After that, he had nearly twenty years of hovelling; cruising about the Goodwin Sands in open luggers in the stormiest winter weather, till he almost knew the Sands by heart; and so James Hogben was appointed first coxswain of the Ramsgate life-boat.
Each time that he and his crew went out in her they gained fresh confidence in her powers; and noble work the good boat did under his command; indeed from the time the Northumberland life-boat began her career at Ramsgate to the time she was broken up, from December 1851 to July 1865, no fewer than two hundred and sixty-one lives were saved by her and the gallant Storm Warriors who sailed her, from vessels that were utterly lost; and nineteen vessels, with their crews, were extricated from the Goodwin Sands and brought safely into harbour.
For nine years Hogben was coxswain of the life-boat, and then came that dread New Year's Eve, when doubts were thrown upon the telegram that came from Deal; and there was delay; and the life-boat got out to the south of the Goodwin Sands only in time for her crew to see the Gottenburg overwhelmed by the waves, and to hear the last cries of the drowning men.
Hogben had been out in the life-boat once before that day, and was exhausted and unwell; and he had a nasty fall in the boat, and hurt his knee badly, and soon fell seriously ill; his nerves were, for a time, utterly shattered, and he who had been remarkable for his dauntless courage became too nervous to walk even down the pier for fear of falling over.
And although, after a while, he so far recovered as to be able to be employed as a boatman in the harbour, and as a watchman on the pier, yet he was never able to go to sea again; his iron constitution broken down by some thirty years of Storm Warrior life, during the last nine years of which he had been coxswain of the famous Ramsgate life-boat.
Isaac Jarman was appointed coxswain in Hogben's room.
Who among Ramsgate boatmen has been better known in his time than Isaac Jarman—or Mr. Jarman, as I suppose I ought to call him now? for is he not master of a thriving public-house, which he will take good care to keep respectable? and it will not be his fault if any of his customers wreck themselves by taking too much drink.
But a yarn on Ramsgate pier with the life-boat coxswain, Jarman, was for some years quite an institution with many a visitor to Ramsgate, as well as with many an inhabitant.
When I have known Jarman (it does not seem quite natural Mistering my old boatman friend) to be out in the life-boat, enduring all the rage of the storm, and I have imagined the wild scenes 'mid the strife of waters through which he has been passing, another picture, one in very vivid contrast, has often presented itself to my mind.