Defoe’s biting indictment came home to the inhabitants of Deal, and, after a considerable time for thinking it over, they grew angry and resentful about it, in proportion to the truth of the charges. Thus we find them on June 21st, 1705, despatching the following letter:
“Whereas there has been this day produced to us a book called the ‘Storm,’ printed in London in the year 1704, for G. Sawbridge, in Little Britain, and sold by J. Nutt, near Stationers’ Hall, pretending to give an account of some particular accidents that happened thereby. We find, amongst other things, several scandalous and false reflections unjustly cast upon the inhabitants of the town and borough of Deal, with the malicious intent to bring a disreputation upon the people thereof, and to create a misunderstanding between her Majesty’s subjects which, if not timely confuted, may produce consequences detrimental to the town, and tend to a breach of the peace. To the end thereof, that the person who caused the publication thereof may be known, in order to be brought to condign punishment for such his infamous libel; we have thought fit, therefore, to appoint our Town Clerk to proceed against him in a Court of Law, unless he shall within the space of ten days thereof make known to us the person or persons, and where he or they may be found, who furnished the libellous article in the book commencing page 199 to the end of page 202, to which we expect a truthful answer within the time specified.”
There followed upon this hectoring document the signatures of the then Mayor, Jurats, and Corporation of Deal. But it proved to be all sound and empty fury, for nothing came of it.
Such men as these were the ancestors of the Deal boatmen of to-day; a race now very much down on its luck. The very town of Deal, one may almost say, is a survival. The causes that conjured it up, or at any rate, brought about its growth from a mere village, along the unprotected stark shingle beach, have ceased to operate, and great ships no longer sit for weeks in the Downs, awaiting a breeze, or in any numbers ride out storms in that once providential anchorage, all immensely to the profit of the purveyors of ships’ stores and to that of the boatmen. Deal in those times was one vast general shop, in which the mariner might buy anything, from anchors and cables, down to “salthorse” and ships’ biscuits. Those days of pigtails, hemp, and sails brought Deal to its time of greatest prosperity, and the present-day appearance of the town still tells the tale of it. Smuggling was then in its prime, and many a lugger constantly made successful runs on dark starless nights, or crept cautiously across Channel when the air was thick as a blanket with fog, under the very bows of the frigates at anchor in the roadstead.
I do not know that the Deal boatmen of to-day think much of this ancestry of theirs, or set much store by it. They are too much concerned, poor fellows, in considering how they are to get a living in these hard times; times particularly hard for them. But their daring and accomplished launching of a galley-punt and their handling of it in a seaway are exhibitions of craftsmanship impossible to be demonstrated except by these men, who have the hereditary aptitude.
To a landsman, the launching of one of these heavy, lug-sailed, undecked boats off such a beach as this, in a raging surf such as these shores alone can know in time of storm, is a marvel. The breakers are coming in snarling and screaming, in cruel, curving walls of water from whose crests the wind whips off the stinging brine that flies through the hurrying air in particles half in the likeness of sleet and half in that of fog. Here, and at such times, if anywhere, is—
“The scream of a madden’d beach dragged down by the wave”—
so finely phrased by Tennyson, in Maud, to be heard.
A launch would seem impossible, but down the beach the galley-punt is run, her keel scrunching through the pebbles with a hurrying roar that rises even above the clamour of wind and waves, and in a moment she is off, her crew of three leaping or tumbling in like jumping-jacks, and in another moment she is clear of the breakers and heading out to where some steamer is dimly seen rolling and pitching yonder in the obscurity, flying a signal for the landing of the pilot, who has brought her round from the port of London and has now finished his job and is going home by train, as the custom is with pilots.
To such work as this did the Deal boatmen’s lives come: hard work, and often hazardous; and, considering the casual nature of it, not well paid. Landing a pilot is, or was, worth twenty-five to thirty shillings or thereabouts, and it is obvious that this sum, casually earned and divided among a crew of three, is a poor recompense. But even this standby has been snatched away from the Deal boatmen since the Trinity House has established a steam pilot-cutter at Dover, which cruises about to land pilots from outward-bound ships at a fixed charge of £1. It is an excellent institution from the pilots’ point of view, but it is the last blow to the boatmen of Deal. Steam has ever been their enemy.