Disko showed him the meaning of the thumbed and pricked chart, which, he said, laid over any government publication whatsoever; led him, pencil in hand, from berth to berth over the whole string of banks—­Le Have, Western, Banquereau, St. Pierre, Green, and Grand—­talking “cod” meantime.  Taught him, too, the principle on which the “hog-yoke” was worked.

In this Harvey excelled Dan, for he had inherited a head for figures, and the notion of stealing information from one glimpse of the sullen Bank sun appealed to all his keen wits.  For other sea-matters his age handicapped him.  As Disko said, he should have begun when he was ten.  Dan could bait up trawl or lay his hand on any rope in the dark; and at a pinch, when Uncle Salters had a gurry-score on his palm, could dress down by sense of touch.  He could steer in anything short of half a gale from the feel of the wind on his face, humouring the ‘We’re Here’ just when she needed it.  These things he did as automatically as he skipped about the rigging, or made his dory a part of his own will and body.  But he could not communicate his knowledge to Harvey.

Still there was a good deal of general information flying about the schooner on stormy days, when they lay up in the foc’sle or sat on the cabin lockers, while spare eye-bolts, leads, and rings rolled and rattled in the pauses of the talk.  Disko spoke of whaling voyages in the Fifties; of great she-whales slain beside their young; of death agonies on the black tossing seas, and blood that spurted forty feet in the air; of boats smashed to splinters; of patent rockets that went off wrong-end-first and bombarded the trembling crews; of cutting-in and boiling-down, and that terrible “nip” of ’71, when twelve hundred men were made homeless on the ice in three days—­wonderful tales, all true.  But more wonderful still were his stories of the cod, and how they argued and reasoned on their private businesses deep down below the keel.

Long Jack’s tastes ran more to the supernatural.  He held them silent with ghastly stories of the “Yo-hoes” on Monomoy Beach, that mock and terrify lonely clam-diggers; of sand-walkers and dune-haunters who were never properly buried; of hidden treasure on Fire Island guarded by the spirits of Kidd’s men; of ships that sailed in the fog straight over Truro township; of that harbor in Maine where no one but a stranger will lie at anchor twice in a certain place because of a dead crew who row alongside at midnight with the anchor in the bow of their old-fashioned boat, whistling—­not calling, but whistling—­for the soul of the man who broke their rest.

Harvey had a notion that the east coast of his native land, from Mount Desert south, was populated chiefly by people who took their horses there in the summer and entertained in country-houses with hardwood floors and Vantine portires.  He laughed at the ghost-tales,—­not as much as he would have done a month before,—­but ended by sitting still and shuddering.