Tom Platt’s lee, learning to use a needle and palm.  Dan hooted with joy, for, as he said, he had made the very same blunder himself in his early days.