My second trip to the Banks was made in response to the same kind of impulse as that which drives the nomad out of his winter quarters in the springtime or brings the wild geese back to their summer feeding grounds. To one who really loves the ocean, the return to it after a period of exile on the land, is an indescribable satisfaction. There was at least one of our crew who experienced this emotion as our staunch little craft turned her nose to the blue water, and with all sail set and lee rail almost under water, leaped away from the petty restrictions of the shore into the practically limitless expanse of the Atlantic. In a week we were on the fishing ground and sentiment gave way to business.

Our schooner was a trawler, equipped with six dories and a crew of fifteen, including the skipper, the cook, the boy and two men for each boat. Each trawl had a thousand hooks, a strong ground line six thousand feet long, with a smaller line two and a half feet in length, with hook attached, at every fathom. These hooks were baited and the trawl was set each night. The six trawls stretched away from the vessel like the spokes from the hub of a wheel, the buoy marking the outer anchor of each trawl being over a mile away. I was captain of a dory this year, passing as a seasoned fisherman with my experience of the year before. My helper or "bow-man" was John Hogan, a young Irishman about my own age, red-headed, but green at the fishing business. John's mother kept a little oasis for thirsty neighbors, in a city adjacent to my home town, and his father was a man of unsteady habits. But John was a good fellow, active and willing, and, though he had not inherited a rugged constitution, he could pull a good steady stroke.

Soon after we reached the Banks, a storm swept our decks and nearly carried away our boats. As a result, the dories, particularly my own, were severely strained and leaked badly. For two weeks, however, we had no fog, but on the morning of the second of June, just as we went over the schooner's side and shaped our course for our outer buoy, a bank of fog with an edge as perpendicular as the side of a house moved down on us like a great glacier, though much more rapidly, shutting us in and everything else out from sight. It was ugly and thick, as if all the fog factories from Grand Manan to Labrador had been working overtime for the two weeks before and had sent their whole output in one consignment. We had just passed our inner buoy when the fog struck us, but we kept on for the outer buoy, as was customary in foggy weather, since it was safer to get that and pull in toward the vessel, rather than take the inner buoy, pull out, and find ourselves with a boatload of fish and ugly weather over a mile from the vessel. We had our bearings, I had often found the buoy in the fog and believed that we could do it again. We kept on rowing and knew when we had rowed far enough, though we had not counted the strokes; but we found nothing.

"Guess we have drifted too far to leeward; pull up to windward a little. That's strange, we must have passed it, this blamed fog is so thick. What's that over there?" We zigzagged back and forth for some time and then realized that we had missed it and must go back to the vessel and get our inner buoy. This seemed easy, but we found that it is as important to have a point of departure as it is to have a destination, and not knowing just where we were we could not head our boat to where the vessel was. We shouted, and listened, rowed this way and that way but not a sound came to us through the fog, although we knew that the boy must be at his post ringing the bell, so that the boats could hark their way back to the vessel. I learned afterward that the tide that morning was exceptionally strong. I had noted its direction and made allowance for it, before leaving the schooner, but we were where the Gulf Stream and the Arctic Current are not very far apart and the resulting tides are strong and changeable. We were in the grip of two great elemental and relentless forces, the impenetrable fog, cutting off all our communications, and the strong ocean current sweeping us away into the uninhabited waste of waters. From my experience of the year before, I knew what it meant to be lost in the fog on the Banks, practically in mid-ocean; I understood that if the fog lasted for a week or ten days as it sometimes did, especially at that season of the year, it was a fight for our lives. I soon realized that we were lost and that the fight was on.

We were certainly stripped for it, without impedimenta, no anchor, compass, provisions, water, no means of catching fish or fowl, and with rather light clothing, as we were dressed for work and not for protection against cold. But youth is optimistic and claims what is coming to it, with a margin for luck, and we started on our new voyage of discovery with good courage and a cheerful disregard of the hardships, dangers and possible death in the fog, with which and into which we were drifting.

It would not be strictly accurate to say that we saw nothing during all the time we were adrift, but the things we saw were of the same stuff that the fog was made of. Early in the first day I saw a sail dimly outlined in the misty air. I called John's attention to it with a shout, and he saw it too, but, as we rowed toward it, the sail retreated and then disappeared. We thought that this was strange, for the wind was not strong enough to take a vessel away from us faster than we could row, and we were near enough to make ourselves heard. Soon, the sail appeared again, and again we shouted and rowed toward it, and again it glided away from us and disappeared, and again, and again, through the seemingly endless procession of the slow-moving hours of that first day, we chased the phantom ship.

When night came on, there came with it a deepening sense of loneliness and isolation. The night was also very cold, the chill penetrated our thin clothing, and we were compelled to row the boat to keep ourselves, not warm, but a little less cold. The icebergs coming down on the Arctic Current hold the season back, and early June on the Banks is much like April on the Massachusetts coast. We tried to sleep lying down in the bottom of the boat with our heads in a trawl tub, but we were stiff with cold, the boat leaked badly, and it was necessary to get up frequently and bail out the water. The thought also that we might drift within sight or sound of a vessel, or within sight of a trawl buoy, made us afraid to sleep.

The night finally wore away, the second day and night were like the first, the third like the first and second and the fourth day like another "cycle of Cathay." These four days and nights were like solitary confinement to the prisoner, the grim monotony and lack of incident contributing to the cumulative effect and accentuating the sense of helplessness and isolation. There was nothing to relieve the situation. We were like an army lying in trenches in the face of the enemy, waiting for the enemy's move.

The fourth night we were startled by the sound of the fog horn of a sailing vessel. The wind was blowing almost a gale. We listened to get the direction, then sprang to the oars and rowed hard to intercept her, shouting, listening, rowing with all our strength, and willing, if need be, to be run down, in the chance of being seen and rescued. The horn finally sounded so near that it seemed that we could almost see the vessel, and we felt sure that they could hear our call. But our hearts sank as the sounds grew fainter and soon we were alone again with the wind and fog. The fifth day we heard the whistle of an ocean steamship. "We can surely head this one off," we thought, but she quickly passed us, too far away to see or hear. It was a bitter disappointment as this floating hotel, full of warmth, food, water, shelter and companionship, for the lack of each and all of which we were perishing, rushed by, so near, yet unconscious and unheeding, in too great a hurry to stop and listen to our cry for help. I have thought of this since, as I have hurried along with the crowd in the street of a great city and wondered, if we stopped to listen, what cry might come to us out of the deep.

The fifth night the sea was running high. We were drifting with a trawl tub fastened to the "painter" as a drag to keep the boat headed to the wind, when it began to rain. I spread my oil jacket to catch the water, and we waited until we could collect enough for a drink, watching the drops eagerly, as we had tasted neither food nor water since leaving the vessel five days before. Just as we were about to drink, however, our boat shipped a sea, filling the oil jacket with salt water, and there was no more rain.

Every day we passed great flocks of sea fowl floating on the water, coming frequently almost within an oar's length, but always just out of reach. We were in worse condition than the Ancient Mariner, with food as well as water everywhere about us, and not a morsel or a drop to eat or drink. Thirst is harder to endure than hunger, and yet hunger finally wakes up the wolf; and the time comes when even the thought of cannibalism can be entertained without horror. About this time John asked me, "Well, what do you think?"

"Oh," I said, "I think that one of us will come out of it all right."

He started, as if he thought that I had premature designs on him.

"You need not be afraid," I said, "I'll not take advantage of you."

He knew that I was the stronger and perhaps thought that if I felt as he did, his chances were very small.

The sixth day, John seemed like a man overwhelmed with the horror of a situation that had gotten beyond his control. He cowered at the opposite end of the boat and had said nothing for a long time. Finally he opened a conversation with a person of whose presence I had not been conscious.

"Jim," he said, "come, give me a piece."

"Jim who?" I asked. "Piece of what? Where is he?"

"Jim Woodbury," he answered, "don't you see him? There he is, hiding under that oil jacket. He's been there over half an hour, eating pie, and he won't give me any."

I tried to laugh him out of his delusion, but the thing was real to him. Soon he jumped up and said: "I'm going on board; I'm tired of staying out here."

"How will you get there?" I asked.

"Walk," he answered, "the water ain't deep," and he started to get overboard.

I caught him and pulled him back into the boat, not any too soon, for if he had gone overboard, the sharks would probably have gotten him, for they were not very far away. Every now and then I had seen their fins cutting the surface of the water, as they patrolled back and forth, waiting their time, or ours, as if they knew that it was only a question of time. Soon John started again to get overboard. This time I punished him so severely that he did not try it again. After that, I had to keep my eye on him constantly. His ravings about food were not particularly soothing to my feelings, for I was as hungry as he, only not so demonstrative about it.

The seventh day drifted slowly by and the fog still held us captive. For a week we had had no food, no water, and scarcely any sleep; having our boots on continuously stopped the circulation in our feet with the same effect as if they had been frozen; we were chilled to the bone; my boat mate was insane. Since the whistle of the steamship had died away in the distance, two days before, no sound had come to us out of the fog but the voices of the wind and the swash of the waves. I knew the chart of the Banks and had a general idea as to where we were. There is a great barren tract on the Banks where few fish are found and fishermen seldom go, and we had drifted into this man-forsaken place. I had almost said "God-forsaken" too, but something began to shape itself in my mind about that time, that makes it difficult for me now to say this. Rather, as I look back on our experience, I feel more like claiming fellowship with the "wanderer" who called the place of his hardship "Bethel" because it was there, at the end of self and of favoring conditions, that he found God.