'All hands in the lifeboat!' From a photograph by W. H. Franklin.
The following simple statement—far below the sublime reality—will prove, if proof be needed, that the men who live between the North and South Forelands are not inferior to their fathers who sailed with Blake and Nelson.
About one o'clock on Sunday, December 28, 1879, a gun from the South Sand Head lightship, anchored about a mile south of the Goodwins, and six miles from Deal, gave warning that a ship was on the dreadful Sands. It was blowing a gale from the south-west, and the ships in the Downs were riding and straining at both anchors. It was a gale to stop your breath, or, as the sailors say, 'to blow your teeth down your throat,' and the sea was white with 'spin drift.' As the various congregations were streaming out of church, umbrellas were turned inside out, hats were blown hopelessly, wildly seawards, and children clung to their parents for shelter from the blinding spray along Deal beach.
Just then, in answer to the boom of the distant gun, the bell rang to 'man the lifeboat,' and the Deal boatmen answered gallantly to the summons. A rush was made for the lifebelts. The first and second coxwains, Wilds and Roberts, were all ready, and prepared with the key of the lifeboat house, as the rush of men was made.
The first thirteen men who succeeded in getting the belts with the two coxwains formed the crew, and down the steep beach plunged the great lifeboat to the rescue. There were three vessels on the Goodwins: the fate of one is uncertain; another was a small vessel painted white, supposed to be a Dane, and she suddenly disappeared before my eyes, being probably lost with all hands; the third was a German barque, the Leda, homeward bound to Hamburg, with a crew of seventeen 'all told.' This ill-fated vessel while flying on the wings of the favouring sou'-westerly gale, supposed by the too partial poet to be
A ladies' breeze,
Bringing home their true loves,
Out of all the seas,
struck, while thus impelled at full speed before the wind, the inner part of the S.E. spit of the Goodwin Sands. This is a most dangerous spot, noted for the furious surf which breaks on it, and where the writer has had a hard fight for his life with the sea.
The Germans, therefore, found this 'ladies' breeze' of Charles Kingsley's splendid imagination more unfriendly to them than even 'the black north-easter,' and their first contact with the Goodwin Sands was a terrific crash while they were all at dinner, toasting absent friends and each other with the kindly German prosit, and harmless clinking of glasses, innocent of alcohol.