I have said this great swatch leads north-east through the Goodwins—but north-east from what, and how is the point of departure to be found on a dark night? If you ask the coxswain of the Deal lifeboat, who probably knows more, or at least as much about the Sands and their secrets as any other living man, he will tell you to 'stand on till you bring such a lightship to bear so and so, and then run due north-east; only look out for the breakers on either side of you.' It is one thing to go through this swatch in fair weather and broad daylight, and another thing in the dark or even by moonlight, 'the sea and waves roaring' their mighty accompaniment to the storm.
There are other swatches, one more to the southward than the preceding, and also running north-east, through which the Deal men once brought a ship named the Mandalay into safety after protracted efforts.
Another swatch too exists, opposite the East Goodwin buoy, being that in which we struck the dangerous bottom. And yet another, just north of the south-east buoy, leads right across the tail of the monster, and so into the deep water of the Downs.
Looking at a chart or reading of these passages, they seem easy enough, but to find and get through them safely when you are as low down as you are in a boat, near the sea level, is very difficult, and as exciting as the escape of the entangled victims from the labyrinths of old—unmistakable danger being all around you, and impressed on both eyes and ears.
The whole of the Goodwin Sands are covered by the sea at high water; even the highest or north part of the Sands is then eight or ten feet under water. At low water this north part of the Goodwins is six feet at least above the sea level, and you can walk for miles on a rippled surface cut into curious gulleys, the miniatures of the larger swatches. Wild and lonely beyond words is the scene. The sands are hard when dry—in some places as hard as the hardest beach of sand that can be named. Near the Fork Spit the sand is marvellously hard. On the north-west part of the Goodwins, which is that given in the engraving, it is hard, but not so hard as elsewhere. In all cases it is soft and pliable under water, and sometimes in wading you sink with alarming rapidity.
Recently attempting in company with a friend to wade a very peculiar-looking but shallow swatch—to right and left of us being blue swirls of deeper water, the 'fox-falls' on a smaller scale of another part of the Sands, and exceedingly beautiful—I suddenly sank pretty deep, and struggled back with all my energies into firmer footing from the Goodwins' cold and tenacious embrace.
The Sands reach round you for miles, and the greater swatches cut you off from still more distant and still more extensive reaches of sand. In such solitudes, and with such vastness around you, of which the great lonely level stretch makes you conscious as nothing ashore can do, you realise what an atom you are in creation.
