A cottager residing near the place, witnessed the circumstance only just previous to the irruption of the water, and informed my relative had he possessed a shovel, he could have prevented it.
The circumstance attending this catastrophe caused in little minds derision and contempt, from the failure of the experiment. But a humble individual, whose ideas were more enlarged, contended upwards of three hundred pounds worth of good had been effected; and the spot on that part of the coast is recognized to this day as Hewitt’s Bank.
While some persons, therefore, considered it a direct failure, my relative deemed it a partial one, and watched with undiminished ardour the effect produced by the stranding of the Hunter cutter, A.D. 1807; the particulars of which are fully entered into in the following pages.
A knowledge of the tides and currents has been principally acquired from the perusal of several works of the most renowned philosophers, whose erudition have stamped them with truth stable and incontrovertible. I have, therefore, adopted their language rather than my own, fearful I should mar their intent, and my regard for such comprehensive writings induces me to add the truism transmitted to us by an ancient Latin author—
Unius ætatis sunt quæ fortiter fiunt, quæ
Vero pro utilitate scribuntur æterna.Vegetius.
Should the design be put in execution, and found efficacious, it will be applicable to other coasts, by taking every particular respecting them into consideration, and great will be the reward on the ambition attained of having endeavoured to benefit the community at large.
THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.—THE FORMATION OF THE TIDES CONSIDERED, THEIR VARIATION, AND EFFECTS.
For, lo! the sea that fleets about the land,
And like a girdle clips her solid waste,
Music and measure both doth understand:
For his great crystal eye is always cast
Up to the moon, and on her fixed fast:
And as she danceth in her pallid sphere,
So danceth he about the centre here.