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.
"She heard it," said the carpenter, involuntarily; "she is an old craft, and doesn't like going over the churchyard." Elizabeth thought that last proposition sounded so uncomfortable that she got up and went below to bed.
The sea ran high in the night, and the vessel kept pitching with dull thuds as if they were in very shoal water, which, however, the lead showed not to be the case.

In the morning the chain-cable of the anchor was found tossed by the force of the sand-laden seas right over the deck, and arranged there with a certain regularity.