THE BEACH AGAIN. 
113 
when on his return from America, in the year 1583, far 
northeastward from where we were, sitting abaft with a 
book in his hand, just before he was swallowed up in the 
deep, he cried out to his comrades in the Hind, as they 
came within hearing, ^‘We are as near to Heaven by 
sea as by land.” I saw that it would not be easy to 
realize. 
On Cape Cod, the next most eastern land you hear of 
is St. George’s Bank (the fishermen tell of “ Georges,” 
Cashus,” and other sunken lands which they frequent). 
Every Cape man has a theory about George’s Bank 
having been an island once, and in their accounts they 
gradually reduce the shallowness from six, five, four, 
two fathoms, to somebody’s confident assertion that he 
has seen a mackerel-gull sitting on a piece of dry land 
there. It reminded me, when I thought of the ship¬ 
wrecks which had taken place there, of the Isle of 
Demons, laid down off this coast in old charts of the 
New World. There must be something monstrous, me- 
thinks, in a vision of the sea bottom from over some 
bank a thousand miles from the shore, more awful than 
its imagined bottomlessness; a drowned continent, all 
livid and frothing at the nostrils, like the body of a 
drowned man, which is better sunk deep than near the 
surface. 
I have been surprised to discover from a steamer the 
shallowness of Massachusetts Bay itself. Off Billings¬ 
gate Point I could have touched the bottom with a pole, 
and I plainly saw it variously shaded with sea-weed, at 
five or six miles from the shore. This is “ The Shoal- 
ground of the Cape,” it is true, but elsewhere the Bay is 
not much deeper than a country pond. We are told 
that the deepest water in the English Channel between 
s 
