It was plain some disaster had taken place, but what had happened on those gruesome sands I could only conjecture until I reached the Boatmen's Rooms. Outside the building I found in groups and knots a crowd of boatmen and pilots, and also Richard Roberts, the coxswain of the Deal lifeboat.
Roberts had that evening, about five p.m., been taking a look at the Goodwins with his glass, a good old-fashioned 'spy-glass.' After a long steady search—'Why,' said he to the men round him, 'there's a new wreck on the sands since yesterday!' The gale of the morning part of the day had been accompanied by low sweeping clouds of mist and driving fog, and as soon as the curtain of thick vapour lifted, Roberts noticed the new wreck.
The other boatmen then took a look, and they all went up to the high window of the lifeboat-house to gain a better view of the distant Goodwins.
The point where the wreck, or the object they saw lay, was the outer part of the Goodwin Sands towards the north, and was quite eight miles distant from the keen-eyed watchers at Deal.
'That's a wreck since yesterday,' said one and all.
Roberts, gazing through his glass, now cried out, 'There's something, man or monkey, getting off the vessel and moving about on the sand!'
'Let's have a look, Dick,' said another and another, and then all cried out,
'Yes; it's a man! He's waving something—it's a flag!'
'No, 'tis n't a flag,' said Roberts, 'it's more like a piece of canvas lashed to a pole; it blows out too heavy for a flag.'
Just about the same time, watchers at Lloyd's office had seen through a powerful glass the same object on the Goodwins, and they sent word to the coxswain of the lifeboat that there was a man in distress on the Goodwin Sands, and wildly running to and fro.