The Pilot and His Wife

by Jonas Lie

Nils Buvaagen, like all fjord peasants, had a strong leaning towards every kind of superstition; and in his many voyages across the North Sea, he had had more than one experience of the kind in question. He had sat quite silent so far.

"H'm!" he remarked now, thoughtfully taking a pull at his pipe. "I dare be sworn there's many a one out here on the Dogger. Where we are now, I tell you, is as it might be an old burial-ground."

With that he retired into himself, and began to pull away vigorously at his pipe, as if he had unintentionally said more than he exactly liked. But being pressed to go on, he was obliged to satisfy the curiosity he had excited, and resumed accordingly in a hushed tone, after cautiously looking round first.

"Do you know," he asked, mysteriously, "how all the old fish come by their deaths?"

None of his audience were able to give an answer to this unexpected question.

"You don't?" he continued; "nor no one else neither. But all the same, such myriads die every day that, if all was right, the whole surface of the sea would be covered with their white bellies—we should be sailing all day long through dead fish. It is a 'mystery,' the same as it is what becomes of all the old ships in the world." Coming from him, that word "mystery" had something very weird and uncanny about it.

"Yes, the Dogger can be ugly enough, and may be so perhaps before we are clear of it," he concluded, and leant back against the spar behind him to look up at the clouds. Some scud was driving at the moment across the full moon.

"But about the old fish and the old vessels, Nils?" said the carpenter, recalling him to the subject.

"Yes, it is here, to the Dogger Bank, that they resort for the most part, and to one or two other places perhaps in the world besides. That is the reason that there is always a sort of corpse sand in the water here, and so many noises and things that one can't explain."

There was a general start as he said this, and they looked at one another in silence; for it seemed as if the vessel had suddenly stopped with a shock in the middle of her course, and the spray from a heavy sea came pouring down over the deck.