In Newfoundland they tell of a ship that comes straight at the boat.
She appears out of the fog — under sail, lights along her whole side, moving fast and sure. She is seen from small vessels on the grounds. She holds a crossing course, and the distance closes until there is time to shout and pull hard on the oars.
The blow never lands. The ship goes out before it — a few fathoms short, without a sound, as though switched off.
The tale was most often recorded in Trinity Bay. It does not stand alone. At Freshwater near Carbonear lights were seen at the place where four brothers were lost in a storm. In the Strait of Belle Isle a pirate dory comes to an island every year on the twenty-fifth of June.
These accounts were not gathered casually. Since 1968 they have been recorded by the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive — the largest collection of folklore sound recordings in Canada, founded by the folklorist Herbert Halpert. The ghost ship stories sit there on folklore survey cards; in 2020 Karin Murray-Bergquist, a doctoral student in the folklore department, drew them together on an interactive map.
Why a ship, and why fog, hardly needs explaining. Newfoundland fog is born where the cold Labrador Current runs in under the warm air of the Gulf Stream, and over the Grand Banks it can stand for weeks. Men drowned in it. Dories were lost in it with their crews: the boat would be found later, the men never.
A ship that bears down on you and vanishes before it strikes is, when you think about it, a fairly merciful shape for memory to take.