The Kentish Coast

by Charles G. Harper

as the song goes, in Gay’s “Black-eyed Susan.”

Here, in the comparatively smooth water of this anchorage, stretching from Walmer, past Deal, nearly to Sandwich, the navies of Rodney’s and Nelson’s times gathered, either for strategical reasons or in stress of weather. The Downs—whose name comes from dunes, referring to the Goodwin Sands and the wild wastes of sand-dunes between Deal and Sandwich—are safe and sheltered in all winds, except a southerly gale; and thus in old times, when tempests blew from any other quarter, all the shipping in the Channel made haste to ride out the storm in these waters. In those times four hundred vessels were often seen at once sheltering here; but steamships are less dependent upon the weather, and, now that sailing-vessels are comparatively few, the Downs are never so crowded as of yore.

The days when the Downs were crowded with many a ship that in the fine old descriptive phrase—which really was description and not imagination—“walked the water like a thing of life,” are long since done, and now the vessels that in fewer numbers ride out the worst of the Channel gales here are things of iron that sit deep and wallow in the water like the tanks they really are; things of steam, with a walking-stick by way of mast and quite innocent of bowsprit. They are vessels in the truest and most exact form of the word, floating tanks, made to hold things, not ships that sit upon the water, as the old sailing-ships did, like swans, or, as the poet says, “walked the water.” There are walks and walks, and I figure the gait of an old frigate, or even of a barque or brigantine, under full canvas, not as a pedestrian’s stride, but as the graceful carriage of a lady in a spacious drawing-room.

The ’longshoremen of all these sixteen miles of roaring storm-bitten coast between the Forelands are men of a courage and endurance proved so long ago that it has become proverbial. Nowhere have those fearless and staunch qualities been displayed to such a degree as at Deal. The “Deal boatmen” are a race famous in the troubled annals of the sea. Between their windy and exposed foreshore, from whose unprotected beach no howling gale has been fierce enough to daunt their putting off, between their shore and the Goodwins they have earned a hard-won livelihood, or have dared the worst of weathers in life-saving, for no reward. There is a nice distinction between the ’longshoremen of Ramsgate and Margate and Dover, and those of Deal; for while all have that “’longshore” appellation, only those of Deal are “boatmen.” All own boats, it is true; but the boats of Deal are different from those of the other towns, and only at Deal did the “hoveller” flourish. It is to be feared the day of the hoveller is done, now that steam is superseding sails. There are those who consider that the word “hoveller” is a corruption of “hoverer,” and it was the business—and a highly remunerative business too—of these men, in their stout luggers, to put forth in stormy weather and cruise about amid the tempest-tossed waters in search of distressed vessels that might wish to be navigated into port. In these modern times of surveillance and overmuch governing no man may, without a licence from the Trinity House, or other port authorities, take a piloting job, and pilots form a class of men who are chosen by examination and may only charge according to scale. This is by no means to say that the law against “illicit piloting” is not very frequently set at defiance. It is, in spite of penalties; for, given a ship’s captain of a saving disposition and a Deal boatman of pressing needs—and the boatmen of Deal are too often in that category—a bargain is sure to be struck between the two, when they are in hailing distance of one another, somewhere out yonder in the Channel, for something under official rates; and although the offender be not, in fact, licensed and has never gone up for examination, he commonly knows the coast round between Deal and Gravesend, and all its many shoals, swins, and swatchways, as well as the certificated pilots, though it is not in human nature—in official human nature, at any rate—to allow the truth of it.

But there is a vast difference in taking a vessel round the North Foreland into London River, and in snatching her off the very edge of the Goodwins on to which she is blundering in fog or storm. That was the hoveller’s ostensible business of old, in conjunction with the undeclared addition of smuggling. It was ever the smuggling, with a good deal of rascally cable-slipping and prowling the seas for wreckage, that made hovelling the fine and conscienceless trade it may most fitly be described, and incidentally made the Deal boatmen the finest sailors in the world. Their present-day representatives are fallen upon the worst of times, and now that days and nights of cruising these waters at their worst yields but an occasional job, the Deal lugger is becoming something of a rarity, and even that other peculiarly localised craft, the “knock-toe,” or galley-punt, does not seem to be as numerous on the beach as of yore. The Deal lugger is no longer built. It was a sailing craft, of some fifteen to twenty tons, undecked except for a forepeak. The galley-punt is built to combine the qualities of a rowing-boat and a sailing-vessel, and is thirty feet long, with a beam of five feet, a single mast, stepped amidships, and four oars.

The old story of Deal shows the boatmen of some two hundred years ago to have been as thorough a crew of scoundrels as might have been found along our coasts, except perhaps in the West, where the wreckers of Cornwall were unsurpassed in cold-blooded, calculating ferocity. We do not read of the ’longshoremen of the Kentish coast luring vessels ashore, but we hear a very great deal of their heartless leaving the shipwrecked to perish on the Goodwin Sands and busying themselves in searching for valuable wreckage the while. Defoe, one of the greatest and most industrious journalists who ever lived, whose amazing fecundity staggers research, wrote and published a book called “The Storm” in 1704. It described the great storm of 1703 and reflected with just severity upon the inhumanity displayed here. “I cannot omit,” he says, “that great notice has been taken of the townspeople of Deal, who are blam’d, and I doubt not with too much reason, for their great barbarity in neglecting to save the lives of abundance of poor wretches; who, having hung upon the masts and rigging of the ships, or floated upon the broken pieces of wrecks, had gotten ashore upon the Goodwin Sands when the tide was out. It was, without doubt, a sad spectacle to behold the poor seamen walking to and fro upon the sands, to view their postures and the signals they made for help, which by the assistance of glasses, was easily seen from the shore. Here they had a few hours’ reprieve, but had neither present refreshment nor any hopes of life, for they were sure to be washed into another world at the reflux of the tide. Some boats are said to have come very near them in quest of booty and in search of plunder, and to carry off what they could get, but nobody troubled themselves for the lives of these miserable creatures.”

“Those sons of plunder are below my pen,
Because they are below the names of men;
Who from the shores presenting to their eyes
The fatal Goodwin, where the wreck of navies lies,
A thousand dying sailors talking to the skies,
From the sad shores they saw the wretches walk;
By signals of distress they talk:
Here with one tide of life they’re vext,
For all were sure to die the next.
The barbarous shores with men and boats abound,
The men more barbarous than the shores are found.
Off to the shatter’d ships they go,
And for the floating purchase row.
They spare no hazard, or no pain,
But ’tis to save the goods, and not the men;
Within the sinking suppliants’ reach appear,
As if they mock’d their dying fear,
Then for some trifle all their hopes supplant
With cruelty would make a Turk relent.”

And thus, with indignation, he concludes:

“If I had any satire left to write,
Could I with suited spleen indite,
My verse should blast that fatal town,
And drowned sailors’ widows pull it down.
No footsteps of it should appear,
And ships no more cast anchor there.
The barbarous hated name of Deal shou’d die,
Or be a term of infamy.
And till that’s done, the town will stand
A just reproach to all the land.”

A bright contrast was afforded by the noble conduct of the Mayor of Deal, one Thomas Powell, a slop-seller, who appealed successfully to these callous wretches’ hopes of gain by offering five shillings a head for every life saved. He had in the first instance entreated the Customs House officials to put out to save them, but without success, and the boats were refused; whereupon he and his mercenaries took them by force. More than two hundred of the shipwrecked were thus rescued; but even when brought ashore there was no shelter or food to be procured for them by appealing to officials, and the generous Powell was at the costs and charges of feeding, sheltering, and clothing the castaways. Further, he buried those who died, and paid the travelling expenses to Gravesend of the survivors.