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.