You may chart rocks, and beware of them; but--it is a proverb on the coast--"there's no chart for icebergs." The Labrador current is charged with them--hard, dead-white glacier ice from the Arctic: massive bergs, innumerable, all the while shifting with tide and current and wind. What with floes and bergs--vast fields of drift-ice--the way north in the spring is most perilous. The same bergs--widely scattered, diminished in number, dwarfed by the milder climate--give the transatlantic passenger evil dreams: somewhere in the night, somewhere in the mist, thinks he, they may lie; and he shudders. The skipper of the Labrador craft _knows_ that they lie thick around him: there is no surmise; when the night fell, when the fog closed in, there were a hundred to be counted from the masthead. * * * * * Violent winds are always to be feared--swift, overwhelming hurricanes: winds that catch the unwary. They are not frequent; but they _do_ blow--will again blow, no man can tell when. In such a gale, forty vessels were driven on a lee shore; in another, eighty were wrecked overnight--two thousand fishermen cast away, the coast littered with splinters of ships--and, once (it is but an incident), a schooner was torn from her anchors and flung on the rocks forty feet above the high-water mark. These are exceptional storms; the common Labrador gale is not so violent, but evil enough in its own way. It is a northeaster, of which the barometer more often than not gives fair warning; day after day it blows, cold, wet, foggy, dispiriting, increasing in violence, subsiding, returning again, until courage and strength are both worn out. * * * * * Reefs, drift-ice, wind and sea--and over all the fog: thick, wide-spread, persistent, swift in coming, mysterious in movement; it compounds the dangers. It blinds men--they curse it, while they grope along: a desperate business, indeed, thus to run by guess where positive knowledge of the way merely mitigates the peril. There are days when the fog lies like a thick blanket on the face of the sea, hiding the head-sails from the man at the wheel; it is night on deck, and broad day--with the sun in a blue sky--at the masthead; the schooners are sometimes steered by a man aloft. The _Always Loaded_, sixty tons and bound home with a cargo that did honour to her name, struck one of the outlying islands so suddenly, so violently, that the lookout in the bow, who had been peering into the mist, was pitched headlong into the surf. The _Daughter_, running blind with a fair, light wind--she had been lost for a day--ran full tilt into a cliff; the men ran forward from the soggy gloom of the after-deck into--bright sunshine at the bow! It is the fog that wrecks ships. "Oh, I runned her ashore," says the castaway skipper. "Thick? Why, _sure_, 'twas thick!"