Heroes of the Goodwin Sands

by Thomas Stanley Treanor

A little closer search would have revealed that the innocent-looking baulk of timber was hollow from end to end, and was full of lace, tobacco, cases of schnapps, 'square face,' brandy, and silks. There is little or no smuggling now, and the little that there is, is almost forced on the men by foreign vessels.

Perhaps four boatmen have been out all night looking for a job in their galley punt. At morning dawn they find a captain who employs them to get his ship a good berth, or to take him to the Ness. Perhaps the captain says—and this is an actual case—in imperfect English, 'I have no money to pay you, but I have forty pounds of tobacco, vill you take dat? Or vill you have it in ze part payment?' The boatmen consult; hungry children and sometimes reproachful wives wait at home for money to purchase the morning meal. 'Shall we chance it?' say they. They take the tobacco, and the first coastguardsman ashore takes them, tobacco and all, before the magistrates, and I sometimes have been sent for to the 'lock-up,' to find three or four misguided fellows in the grasp of the law of their country, which poverty and opportunity and temptation have led them to violate.

At present a large number of galley punts lie on Deal beach. These boats carry one lugsail on a mast shipped well amidships. These boats vary in size from twenty-one feet to thirty feet in length, and seven feet beam, and as the Mission boat which I have steered for thirteen years, as Missions to Seamen Chaplain for the Downs, is a small galley punt, I take a peculiar interest in their rig and behaviour.

The galley punts are powerful seaboats; when close reefed can stand a great deal of heavy weather, and are the marvel of the vessels in distress which they succour.

All the Deal boats, the lifeboats of course excepted, are clinker built and of yellow colour, the natural elm being only varnished. And it is fine to see on a stormy day the splendid way in which they are handled, visible one moment on the crest and the next hidden in the trough of a wave, or launched or beached on the open shingle in some towering sea.

I have been breathless with anxiety as I have watched the launch of these boats into a heavy sea with a long dreadful recoil, but the landing is still more dangerous.

If you wait long enough when launching, you can get a smooth, or a comparatively smooth, sea. I have sometimes waited ten minutes—and then the command is given 'Let her go,' and the boat is hurled into the racing curl of some green sea.

Sometimes the sea is too heavy for landing, and the galley punts lie off skimming about for hours. Sometimes if the weather looks threatening it is best to come at once, and then, supposing a heavy easterly sea, you must clap on a press of sail to drive the boat. You get ready a bow painter and a stern rope, and the boat, like a bolt set free, flies to the land. Very probably she takes a 'shooter,' that is, gets her nose down and her stern and rudder high into the air, and, all hands sitting aft, she is carried along amidst the hiss and burst of the very crest of the galloping billow. Fortunate are they if this wave holds the boat till she is thrown high up the beach, broadside on, for at the last minute the helm must be put up or down, to get the boat to lie along the shore, but only at the very last minute—otherwise danger for the crew! I have known a boat landing, to capsize and catch the men underneath, and I have been myself tolerably near the same danger.

Three or four men man these galley punts, and the hardships and perils they encounter in the earning of their livelihood are great. The men are sometimes, even in winter time, three days away in these open boats, sleeping on the bare boards or ballast bags and wrapped in a sail.

They cruise to the west to put one of their number on board some homeward-bound vessel as 'North Sea pilot,' or they cruise to the north and up the Thames as far as Gravesend, a distance of eighty miles, to get hold of some outward-bound vessel with a pilot on board, which pilot is willing to pay the boatmen a sovereign for putting him ashore from the Downs, and they are towed behind the vessel, probably a fast steamer, for eighty miles to Deal and the Downs. I have done this—and it is a curious experience—in summer, but to be towed in the teeth of a north-easterly snowstorm from Gravesend to the Downs is quite another thing; but it is the common experience of the Deal boatmen. And every day in winter they hover off Deal in their splendid galley punts, rightly called 'knock-toes,' for the poor fellows' hands and feet are often semi-frozen, to take a pilot out of some outward-bound steamer going at the rate of ten or fifteen knots an hour. It means at the outside about 5s. per man; perhaps they have earned nothing for a week, and hungry but dauntless they are determined to get hold of that steamer, if men can do it. On the steamer comes full speed right end on at them. The Deal men shoot at her under press of canvas, haul down sail, and lay their boat in the same direction as the flying steamship, which often never slackens her speed the least bit. As all this must be done in an instant, or pale death stares them in the face, it is done with wonderful speed and skill. While a man with a boat-hook, to which a long 'towing-line' is attached, stands in the bow of the galley punt and hooks it into anything he can catch, perhaps the bight of a rope hung over the steamer's side, the steersman has for his own and his comrades' lives to steer his best and to keep his boat clear of the steamer's sides, and of her deadly propeller revolving astern, while the bowman pays out his towing-line, and others see it is all clear, and another takes a turn of it round a thwart.