midnight
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 harbour 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 portieres . He laughed at the ghost-tales , -- not as much as he would have done a month before , -- but ended by sitting still and shuddering . Tom Platt dealt with his interminable trip round the Horn on the old Ohio in the flogging days , with a navy more extinct than the dodo -- the navy that passed away in the great war .