On a fine, calm day from the height of the cliffs betwixt Ramsgate and Broadstairs you may spy at low-water time a yellow vein, like a thin winding of pale gold, a hand’s breath this side of the horizon—the famous and fatal Goodwin Sands. I suppose there is no shoal in the whole world that a man whose sympathies are with sailors can view with more interest. Starting from the North Sand Head, which is almost abreast of Ramsgate, and looking east, the eye follows the south-westerly sweep of the Goodwins until the Downs are embraced with all their dim tracery of spars and rigging and faint sinuous lines of steamers’ smoke beyond, whilst the giant South Foreland acclivity stares down upon the lightship abreast of St. Margaret’s Bay, marking the extreme limits in the south and west of the deadliest stretch of sands upon the face of the globe.
“Who can view the Goodwins without thinking of the treasures which lie buried in their heart, of the hundreds of ships which have gone to pieces upon them, of the thousands of human corpses which have floated out of their flashing surf to be stranded upon some distant beach, or to drift, maybe for days, upon the bosom of the tides, looking up with blind faces to heaven through the green transparent lid of their sea coffin? There is no spot that has ever been the theatre of wilder human suffering. Again and again as you sail past you see forking up out of them some black gibbet-like relic of a wreck a week, a fortnight, a month old. Something of the kind is always visible, as though even on the tenderest of summer days, when the blue water sleeps around, and the heavens are a violet hollow, with a rayless sun making gold of the sea in the west, the deadly suggestiveness of that long sweep of yellow sand should be as plain as when its presence is denoted amid the black tempestuous night by the ghastly gleam of boiling white waters.
I remember once passing these Goodwins and seeing a number of little black figures running about them. A pleasure vessel from one of the adjacent ports was lying at anchor a short distance off, and her boat was against the slope of the shoal. It was a very calm day indeed, the sea just blurred here and there with small draughts of air that gave the water in those places a look of ice, with a pallid streak of the French coast beyond the white mainsail of the pleasure-cutter, hove up by the refraction of the light above the sea-line. I brought a small pocket telescope to bear, and observed that those little black figures running about like the savages Robinson Crusoe saw were Cockney excursionists, engaged in playing cricket. They played as if they wanted to be able to talk of having played rather than as if they enjoyed the game. Talk of contrasts! A man may be rendered pensive by watching children sporting in a graveyard, by mingling in a festivity held upon a space of ground where once a famous battle was fought, and where the feet of the merrymakers are separated from the bones and skulls of warriors by a couple of spades’ length of earth. But to see those little black-coated creatures running about after a ball on top of such an ocean burial-place that the like of it for the horror of its annals and for the number of those it has sepulchred is not to be found in this habitable world, might well have made the gayest heart sad and thoughtful for a spell.
As I leaned over the rail, looking at those happy pigmies—those lords of creation who, viewed half a mile further away, might have passed for a handful of black crabs crawling about—the scene in imagination changed, the darkness came rushing out of the east with a moan of approaching storm, the three lanterns winked like stars beyond the North Sand Head, and there was a sound of weltering waters and the seething and hissing of surf rising up through the gloom out from the whole length of the shoals. The wind rose fresh and eagerly, with a raw edge in it; the ebony of the swelling water was broken by the glimmer of the froth of breaking seas. I could hear the muffled thunder of the confused play to windward of the surf, with the shrieking of the blast overhead, whilst a deeper shadow yet gathered in the air. Then, with a blinking of my eyes, back would come the facts of the thing again, and yonder were the little figures merrily chasing the ball, the sea spreading like a sheet of silk to the yellow rim of the hard sand, and the blue sky bright overhead. Yet another touch of the magician Fancy’s wand, and it was all howling storm and flying blackness and the steam of hurling spume again, with a sudden glare of lightning between, flinging out the shapes of the piles of whirling clouds like monstrous brandished wings going to pieces in the hurricane, and throwing up the black fabric of a big ship on her beam ends, her masts gone, and a fury of white water veiling her.
There are lifeboat coxswains who need but close their eyes to see fearfuller things. Just where those little creatures are brandishing their tiny bats and flourishing their shrimp-like legs, the great ship struck, and four hundred men and women shrieked out to God for mercy in one breath. A man’s fancy must be feeble even on the softest of summer days not to hear the crash of her timbers, the thunder-shocks of the smiting seas, the rending noises of hemp and wire and spar torn by the tempest from their strong fastenings; not to see the ghastly picture she makes in the wild gleam of the signal flare whose tongues of fire are blown horizontal, like streaming flags, by the furious breath of the storm, illuminating with a dull horrible crimson light the throngs of human beings who cry and struggle upon her decks, or hang, like streaming suits of clothes, in what remains of her rigging.
Is this an exaggerated picture? Alas! the pen never yet was wielded that could pourtray, in the barest form, any one of the countless horrible scenes which have taken place on that stretch of sands where one summer day I watched, leaning over the rail of a vessel, a number of light-hearted excursionists playing cricket.
Among the things which never can be known may be placed the thoughts which possess a man in the moment of shipwreck. Of the hundreds of published narratives none satisfies the reader; and of those who relate their experiences, how infinitely remote from the truth do their statements strike them as being when they put what they have written side by side with what they remember having felt! The reason is, I take it, because in no other situation is death more awful than upon the sea. It is commonly slow—at least, it gives time for anguish to become full-blown—and the hope of rescue must be very strong indeed, and well founded, to qualify that agony of expectation, sinking into paralyzing despair, which confounds and in a manner stuns a person stranded far out upon the water in a black night, seeing nothing but the glare of lightning or the spectral flashing of froth flying past, hearing nothing but the grinding and trembling and dislocating noises of the hull upon the ground.
It is supposed because sailors cannot or do not describe the horrors they pass through that they lack the capacity of expression. But you may put the most eloquent writer now living, call him by what name you please, on board a ship foundering amid a tempest or going to pieces in a storm on such a shoal as the Goodwins or the Sunk Sand, and when he has been long enough rescued and ashore to recover the use of his brains, you may defy him to write such a narrative of the disaster as will come, to his own conscience and memory, one jot nearer to the truth than the newspaper paragraph of five lines in which the wreck was chronicled. A man can describe what he has suffered in a railway collision, in a house on fire, down in a mine where there has been an explosion, in a theatre where there has been a panic; but put him aboard a ship and let him clearly understand that he is going to be drowned, and when succoured he can tell you little more than that the waves ran mountains high, that some people were brave, and that some people shrieked, and that what he best remembers is catching hold of something, and hearing the water in his ears, and being dragged into a boat.
Very true is the old saying, “If you want to learn how to pray, you must go to sea.” So distracting, so paralyzing, so utterly despairful are all the conditions of shipwreck in its worst forms, that I cannot but think, when a man is known to act bravely and coolly in that situation, unmindful of himself, thinking of others, encouraging and heartening them, the heroism he exhibits is of a kind not to be matched by any kind of courage a man may show in a position that lacks the overwhelming features which distinguish the foundering or the stranding of a ship.
Some days ago I met a seaman who had made one of the crew of a brig that a few months since was stranded on the Goodwin Sands, and went to pieces there. The circumstances of the wreck were so recent that I was sure it could not but be a very sharp, clear memory in this sailor; and, wanting to hear what sort of thoughts come into a man’s head at such a time, and how he will act, what kind of impulses govern him, and the like, I carried this mariner to where a seat and a glass of beer were to be had, and conversed with him.
“She was a wessel,” said he, “of 220 ton, and we was in ballast, bound from Can (Caen) to Seaham. All went well, nothen particular happening, I mean, till we comes abreast o’ the South Foreland. It might then be twelve o’clock in the middle o’ the night. The weather was as thick as mud, plenty of rain driving along, and the wind west, blowin’ a fresh breeze. We was under upper and lower main-tops’l, lower fore-tops’l, and foresail.”
Here he took a drink.
“And the weather as thick as mud, you say?”
“Ay, thick as mud in a wine-glass. The Sou’ San’head light was on our starboard beam, and ye may guess how clear it was when I tell you that that light took a deal of peering at to make out. As to the East Good’in, why, all that way was black as my boot: not the merest glimmer to betoken a lightwessel there. I was at the side, heavin’ the lead, getting nine fathom, and then seven, and then eight, and then seven again. Eight fair betwixt the Callipers and the Deal coast I’ll allow ye’ll get eleven and twelve fathom good till you come on to past the Downs—headin’ up, I mean—and then it shoals down to height and seven and five and a ’arf. So in a night as black as a dead wall, when there’s no moon, who’s to know, when the last light seen has drawed out of view, and there’s ne’er another to be sighted, where you are in that water? We was going along tidy fast, when a squall of rain drives right up over our starn in a wild smother, and I had just made seven fathom by the lead when the wessel took the ground, chucking me off the rail on to the deck. The skipper begins to bawl out like mad, ‘Let go the main-torps’l halliards! Haul up the foresail! Let go the ——’ Wash at that moment comes a lump of sea right over the port quarter, cantin’ our starn to the south’ard and smotherin’ the decks. You didn’t want to see—you could feel that the brig was hard and fast, though as the sea thumped her she’d kinder sway on her keel.”
Here he took another drink.
“Well?” said I.
“Well,” he continued, “what was to do now, master? Everything being let go aloft, the canvas was slatting like thunder up there, and though I’m not goin’ to tell you it was blowing a gale of wind, yet it seemed to come twice as hard the moment we took the ground, and the seas to rise as if our falling helpless on a sudden had swelled ’em up with joy. We lay with our head about nor’-nor’-east, and over the starboard bow you could see the white water jumping. But that was all that was visible. The wind seemed to blow up the thickness all round us, there was not a light to be seen, and looking around anywhere away from the white water was like putting your head in a pitch-kettle. Cold! master, that was the worst part of it. I’ll allow that in all sitivations of this kind the cold’s the part that’s hardest to bear. Somehow clanger ain’t so frightful when it’s warm. Can’t explain it, I’m sure; matter o’ constitootion, perhaps: but I doubt if ye’d find much bravery among the Hesquimos and the Roosians up near the pole, and the likes o’ them. Can’t see how it’s possible; but it’s only my ’pinion.”
Another drink.
“Well,” he continued, holding up the fresh glass of ale I had ordered for him to the light, with a look of pensiveness in the one bloodshot eye he kept open, “we tarns to and makes a flare—a sort o’ bonfire. But if we couldn’t see anything, who was to see us? However, we kept all on burning flares, whilst first the fore-top-gall’nmast came down with a run, causing us all to jump aft out of the road, and then the main-topmast carries away at the cap and falls with a roar over the side, and set us all running forrard. I for one made up my mind we was all to be drownded. I couldn’t see no help for it. The noise of them spars cracking and tumbling away in the blackness overhead, and the shindy set up by the slatting canvas, along with the creaking of the hull and the washing of the water that came as white as milk over the starboard rail, was enough, I reckon, to make any man suppose his time had come, and that his ghost was to be turned out of him. However, we took heart after a spell, by noticing that the seas burst with less weight as the tide left us, though every butt in her must have yawed open after she had been grinding awhile, for she was full of water and a few hours more of such dusting was bound to have made staves of her. Well, at about half-past four o’clock in the morning, we being by that time pretty near froze to death, the weather thinned down, and we caught sight of the Gull Light shining—about three mile off, I dare say. What was to be seen of our wessel was just a fearful muddle; masts overboard washing alongside, the lower masts working in her like loose teeth with every heave, decks full of raffle, and the water every now and again flying over us as though detarmined if it couldn’t wash us overboard it would keep us streamin’ wet. When we spied the Gull Light we turned to and made another flare, and presently they sent up a rocket, and to cut this yarn short,” continued he, having by this time emptied his second tumbler, and finding me slow in offering him a third, “just as the light was abreakin’ in the east one of us sings out that there was a steamer headin’ for us, and when the mornin’ grew stronger we spied a tug makin’ for us with a lifeboat in tow. Well, by this time there was little enough sea, and the lifeboat, letting go off the tug, came alongside, but two of our men was so badly froze up that they had to be lifted into her, and such had been our sufferings, though I’m not going to say they equalled what others have gone through on those cussed sands, that we couldn’t have looked worse, with salt in our eyes and our faces washed into the appearance of tallow, had we been spendin’ forty-eight hours on that shoal. We lost all our clothes, every bloomin’ thing we had with us; and that same forenoon, just afore twelve o’clock, half a gale of wind sprung up, and by two o’clock there was nothing to be seen of the brig.”
“And that’s the story,” said I.
“That’s it,” he answered; “every word gospel true.”
“How did the others behave,” said I, “in this awful situation? Pretty well?”
“It was too dark to see,” he answered.
“Did you encourage one another?”
“Well,” he replied, “the cook at first kept on singin’ out, ‘We’re all drownded men! Lord have mercy upon me!’ and the like of that, until the cold took away his voice. I don’t know that there was any other sort o’ encouragement.”
“And what were your feelings,” said I, “when the brig took the ground and the water washed over her?”
“My feelings?” he replied. “Why, that we was in a bloomin’ mess. That was my feelings.”
“How did the prospect of death affect you—I mean the idea of being swept into the black water and strangling there?”
“Are you chaffin’ me, sir?” he asked.
“Certainly not,” said I.
“Well,” he said, “I’m blessed if I was asked such a question as that afore,” grinning. “It’s like a meetin’-house question.”
“Didn’t you think at all?” said I.
“Yes,” he answered; “I thought what a jolly fool I was to be ashore on the Good’ens on a winter’s night, gradually dyin’ of frost, instead of bein’ in a warm bed ashore, with a parlour to take breakfast in when I woke up. That’s about it, sir.”
