THE EAST GOODWIN LIGHTSHIP
The first lightship to mark the Goodwins was that on the North Sand Head, established in 1795. The Trinity House placed a beacon on them a few years later. It was a primitive affair: merely an old hulk filled with stones, and was perhaps more dangerous than useful to shipping. Several others were erected, from time to time, all short-lived and ineffectual. The last was the “refuge beacon,” erected in 1840. This was the invention of the then Captain (afterwards Admiral) Bullock, and consisted of a tall mast strengthened by stays and provided with a kind of “crow’s nest” into which wrecked mariners were supposed to climb. In this refuge were stored supplies of food and restoratives. There do not appear to exist any records of this beacon proving its usefulness in any way; and in 1844 it was destroyed by a vessel running into it. The growing traffic in the Channel has gradually led to the provision of other lightships; the Gull in 1809, the South Sand Head 1832, and the East Goodwin 1874.
CHAPTER XVII
THE DOWNS AND THE DEAL BOATMEN
It has been shown that the Goodwins have from the earliest times greatly exercised the imaginations of all kinds of people, and that the bones of countless dead have found sepulture there, but it would scarce be supposed that any one would choose to be buried on the Goodwins. Yet there are at least two instances known of such a strange choice; one of them prominently recorded in the well-known—perhaps better known by repute than actually read—Evelyn’s “Diary.” John Evelyn, in the pages of that not very lightsome record, has an entry dated April 12th, 1705: “My brother-in-law Granville departed this life this morning, after a long, languishing illness, leaving a son by my sister, and two granddaughters. Our relation and friendship had been long and great. He was a man of excellent partes. He died in the eighty-fourth year of his age, and will’d his body to be wrapp’d in leade and carried downe to Greenwich, put on board a ship, and buried in the sea betweene Dover and Calais, on the Goodwin Sands, which was done on the Tuesday or Wednesday after. This occasioned much discourse, he having had no relation whatever to the sea.”
A similar interment took place forty-six years later, and forms the subject of a paragraph in the London Evening Post of May 16th, 1751:
“We have an account from Hamborg that on the 16th April last, about six leagues off the North Foreland, Captain Wyrck Pietersen, commander of the ship called the Johannes, took up a coffin made in the English manner and with the following inscription upon a silver plate: ‘Mr. Francis Humphrey Merrydith, died March 25th, 1751, aged 51;’ which coffin the said captain carried to Hambourg and then opened it, in which was enclosed a leaden one, and the body of an elderly man, embalmed and dressed in fine linen. This is the corpse that was buried in the Goodwin Sands a few weeks ago, according to the will of the deceased.”
Much has already been said of the dangers of the Goodwins, but they are not altogether evil. Like human beings, they are compact of good and ill. Their useful and beneficent function is to provide a kind of natural breakwater forming the roadstead famous for centuries in naval and mercantile shipping annals as “the Downs”:
“All in the Downs the fleet lay moored,”