THE GOODWIN SANDS AND THE FORELANDS
Four miles seawards from Deal lie the Goodwin Sands, and the deep water
between the two is known as the Downs—the great historic resting-place
for ships, naval and mercantile, the scene of the gathering together of
many a noble fleet of British war-ships, whose broadsides have helped to
make England the mistress of the seas. The Goodwins shelter the Downs:
that is their one good service, and surely the mariner pays dearly for
it! No more treacherous shoal exists than that ever-shifting mass, that
greedy monster that lies beneath the surface of the water, and grasps in
the clasp of death every luckless vessel driven within its reach.
Deep in the Goodwin Sands lie the wrecks of centuries, the treasure of
many lands. And the stories of those wrecks, what stirring reading they
would be were they recorded! In the great storm of 1703—of which I shall
speak later on in telling the story of the Eddystone—thirteen men-of-war
were driven on the Goodwins, dashed to pieces, and their crews engulfed
in the rising tide. Now, in our own day, each succeeding winter brings
some fresh piteous tale of disaster from the Sands, some grievous loss of
human life which happens, despite the undauntable courage of the men who
man the lifeboats stationed along the coast from Broadstairs to Dover.
Our hearts bleed as we read of the lifeboat which, notwithstanding all
that human skill and pluck can do, reaches the Goodwin Sands too late:
there has been no unnecessary delay since the signal of distress was
first noticed, no hanging back by the crew, no thought for their own
safety. Simply the actual impossibility of reaching the wreck in time.
This is the story we read of yearly; and though it may fill us with
sorrow for the sufferings of the luckless men and women on the wrecked
ship, we can at least say, as we lay aside our newspaper, All was done
that could be done to save them. Few, thank God, are now the occasions on
which we cannot say this; but the loss of the Gutenberg, on the evening
of New Year’s Day, 1860, is one of them. It was a wild night, bitterly
cold, and the snow fell so thick that her pilot could not see the light
from the lightship, and she struck the Goodwins about six o’clock. Her
signals of distress were seen from Deal, but there was then no lifeboat
stationed there, and the Deal boatmen telegraphed to Ramsgate, ‘Ship
on the Goodwins.’ The lifeboat-men there were ready as usual, and they
hastened, as was customary, to the harbour-master to get permission for
the steam-tug to tow them out.
The harbour-master was an important person, and he felt the dignity of
his office. Perhaps he did not like the unceremonious way the would-be
crew had come into his presence; one sometimes forgets to be duly
respectful when the lives of an unknown number of one’s fellow-men
are at stake, and may be saved by haste; any way, he heard this news
from the breathless spokesmen without much visible sympathy. ‘Have the
distress-signals been noticed at Ramsgate?’ he inquired.
‘No,’ cried the sailors, ‘at Deal; Deal has telegraphed here, and we
want your orders for the harbour-tug to tow us out to the Sands.’ The
harbour-master smiled. ‘That, I fear, is not official intimation,’ he
said, and continued the discharge of important duties at his desk!
Ramsgate was astir? The official answer had somehow not been received by
the knots of sailors who thirsted to save life with the admiration the
harbour-master perhaps expected.
Further telegrams came from Deal at 8 and 9, that signals of distress
were still going up from the Sands, and an angry crowd _demanded_ the
use of the tug, that, with steam up, lay in the harbour. ‘Go in your
own luggers, if you will go!’ shouted the harbour-master, whose official
dignity was now relaxing into official indignation; but he knew that was
practically an impossibility.
Then, at 9.15, came the welcome cry, ‘A signal from the South Sand
lightship.’ The benevolent harbour-master forthwith untied the red tape
that held the steam-tug to her moorings; and towing the lifeboat behind
her, she plunged into the storm. On she went, steaming her hardest
towards the Goodwins, and as those on board her and on the lifeboat
neared the Sands they saw the lights of the breaking ship; nearer still,
and the cries of the perishing crew could be heard. The lifeboat is set
free, her sail hoisted, and she makes for the Sands!
The lights disappear, the shouting ceases, and presently a faint light
shines from the sea nearer to them. Then, through the blackness of the
night, the lifeboat crew can see a ship’s boat coming towards them; a
rope is thrown, and she is hauled alongside the lifeboat. The men, five
in number, drenched and exhausted, are taken on board: these are the
remnant of the Gutenberg’s crew of thirty-one, that for nearly four hours
clung to their ship as the waves dashed her to pieces on the Goodwins,
and were sacrificed to an official’s ‘sense of duty!’
But what about the history of attempts to mark with lights the dangers
of what legend calls the once cultivated estate of Earl Godwin? These
dangers were well known to the mariner of old, and have for long been
sung in sea-song. But the ever-shifting nature of the sands left the
lighthouse builder of bygone days without hope of the possibility of
placing upon them a warning to navigators of their exact position.
However, ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread’: the enthusiast and
the mad speculator were often in evidence in the days of good Queen Bess.
Those days of leaping and bounding prosperity that England then saw, as
she followed new paths to fortune, encouraged such beings, and amongst
them was one who came to court with a project to build a lighthouse on
the Goodwins.
The projector was Gawen Smith; his proposals did not begin with this
of which we have spoken. He had been an applicant for office before;
a vacancy had happened in ‘Her Majestie’s bande,’ one of the drummers
having been gathered to his fathers, and Gawen considered he was just
the man for the post, for he could ‘sounde on the drumme’ all manner of
‘marches, daunces and songys.’ Had it been the post of chief-engineer for
draining the Lincolnshire fens, our friend would, no doubt, have been
able to make out a good case for his own fitness for the appointment.
Poor man! his application for the band vacancy was never answered, so far
as we know; perhaps Secretary Cecil thought him a better sounder of his
own trumpet than beater of her majesty’s drums!
But he was not daunted by failure to get an answer: in due course came
the application which has made him of interest to the reader of these
pages—the suggestion for a lighthouse on the Goodwins.
He tells Cecil that he has been ‘down upon the Goodwin Sands,’ in sundry
parts of them, and though he found the place ‘very dangerous,’ yet by
the May following he would be ready, if permitted, and if the queen
would grant him the leave to gather toll—to build a beacon, ‘fyrme and
staide uppon the foresaid Godwyne Sande,’ twenty or thirty feet above the
high-water level; which beacon should, by night, ‘shewe his fyre’ for
twenty or thirty miles, and be seen by day for hard on twenty miles.
It was no ordinary lighthouse that Gawen was going to build there. Should
there—despite this wonderful erection—happen a wreck upon the sands, the
beacon-tower would be an abiding-place for the shipwrecked, as it would
furnish room for forty persons above the highest point to which the waves
had been ever known to reach.
He had one other request, and when compared with the vastness of the
undertaking, it was a modest one; it was that the queen would give him
£1,000 when he should deliver to her hand ‘grasse, herbe, or flower,’
grown upon this desolate, shifting mass of sand, and £2,000 when the soil
should be so firm that his tower would bear the weight of cannon for the
defence of the channel!
Cecil carefully folded up the application and endorsed it: ‘The demands
of Gawen Smith touchinge the placing of a beacon on the Goodwyn Sandes’;
and there the matter ended.
Years went by, Gawen Smith died—probably a disheartened speculator;
winter gales blew luckless vessels on the Goodwins; and the greedy shoal
drank in life and treasure as before; but no project came prominently
forward for indicating its danger till the year 1623. Then a more
rational proposal was made, and made by men of a very different stamp
from Gawen Smith. John, afterwards Sir John, Coke, a nautical expert,
proposed means by which a light might be exhibited upon the Goodwins.
Unfortunately we do not know exactly what his proposal was, but that
it was practical we may guess from the fact that the English and Dutch
mariners approved it and were ready to contribute to its support, and it
is almost certain that a moored vessel, showing a light by night, was
suggested. If so, we have in this proposal the first suggestion of a
lightship: the reader will see in a moment on what I base this theory.
Sir John Coke’s scheme came to nothing, and a like fate attended those
put forward soon afterwards by Capt. Thomas Wilbraham and the Mayor of
Rochester and others which were for the same kind of light, whatever
that was; but in 1629—four years after Charles I’s accession—almost the
same persons petitioned the king for licence to light the Goodwin Sands.
In this case their petition is extant, and we see what they propose.
After setting forth the dangers of the sands in the usual terms, they
state that they are ready, in order to warn vessels of those dangers, to
maintain at their own costs, ‘_a light upon the main_’ at or near the
Goodwins, ‘whereby every meanly skilfull mariner’ could, on the darkest
night, safely pass the place of danger. I think the expression ‘upon the
main’ must here mean the main or open sea, especially as the words ‘at
or near the Goodwins’ immediately follow: that expression cannot refer
to the _mainland_, eight miles off at its nearest point, for lights at
the two Forelands were then already established, and the expression ‘on
the main’ would not have been used if a tower built on the sand had been
intended. There is, I think, but one way of interpreting this and the
earlier proposals, and that is, that they were each of them for afloating
light or lightship at the Goodwins.
Besides maintaining this nocturnal light, the petitioners undertook
to constantly provide ‘a sufficient company of strong and experienced
men, with vessels, always in a readiness to relieve such as by day, or
night, through extremitie of weather, should unhappily be forced upon the
sands’: presumably, then, more than one vessel was to be kept permanently
moored at the Goodwins, each craft being provided with boats, and with
such life-saving apparatus as was then known, so that assistance could
at once be sent to any ill-fated ship that ran upon the Sands. In return
for all this the petitioners craved leave to levy one penny from every
English ship passing through the Downs and three-halfpence from every
‘foreigner,’ besides an allowance for salvage in respect to the cargo
of any wrecked ship that the petitioners or their servants happened to
rescue.
The petition bears no endorsement, so that we cannot tell what was
done upon it: the proposal as to the payment of dues probably defeated
it, especially as lights, for which a tax had been demanded, had been
established only a little before at the Forelands. These were, neither of
them, very elaborate buildings, nor, we should fancy, efficient lights:
each was built of timber and plaster, and had at its top a lantern
in which were stuck a few candles. The Trinity House offered a most
strenuous and relentless opposition to the Foreland lighthouses, which
were set up by Sir John Meldrum, and felt bound to inform King Charles
that there was ‘no necessity for such lights’ and that an imposition of
a rate for their support would a grievance to navigation: in times of
‘hostility,’ the Trinity House went on, ‘such lights would be a means
to light an enemy to land, and bring them to an anchor in the Downs’;
and moreover, ‘in a chase by night’ ships would be brought to where the
king’s ships and our own merchantmen rode peacefully at anchor, and
then these pursuing vessels might, on dark nights, by mistake board
either those frigates or merchant ships without either having time to
demonstrate what she was. True, it might be urged that, ‘in time of
hostility,’ the Foreland lights could be put out; yet, meanwhile, they
would so far do mischief as to acquaint strangers with our coast in every
part; so that in time of war they night get through the channel by night
without lights ‘merely by their depths.’
The Trinity House at Dover had similar objections to such costly follies
as lighthouses. ‘We at sea,’ it wrote, with professional contempt, ‘have
always marks more certain and sure than lights—high lands and soundings
which _we_ trust more than lights’; ‘and,’ continued these superior
persons, ‘the Goodwins are no more dangerous now than time out of mind
they were, and lighthouses would never lull tempests, the real cause of
shipwreck.’ If lighthouses had been of any service at the Forelands, the
Trinity House, as guardians of the interests of shipping, would surely
have put them there!
The real objection to the Foreland lights—their dimness and general
badness—was never once mentioned; the outcry against the lighthouses
was by those who had to pay for them, the shipowners and merchants; and
from their point of view good lights or bad were equally objectionable.
Probably the king—who must have been getting quite used to these
extraordinary outbursts of eloquence every time a lighthouse was proposed
_anywhere_, and who was beginning to have a shrewd suspicion as to
the motives that caused them—knew how much of this expressed alarm
was genuine. He stayed, for a little time, Sir John Meldrum’s patent,
empowering him to gather tolls for the Foreland lighthouses, and then
granted it, ordering his Admiral of the Narrow Seas to arrest vessels
that would not pay.
We do not know if Sir John Meldrum, after this confirmation, improved his
system of lighting; let us hope he did; but it is doubtful, for the same
ramshackle towers, well patched with timber and iron, were not replaced
with more substantial structures for more than sixty years afterwards. A
new tower, of flint and lime, was set up at the North Foreland in 1694,
and then a coal fire was used to light the lighthouse. This was soon
after completely gutted by fire, and for a long time the only light shown
there was a lantern, containing one candle, stuck on a pole!
After a while a tower of brick and stone was raised, and it is probable
that some part of this forms the lighthouse we see at the North Foreland
to-day; then the owners went back to their coal fire again, and kept
it up so badly that bitter complaints arose from those who worked the
Channel trade. Inquiry was held, and it was found that the grates were
but half filled with fuel.
This was scandalous, for the profits of the two Foreland lights had
grown—I am speaking of the opening years of the last century—to be
enormous. The Trinity House thought the outcry offered a reasonable
pretext for acquiring possession of the lights, but the crown officers
would not transfer the patent; they only warned the patentee to amend his
light, and he did so. Then, in 1727, the Trustees of Greenwich Hospital
bought both lighthouses, and possession of them remained in that charity
till the general transfer of lighthouses to the Trinity House, some sixty
years ago.
One of the first things the trustees did was to close in the open coal
fire at the North Foreland, and so save their coals. The plan succeeded
no better there than at other lighthouses at which it was tried:
shipwreck on the Goodwins became much more frequent, and sailors said
that often they could see the outline of the Foreland before they got a
glimpse of the fire on the lighthouse; and so the lantern was taken off
and the fire was left to burn unshaded till 1790, when the tower was
raised one hundred feet, to its present height, and a lantern lit with
oil lamps supplanted the coal fire altogether.
Of the history of the South Foreland lighthouse there is not a great
deal to record; yet, from a scientific point of view, that lighthouse
certainly demands attention, from the fact that many of what have been in
turn regarded as the most approved methods of coast-lighting have been
first put into practice there. It was suggested as an experiment station
so long ago as 1729: magnifying lenses were first used there in 1810.
In 1853, Faraday made his initial experiments there with the electric
light as a means of coast illumination; and there—nine years later—the
lime-light was first applied for a similar purpose. Having said this much
we may leave the South Foreland light, for of its history and romance we
know little, practically nothing.
But before we pass on to Dungeness lighthouse a word more must be said
about the Goodwin lights. We left their history in 1629 very far from the
date at which a light was actually placed upon them. Nothing came of the
suggestion then made to indicate the dangers of the Sands by means of
floating lights, and the existence of lighthouses on the North and South
Forelands, for which heavy dues were payable, gave little hope of success
to any project to light the Goodwins. As a consequence we hear of no
subsequent proposal for a lightship there till well on in the eighteenth
century, that is, after the practicability of this form of coast
illumination had been actually demonstrated at the Nore and the Dudgeon.
But the then proposers of the lightship at the Goodwins were only two
poor pilots, who could not be expected to carry on a battle with so
powerful an antagonist as the Trinity House. The secretary of that body,
writing, about the year 1750, of the pilots’ humane but ineffectual
effort, congratulates himself that so crushing had been their defeat,
that his Board was unlikely to be troubled again with such ridiculous and
tiresome suggestions. The Trinity House, he observes, ‘was not fond of
them!’
However, times changed as the years went by: the Trinity House, and those
for whom it spoke, grew larger-minded, had greater scientific knowledge,
and were more public-spirited. Thus before the end of the century of
which we have been speaking, the Trinity House had itself established a
lightship at the Goodwins—the first of the three which now warn mariners
of the presence of the Sands.
Of course these lightships are not as useful as lighthouses; but it is
pretty certain that to do what Gawen Smith wanted to do in the days
of Queen Bess—reclaim the Goodwins and build a lighthouse on them—is
practically impossible. Projects for doing this came before the Trinity
House in plenty during the first half of the present century, one being
to enclose that part of the Sands called ‘Trinity Bay’ and form it into
a harbour of refuge; and, according to the author of _Memorials of the
Goodwin Sands_, the Trinity House itself, at the close of the seventeenth
century, made trial borings, to great depths, to see if a solid bottom
could be reached: it could not.
But although it may be impossible to build a lighthouse on the Goodwin
Sands, it must not pass unnoticed that between 1840 and 1850 at least two
temporarily successful attempts were made to erect what their inventors
termed ‘refuge beacons’ on the Goodwins: one of these was a mast forty
feet high, sunk into the sand in a strong frame of oak, on which mast
was fitted a gallery—never less than sixteen feet above high-water mark.
This gallery, so its inventor stated, was capable of holding thirty
or forty persons. In it a supply of food and drink could be left in
a properly protected case, and a flag, which the shipwrecked persons
who availed themselves of the refuge could immediately hoist, and thus
acquaint the coastguard on the mainland of their presence there. The
gallery could be reached by means of a chain ladder from the sands, and a
‘basket chair’ was kept in readiness in the gallery, in which might be
placed persons too exhausted to ascend the ladder; this would be easily
lowered and hauled up again to the top. This wonderful erection stood for
nearly three years and then disappeared—whether run down or washed away
nobody knows. It would be interesting to learn if during that period the
wonderful paraphernalia was ever put in operation, if any shipwrecked
mariners availed themselves of the refuge gallery, and if so, whether or
not they found a comfortable meal awaiting them!
On the whole, then—though it is perhaps dangerous to predict that
anything is impossible—it may be stated as exceedingly improbable that
the Goodwin Sands will ever be turned into _terra firma_, or that a
lighthouse will be built upon them; and without penetrating into the
secrets of the official breast, it may be taken as correct that such is
the opinion of the present Trinity Board. Could such a work be carried
out, its advantages would be, of course, enormous. As a fortification and
place of defence of the Downs and Channel its value is incalculable, and
that, as some of us may remember, was the opinion of our great commander,
the Duke of Wellington.