The Banks of Newfoundland are a series of shoals—submerged islands, in fact—which lie off the northeastern coast of America from Cape Cod to the farther end of Newfoundland. The shallowness of the water over them makes them advantageous places for fishing, because many of the species caught remain near the bottom, and in deep water are therefore beyond convenient reach. It is possible, also, to anchor there—often a necessity. But just here are presented some of the worst perils to which fishermen are exposed. Nowhere are old ocean’s storms worse than on these Banks, where the sand is sometimes stirred five hundred feet below the surface. The best fishing comes in winter—the season of the heaviest gales. The vessels must anchor close together, too, for the areas of good fishing are small, and if one breaks its hawser, or the anchor drags, there is great danger of drifting afoul of some neighbor, which is likely to end in the destruction of both. Then there is ever present the danger, in these latitudes of almost ceaseless fog, of being run down by the transatlantic steamers, in whose track the fishing fleets must anchor. The skipper keeps his bell tolling, or a great horn blowing, but if a steamer comes down the wind her lookout will hardly be able to hear it before it is too late to stop or change the course of the monster rushing at full speed through the thickness of mist and flying spray. “Before anything can be done the relentless iron prow cuts into the schooner, which for a moment quivers and then disappears into the depths.... One of these great iron ships might cut the bows off a fishing schooner of sixty or eighty tons and not, perhaps, experience a sufficient shock to alarm the passengers sleeping calmly in their staterooms.” The vessels which go upon this perilous quest are the stanchest, swiftest, and withal handsomest little vessels that sail our seas. Their rig is adapted to this purpose, and spreads almost as much canvas as a racing-yacht, which, in fact, on this side of the Atlantic has been modeled from Banks fishermen. The best of them probably are those hailing from Gloucester, Mass., and these are never used for any other purpose. The old-fashioned hand-line fishing, such as still holds a place in the mackerel fisheries—although even there it has given way in most vessels to purse-netting,—is no longer practised in the American codfishery, which now uses the trawl-line altogether, by which the men have added to the hardship and danger of their adventurous life as well as to its profits.