Boethius, an old-time writer, described the Goodwin Sands as “a most dreadful gulph and shippe-swallower,” and he was well within the mark in doing so, for the dreaded Sands do, in fact, not in any metaphorical sense, often swallow ships up whole. The number of wrecks, too, in spite of the three lightships that mark the Sands, is still very great; according to the Board of Trade Wreck Abstracts from 1859 they average twelve a year, British shipping, exclusive of foreign vessels. The four lifeboats that divide the sands between them—those of Ramsgate, Deal, Walmer, and Kingsdown—have saved upwards of 2,000 lives in peril here.
The greatest disaster that ever happened here was during the terrible fourteen days’ storm of November 1703. On November 26th no fewer than thirteen men-o’-war were cast away, and Admiral Beaumont and twelve hundred officers and men were drowned. The story of the wrecks since then would take long in the telling; let us therefore choose only a few of the most outstanding. There was the transport Aurora, which sailed straight on to the Goodwins in a fog, and was wrecked with a loss of over three hundred. The wreck of the British Queen in 1814 was due to a like cause. The sole fragment ever found was a portion of the stern, with the ship’s name: the hungry sands had swallowed all else, ship and crew!
The mail-packet Violet, from Ostend, was lost at two o’clock in the morning of January 5th, 1857. She had started the night before, at eleven. An hour after she had struck upon the Sands there was no one left aboard to answer the signals of the steamer and the lifeboat that set out to the rescue; at seven there was nothing to be seen of the Violet, crew, or passengers but a portion of one mast and the lifebuoy picked up with the lifeboat, in which lay three dead men.
In recent years these insatiable sands have claimed more ships. There was the steamship Dolphin in 1885. After being thrown out of her course in a collision with the Brenda, she drifted here and became a total loss. Seventeen men were drowned on that occasion, and thirty-three were rescued. On April 20th, 1886, the Norwegian brig Auguste Hermann Franche, with a cargo of ice, went ashore on the Goodwins in a fog. Of the crew of seven, only one was saved. On the night of May 14th, 1887, the large schooner Golden Island was lost, but all hands were rescued. On April 8th, 1909, the four-masted iron passenger steamer Mahratta struck upon the Fawk Spit, and although a number of powerful tugs tried to drag her off, all efforts were useless. The passengers were safely landed, and work was proceeding to jettison some of the cargo, with the object of lightening the vessel, when she broke in half, with a noise like thunder, and it was not long before the sands swallowed her.
The appearance of the Goodwins when exposed at low water is thoroughly in keeping with the melancholy story of the Sands. The stranger does not find a broad or long uninterrupted stretch of firm sand, but great dismal wastes with here and there a navigable channel between, called by local seafaring men “swatches,” or “swatchways”; and in every direction, except after unusually calm weather, the sand is ribbed and hollowed into irregular furrows, water and sand alternating. To remain standing in one place for a short time is to find one’s self sinking gradually, and sometimes even suddenly, for these are in many places quicksands; and innocent-looking pools, apparently quite shallow, give the incautious a bad shock by often proving to be perhaps anything from six to sixteen feet deep. They are locally known as “fox-falls,” and form but one of the many unpleasant surprises the Goodwins are capable of giving. Another strange thing is the extraordinary steepness of the Sands on the north side of the North Goodwin. The popular idea of a sandbank is of a gradual shoaling of the water, but at this point it falls almost sheer away into deep sea, about ninety feet.
THE GOODWIN SANDS: “A DANGEROUS FLAT AND FATAL.”
The Sands, even on the brightest day, are the abomination of desolation to the last detail. They are, it is true, “ship-swallowers,” but are sometimes nice in their appetite, or over-gorged, and cannot fully dispose of every wreck; and so the clinching evidence of disaster is rarely lacking, in the protruding timbers of a lost ship, or the fluke of an almost entirely buried anchor; although it becomes the duty of the Trinity House to remove—generally by blowing up with dynamite—any wreckage here that is considered to be dangerous to navigation.
To stand contemplative upon the Goodwins is a strange and deeply impressive experience. The expanse of doleful grey sand, almost mud-coloured, fully bears out the Shakespearean description of this “dangerous flat and fatal.” It is so nearly awash and so mixed up with watery gullies that the waves that come curling and snarling upon the edge appear about to overwhelm you. Except for the sound of them, an uncanny stillness prevails, and the great expanse of the sky and the distant white cliffs from near Deal on to Ramsgate intensify the loneliness. A horror of the solitude seizes you, not lessened by the strange tameness of the gulls that numerously patter about and seem to welcome your company.
Attempts have from time to time been made to provide some warning beacon to mark the Goodwins, but it is now recognised that lightships form the only practical solution of the difficulty. It was at about the close of the seventeenth century that the first effort to establish a beacon was made; but the borings failed to reach any firm basis, and the Sands were declared to be of unfathomable depth. Even in modern times they have been held by marine surveyors to be of the great depth of some eighty or ninety feet. Sir Charles Lyell, on the other hand, stated them to be only fifteen feet deep, resting on a base of blue clay. The opinion of the seafaring men of the Kentish coast, who are not geologists, or by way of being scientific men, but who have at any rate a practical acquaintance with the Goodwins in all weathers, is that the depth is indeed very great.