But it would be a mistake to assume that Sandwich was immediately
ruined by the closing of its haven. It so happened, about the time
when the sands were first closing in, in the reign of Elizabeth, that
religious persecution in the Netherlands was harassing the industrious
Flemish and French peoples whose commercial and industrial genius had
made the fortunes of that land. England’s textile and weaving trades
were poor in comparison with those of the Continent, and it was a
far-seeing statesmanship, as much as a fellow religious feeling, that
induced Elizabeth to grant the petition of the oppressed weavers
of bays and says, and other craftsmen in 1565, and afford them an
asylum from the ferocious persecution carried on by the Spaniards in
the Low Countries. Archbishop Parker well named the Dutch and French
refugees who by command of that great Queen were permitted to settle in
Sandwich, “gentle and profitable strangers.” Unlike the often diseased,
verminous, and generally vicious, ignorant, and tradeless aliens whose
free entry into the England of to-day is so rightly resented, those
immigrants brought with them, in addition to cleanly and industrious
and law-abiding habits, the mastery of trades and techniques that
England lacked. They were indeed profitable to the State, and they
largely saved Sandwich from such complete extinction as that which has
befallen Romney and Winchelsea.

This community originally numbered some four hundred persons, and
formed a class apart, with two chapels, a Flemish and a French, for
their own use. Their textile trades thrived, and sent forth colonies to
Colchester and other places; and, among other crafts, they introduced
market-gardening. Incidentally, also, they taught the wasteful and the
riotous English a new mode of life. I suppose those two chief races
that mainly go towards the making of the English people--the Celts and
the Anglo-Saxons--have wastefulness and a love of drink in common,
however else they differ. But these strangers added sobriety and
prudence to their industry, and brought much housekeeping cleverness
with them. It is but one example of their methods, but characteristic,
that they were the first to introduce oxtail soup. The English butchers
had always disposed of the tails with the hides, but these newcomers
had long known their value and bought them cheaply, in the way of their
housekeeping, until the English aptitude to learn at other people’s
expense sent up the price of those neglected appendages. It is quite
in keeping with the contrary nature of people and affairs that it was
after a time sought to discriminate unfavourably in taxation against
these people who had brought such benefits into the land. How matters
would eventually have shaped does not appear, for at that juncture
the strangers had begun to mingle with the English. They intermarried
and lost their foreign tongues, and, such is the English power of
assimilation, their very names have suffered similar changes. Thus,
although to this day many names in Sandwich are in their origin Dutch
or French, they have been altered so greatly, following the original
English inability to pronounce them, that they appear, on the face
of them, sufficiently British. All the poetry in them has been
obliterated in the process, and they have become quaint or grotesque.
But those typical Sandwich names, “Gutterbock” and “Poisson,” are in
their original form.

The textile trades in time deserted Sandwich, and at last left it to
a gentle sleep; and so it has drowsed away the last centuries. It is
not the “dead town” it is commonly reported to be, and by no means to
be judged by Cobbett’s uncomplimentary reference in 1823: “Sandwich,
which is a rotten borough. Rottenness, putridity, is excellent for
land, but bad for boroughs.” It was political rottenness that aroused
his indignation; but that was no especial attribute of Sandwich, and
therefore he need not have continued with the remark, “as villainous a
hole as one would wish to see.”

Wish _not_ to see, he doubtless meant, for nobody desires to see
villainous holes. But Sandwich was not of his political creed, hence
this fury.

So much has been said of Sandwich as a “dead town” that strangers who
first come to it full of the tales they have heard, of grass growing in
its streets--and, for all I know, moss growing on its inhabitants--
are likely to be surprised at its comparative vitality. Grass does
not grow like a lawn in the streets of Sandwich, in spite of all the
far-fetched stories of decay and desolation that it pleases eloquent
descriptive writers to tell, and it is something of a shock to find
a quite busy railway station just outside the ramparts and a very
modern “Stores” in whose windows are all sorts of twentieth-century
provisions, for which modern coin of the realm, and not the quaint
moneys of Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth, must be tendered. All these
signs, including the occasional motor-cars that hurry through the
narrow streets, are very reassuring, or very disastrous, according to
your point of view.

At Sandwich, which is supposed (in the pages of those super-eloquent
writers aforesaid) to have given up the ghost long ago, but has done
nothing of the kind, there should certainly be no railway, and there
should be no room in a “dead” town for the gasworks which may be seen--
and smelt--on the quay, nor for the particularly large and busy
brewery in Strand Street. At the mediæval Sandwich, thus pictured, the
few remaining shopkeepers should stand in their doorways and address
passers-by with “What d’ye lack, my masters?” but they don’t; and the
thirsty wayfarer will call in vain for a posset of sack, a beaker of
canary or malvoisie at the “Red Lion” or “King’s Arms.” Beshrew me,
sirs, but he will need to content himself with a whisky-and-soda,
mineral-waters, or the product of the local brewery already mentioned.
I have no doubt, could he sample the old-style drinks, he would greatly
prefer the modern.

If one really wishes to see a dead town, Winchelsea, or New Romney,
or, better still, Old Romney, may be recommended. They are much more
dead--if it be in any way possible to institute degrees in these
things--than Sandwich.

But the census returns of a hundred years ago, compared with those of
1911, prove an increase of population in the town. They at the same
time disclose how small a place it is. The population in 1801 was
2,452; in 1901 it had risen to 3,170; but the 1911 census reveals a
decline of 130.

There is no grand architecture, of the wonder-compelling kind, in
Sandwich. It is all very quiet and modest and domestic, but at the
same time old-world and reverend. Of the three parish churches, St.
Clement’s, which stands hard by the place where the ancient sea-front
of Sandwich once opened out, is the most notable, and has a fine Norman
tower. The restoration it has experienced was paid for by the sale
of its bells--a quaint touch--and a modern set of tube-chimes now
replaces them. St. Peter’s is perhaps better known, because its tower
is taller and is capped with a curious Dutch-like turret, and rising
to a considerable height, viewed from a distance, across the flats, it
is the most prominent feature of the town. The tower is frankly and
unashamedly unarchitectural, and replaces the one that fell without
warning on October 13th, 1661. It fell disastrously into the church
and demolished the south aisle, making a mighty heap of wreckage. “The
rubidge,” says the contemporary account, “was three fathoms deep in
the middle of the church.” The roofless walls of that destroyed aisle
remain in part to this day. The tower that replaces the fallen building
is of a local grey brick made from the harbour mud, and would appear
from its style to have been designed and built by a local journeyman
bricklayer. But it is to be hoped that the modern passion for
remodelling plain buildings and putting them into a conventional dress
will pass this tower of St. Peter’s by; for Sandwich would scarce seem
the same Sandwich without it, and people who write about the town would
lose the cherished chance of being mildly funny at its expense.

I do not think any stranger has ever been known to find his way
through Sandwich without making one or two false turns, for its
streets are winding and deceptive. The houses of the middle ages
are not represented in them at all, and it is a sixteenth and
seventeenth-century Sandwich you see, not the mediæval port. It is,
in general, a Dutch effect, as if those settlers under Elizabeth had
imported their views upon domestic architecture and had successfully
imposed them upon the town.

The native of Sandwich who has left his mark most visibly upon the
place is Sir Roger Manwood, who founded the Grammar School in 1563.
Manwood was born 1525, son of a local draper, and, entering the law,
became eventually Chief Baron of the Exchequer. An elaborate new
school-building, built 1895, stands in a solitary position outside the
town, at the very opposite end from the original school, now occupied
as a private residence and named Manwood Court. It stands at the very
extremity of Sandwich, as you go towards Canterbury, and is a very
striking building, with five gables and a high-pitched roof, and the
date, 1564, in great figures, sprawling in genuine sixteenth-century
ironwork along the frontage. Queen Elizabeth, on her visit to Sandwich
in 1572, when she was elaborately entertained by the town, honoured Sir
Roger by staying at his house.

For the rest, there are dim, odd corners, where queer old timber
angle-posts, carved with grinning and demoniacal figures, start out of
the houses. Such an one is that which forms the chief adornment of the
“King’s Arms” inn and is dated 1592.

[Illustration: THE TOWN HALL, SANDWICH.]

The Town Hall is a curious old building within, although refaced and
rendered commonplace without. In it are held the Quarter Sessions
for Sandwich and the Liberties of Ramsgate, Walmer, and Sarre.
Brightlingsea’s law-cases were also formerly held here; and the Mayor
of that Essex seaport still has his chain of office placed on him here
by his overlord, the Mayor of Sandwich. Another mayoral peculiarity
is the black wand, instead of the usual white one, presented by the
clerk to his Worship on his assuming office. The town traditionally
thus went into mourning after the battle of Bloody Point. As this took
place in the year 851, it is quite evident that the men of Sandwich
are people with long memories, whom it would be an ill business to
offend. The Sessions Hall and police-court is a fine old room, the
court being entered past two weird old sculptured heraldic figures, a
lion and a dragon sitting up on their rumps and holding shields. These
are survivals of the town’s decorations when Queen Elizabeth visited
it, the dragon being, of course, the ancient Dragon of Wales. A number
of pictures of curious interest seen in the Mayor’s Parlour were found
in 1839, during some alterations to a house in Harnet Street. They
represent the battle of Sole (Southwold) Bay, the reception of Queen
Elizabeth, etc. The jury-box in the Sessions Court is worth notice.
It is one which used formerly to be set up at the opening of the
Court, and taken down at the conclusion of business, when its parts
were fitted into the panelling which lines the walls. Thus arose the
expression of “empanelling” a jury.

There is now a stir in the old streets of Sandwich. Somewhere about
1887 some enthusiastic golfers discovered in the wide-spreading sands
an ideal site for links on which to play that “royal and ancient”
game, at that time scarce known, even by name, to the generality of
Englishmen; and speedily the St. George’s Golf Club, since granted the
prefix of “Royal,” was established, on land--or rather sand--leased
and eventually purchased, from the Earl of Guilford, to whom the sea,
in closing the career of Sandwich as a port, has gracefully presented
this truly “unearned increment.” The present club-house was formerly
Great Downs Farm. Recently the trustees of the Earl of Guilford have
constructed a “private” road from Sandwich, across the sandy wastes, to
the sea, where they have erected a smart hotel, chiefly for golfers,
on what was the solitary shore. Sometimes, when the golfers have bored
each other almost to extinction with bragging of their remarkable feats
on the course, they lounge into Sandwich and patronise it. To those who
do not play golf all these developments are hateful and infuriating,
and the players seem to be persons who pretend at exercise, rather
than putting themselves to any real exertion; and on that score very
inferior to cricketers. Meanwhile the boys and growing lads of Sandwich
employed as “caddies” are being bred up to be idle, vicious, and
unemployable men.

CHAPTER XVI

WORTH--UPPER DEAL--DEAL--THE GOODWIN SANDS

The old road from Sandwich to Deal ran across the sandy wastes through
which the railway goes, but the sand-dunes that line the shore all
the way between the towns, and stretch far inland, form a profound
discouragement to those who would seek to trace the seashore. Maps
rightly mark this space of coast “Blown Sand.” Blown it is, into
hollows and heights, sometimes overgrown with a scanty herbage and thus
anchored securely against being moved on again by the winds; but often
mere loose sand-heaps that will be changed radically in shape by the
next furious gale. It is distressing walking, and plaguy ill-favoured
to boot; and where the sand at last dies away inland and gets mixed up
with marshes, is about as easy and as awkward a place to get lost in as
may well be imagined. The railway between Sandwich and Deal cuts midway
through this swampy desolation.

[Illustration: UPPER DEAL.]

The modern road to Deal lies open and unfenced for the most part,
first across samples of these marshes, and then across chalk downs.
It is a pleasant highway, where you get just as much of the dykes
and waterlogged scenery as you want, without a depressing surfeit of
it. By the time the turning for Worth is reached the shore is nearly
three miles distant. Here a signpost directs on the left “To Word,” a
spelling which reproduces the olden Saxon pronunciation of “Worth,”
still current here; all one with the singular inability of the Kentish
folk to enunciate “th”--a strange and widespread trick of the tongue
which makes the rustics talk of “de wedder,” instead of the weather.
The effect upon strangers is almost that of talking to foreigners.
The word “shibboleth” itself would certainly bewray them; they would
inevitably make it “shibboled.”

“Worth” is pure Anglo-Saxon: deriving from “Weorthig,” meaning an
enclosure. The site of it was evidently a very early attempt at
cultivation in these marshes.

We will not penetrate beyond Worth to the shore, the sands, and
marshes, to the site of the old road, but will proceed along the
present highway to Deal, through Shoulden.

The town of Deal is entered through what might at first be considered
the inland modern suburb of Upper Deal, where the very striking
red-brick seventeenth-century tower of St. Lawrence’s church confronts
the wayfarer. But what is now “Upper” Deal is in fact the original
place: the “Addelam” of Domesday, the “Dole” of earlier records. The
place-name, which signifies a “dale,” is singularly appropriate for the
spot where the rolling chalk hills descend to a long level, stretching
to the sea. Before there was any town at all where Deal now faces the
Channel, almost awash with the tides, “Upper” Deal was simply “Deal,”
and what we now know as Deal was the upstart settlement called “Lower”
Deal. Thus oddly is the situation reversed.

A curious piece of evidence as to the comparatively recent origin of
the town is found in a Chancery case argued in 1663, when a witness
seventy-two years of age declared that “he well knew the valley where
Lower Deal is situated, and that he knew it before any house had been
built there.”

The church of St. Lawrence is a singular mixture within, and has a
singing gallery, quaintly painted with an East Indiaman in full sail,
and bearing the date 1705; together with little pictures of pilots
and terrestrial globes, and the inscription: “This Gallery was built
by ye Pilots of Deal.” It will be noted that, in the construction of
this road into Deal, the old Dutch-like houses here have suffered some
mutilation.

It is a mile-long affair of incredibly mean streets from Upper
Deal to the seashore. When the town arose from these levels in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it came into existence as a
place of ship-chandlers and purveyors, and grubbed along in a kind of
squalid, casual prosperity which apparently no one expected to last.
Hence the little grey-brick houses, that seem to have been built with
small confidence in the future. Here and there, however, you find some
charmingly designed old shop-fronts and fanlights, in the nicest taste,
unobtrusive but in just proportion.

The church of Deal, dedicated to St. George the Martyr, and dating
only from the time of Queen Anne, is just the type of building one
would expect from that date: red brick, with factory-like windows and
a cupola-crowned clock turret. But it is a good and well-proportioned
specimen of its class. Something of the fine old salty flavour of the
tarry-breeched sailors of Nelson’s day belongs to the two epitaphs that
may be found against the walls. The first is to--

  “John Ross and James Draper, Seamen, who were killed on board
  H.M.S. _Naiad_ in defeating the French Flotilla off Boulogne in the
  presence of Buonaparte, 21st September 1811. Their Shipmates caused
  this Monument to be erected to the memory of these truly good Men,
  who so nobly fell in the just cause of their Country.”

The other reads:

  “Sacred to the Memory of David Browne, late a Seaman on board his
  Majesty’s Ship _Immortalité_, who died of wounds received in action
  with the Division of the French Flotilla off Cape Blanc Nez, 23rd
  of October 1804. Likewise of James Wilson, William Terrent, John
  Dewall, and George Bacher, Seamen, who lost their lives on the
  same occasion. Of William Panrucker, Seaman, killed 6th Sept.
  1804, John Egerton, Marine, killed 17th February 1804, and of James
  Redout, Seaman, killed 5th Nov. 1803. This is erected by their
  Shipmates. They were brave good Men and fell at that Post their
  Country had assigned Them.”

Deal, in the opinion of Cobbett, was “a most villainous place. It is
full of filthy-looking people. Great desolation of abomination has
been going on here; tremendous barracks, partly pulled down and partly
tumbling down, and partly occupied by soldiers. Everything seems upon
the perish. I was glad to hurry along through it, and to leave its
inns and public-houses to be occupied by the tarred and trowsered, and
blue-and-buff crew whose vicinage I always detest.” The “tarred and
trowsered crew” in his time were very largely smugglers of the most
ingenious type. They smuggled in the most incredible places, and it is
even recorded that the Deal boatmen wore bustles, in which they packed
vast quantities of tea and tobacco. The visitor of to-day, noting that
the Deal boatmen are already provided by nature with a very extensive
area in the region on which bustles are worn, will smile at the
quaint picture that must have been presented by these bold dealers in
contraband.

Julius Cæsar landed at Deal, in his invasion of Britain, B.C. 55, and
again in the following year; and Perkin Warbeck chose the same spot in
1495. The low, shingly beach afforded an easy landing-place; and hence,
when invasion was expected in the reign of Henry the Eighth, Deal was
one of the earliest places to be fortified.

[Illustration: THE QUAINT FORESHORE OF DEAL.]

History speaks with many voices on the subject of Henry the Eighth.
That is partly because history is the sport of partisans, and partly
because the character of that King is so complex. The view that he was
all bloodthirsty tyrant and sensualist is easily taken. His amazing
marriages, and still more amazing dissolutions of marriage, contribute
largely to that estimate of him. But there were several Henrys in that
one portly body. There was the avaricious, greedy Henry, own son of the
mean Henry the Seventh; the vain and luxurious and spendthrift Henry;
the proud and cruel Henry, a true Welsh Tudor; and the statesman and
patriot, whose existence few acknowledge. Whatever were his faults and
errors, Englishmen to this day owe more to Henry the Eighth than to
many a later monarch. He it was who established the Royal Navy, who
had the courage to break with Rome and to free England from the deadly
embrace of that Church; and he spared no effort to arm his country
against the political alliances the Pope sought to direct against it.

Says Hall, the Chronicler:

“The King’s Highness, which never ceased to study and take pains both
for the advancement of the commonwealth of this his realm of England,
of the which he was the only supreme governor, and also for the defence
of all the same, was lately informed by his trusty and faithful
friends that the cankered and cruel serpent, the Bishop of Rome, by
that arch-traitor Reignold Poole, enemy to God’s word and his natural
country, had moved and stirred divers great princes and potentates of
Christendom to invade the realm of England, and utterly to destroy the
whole nation of the same. Wherefore His Majesty, in his own person,
without any delay, took very laborious and painful journeys towards the
sea-coasts.”

The results of these journeys was the building in 1539 of what Lambarde
describes as “castles, platfourmes, and blockhouses in all needfulle
places of the Realme.” Some of these we may still see, here and at
Walmer, Sandgate, Camber, and along the south coast, far away into
Cornwall. These “bulwarks,” as they are styled in the records of the
time, were designed by Van Hassenperg, a German military architect, and
all bore outwardly much the same appearance, consisting of portly, but
low, masonry towers clustered at intervals round a stout curtain-wall
and pierced with lunettes for guns. Islanded within the centre of this
enclosure was a keep and gun-platform, rising to a somewhat greater
height than the outer works. Although of one general appearance, there
were minor differences in the outer aspect of these coast defences,
and the ground-plan of each was markedly individual. Deal Castle, long
since become a private residence, still stands to the west of the
town. It wears much the same exterior appearance, although its moat is
planted with shrubs.

The narrow alleys that lead on to the beach at Deal, and the ramshackly
old houses and hovels from whose windows one might almost indulge in
sea-fishing, seem almost like provocative impertinences to the waves,
which appear always to be threatening them. But there they remain, the
most whimsical of dwellings, with the spars and bowsprits of vessels
almost poking in at the windows, greatly to the amusement of summer
visitors.

The visitor to Deal who does not partake of at least one Deal “hoffkin”
is not considered to have done his duty by the place. There is,
however, nothing especially delightful in one of these strangely
named articles. A “hoffkin” may be purchased at any baker’s shop, at
the price of one penny, and is nothing more than ordinary breadstuff
(except that it appears to be a good deal harder, and not so palatable)
baked in the shape of a teacake. It is about the size of a saucer, and
has a hole in the middle. And why any baker makes such a thing, and how
it came by its name, is an unrevealed mystery.

Half a mile north of Deal once stood the castle of Sandown, one of
Henry the Eighth’s many shoreward castles. They had no opportunity of
fighting the foe, and their history has thus been meagre; but to this
fortress of Sandown belonged one grim incident. It was selected as
the prison of that convinced regicide, Colonel Hutchinson, sometime
member of Parliament for Nottingham, who was at first pardoned on
the Restoration, and then, in 1663, arrested and sent to the Tower of
London. Removed to a solitary imprisonment here in May 1664, his wife
and daughter were only permitted to visit him from Deal. According
to the “Memoirs” written by his wife, Sandown Castle was even then a
“lamentable old ruined place, not weatherproof, unwholesome and damp,”
and he died in four months, September 11th, aged forty-nine, from a
fever with which it had infected him.

Sandown Castle is a thing of the past. Only the black memory of it
remains. It was gradually undermined by the sea, and fell in massive
ruinous blocks of masonry, unsung, unwept, with no story save that of a
sordid and cruel and useless revenge.

[Illustration: THE KENTISH COAST: _Deal to Brookland_]

The explorer who pushes manfully into these sandy wastes will scarce
find that they repay him for his trouble and fatigue. A squalor
pervades them, in addition to their essential melancholy; and when
a kind of golf club-house has been passed and you come upon a small
stone with a barely decipherable inscription, set upon a bank that
marks where the sands and the marshes begin, and are told that it
marks the site of a murder done there, long ago, you feel it to be a
fitting place for such a deed. Here a young woman named Mary Bax was
murdered in 1784 by a sailor tramping this way, along the old road to
Sandwich. A boy roaming in the marshes saw the crime committed, and
hid trembling in the rushes of a dyke, for fear that if he were seen
he would be served the same. When the man had gone he raised an alarm,
and the countryside was roused. The sailor was tracked to Folkestone
and captured in the churchyard of St. Eanswythe. The following account
of the affair, and of the conviction and execution of the murderer,
appeared in the _Annual Register_ for 1784:

“Martin Laas, a sailor, was in April convicted of murdering a young
woman at Worde, near Sandwich. Throughout the whole of his trial he
treated the witnesses very insultingly, and gave three loud cheers
before he was removed from the dock. Upon this, the Judge gave strict
orders for him to be chained to the floor of his dungeon, where he
afterwards confessed the crime. He said that on August 25th, as he was
sitting on a roadside bank near the halfway house, between Deal and
Sandwich, Mary Bax passed by, upon which he followed her, and in half
a mile stopped her and inquired the way to Sheerness. She told him he
was a great way from that place; whereupon he said he had no money,
and must have some. She had none, she said, for him. He then pushed
her into a ditch, and jumped after her, into the mud and water, which
reached to the middle of him. Taking the bundle she was carrying, and
removing the shoes from her feet, he made off across the marshes,
towards Dover. The shoes he immediately threw away, and hid the bundle
near where he was taken.

“The prisoner, giving this account, did not seem to feel the least
concern for the crime, or its consequences, but appeared, on the
contrary, very cheerful, saying he had been fated to commit it, and to
suffer for it, as he had been told, years before, by an old Spaniard.

“He was a native of Bergen, in Norway, twenty-seven years of age, and
had served under Lord Rodney, in H.M.S. _Fame_, for upwards of two
years. He was, however, extremely penitent when brought to the place
of execution, acknowleged the justice of his sentence, and prayed with
great fervency.”

Deal is all very well in summer, but it is in winter and in spring a
desperately cold place. It is as though winter, departing reluctantly
with the coming of the vernal equinox, lingered fondly here, loth to
go. Thanet is open to the east winds, and every gust that blows out of
the North Sea is felt acutely at Westgate and Margate, turning noses
and hands red or blue, as the case may be; but at Deal your very vitals
seem to be frozen stiff and stark with the natural acerbity of the air
and with the cutthroat blasts that come murderously out of the many
alleys of this strange old seafaring town.

At Deal one talks most naturally of the Goodwin Sands. Stretching in a
line about eleven miles long, from Broadstairs to Deal, parallel with
the coast-line, and roughly from four to five miles from the shore,
these dreaded shoals extend at their greatest breadth some four miles.
The dangers they offer to the crowded shipping of the Channel lie
chiefly in their being covered at high water.

The Goodwin Sands are the most famous feature of the Kentish coast,
though not the most spectacular. If they were, indeed, visible in
proportion to their fame or notoriety, they would be as little
dangerous as Shakespeare’s Cliff itself, which is a landmark for
mariners, rather than a peril to them. The Goodwins, more dreaded by
seafaring men than rocks, find impressive mention in Shakespeare. In
_The Merchant of Venice_ they are referred to as “a very dangerous flat
and fatal, where the carcases of many a tall ship lie buried.”

The origin of the Goodwin Sands has been from the earliest time
a matter of dispute, nor can the question even yet be considered
settled. This lack of any definite conclusion is by no means due to
want of trying, and the question appears early to have been confused
by the inclusion in the inquiry of that very different matter, the
accumulation of sand that in the sixteenth century destroyed the haven
of Sandwich.

A Royal Commission appears to have been appointed in the reign of Henry
the Eighth for the purpose of ascertaining the cause of the Goodwin
Sands and the sands that were silting up Sandwich haven, and of finding
a method of dealing with them. Bishop Latimer narrated in one of his
sermons, as an example of unverified gossip, how Sir Thomas More,
taking evidence, was met with some curious ideas:

“Maister More was once sent in commission into Kent; to help to trie
out (if it might be) what was the cause of Goodwin Sandes, and the
shelfs that stopped up Sandwich Haven. Thether commeth Maister More,
and calleth the countrye afore him, such as were thought to be men of
experience, and men that could of likelihode best certify him of that
matter, concerning the stopping of Sandwich haven. Among others came in
before him an olde man with a white beard, and one that was thought to
be a little lesse than a hundereth yeares olde. When Maister More saw
this aged man, he thought it expedient to heare him say his minde in
this matter, for, being so olde a man, it was likely that he knew most
of any man in that presence and company. So Maister More called this
olde aged man unto him, and sayed: ‘Father,’ sayd he, ‘tell me, if ye
can, what is the cause of this great arising of the sande and shelves
here about this haven, and which stop it up that no shippes can arrive
here? Ye are the oldest man that I can espie in all this companye, so
that, if any man can tell any cause of it, ye of likelihode can say
most in it, or at leastwise more than any other man here assembled.’

“‘Yea, forsooth, good maister,’ quod this olde man, ‘for I am well nigh
an hundreth yeares old, and no man here in this company anything neare
unto mine age.’

“‘Well, then,’ quod Maister More, ‘how say you in this matter? What
thinke ye to be the cause of these shelves and flattes that stoppe up
Sandwiche haven?’

“‘Forsooth, syr,’ quoth he, ‘I am an olde man: I thinke that Tenterton
steeple is the cause of Goodwin Sandes. For I am an olde man, syr,’
quod he, ‘and I may remember the building of Tenterton steeple, and I
may remember when there was no steeple at all there. And before that
Tenterton steeple was in building, there was no manner of speaking
of any flats or sands that stopped the haven; and therefore I thinke
that Tenterton steeple is the cause of the destroying and decaying of
Sandwich haven.’”

The ancient man whose evidence seemed to Bishop Latimer so absurd a
_non sequitur_ was not such a fool as he seemed to be, and did but echo
the olden widespread belief in Kent that “the building of Tenterden
steeple was the cause of Goodwin Sands.” That belief, when explained,
is not so ridiculous as at first sight it appears, even though it be
founded upon a legend that has no basis whatever. This legend declares
that the Abbot of St. Augustine’s Abbey at Canterbury, to build the
steeple of Tenterden church, employed a quantity of stone that had been
set aside for repairing the sea-walls defending the Goodwins, then
a portion of the mainland; and that the next storm, in consequence,
drowned thousands of acres.

Quite apart from the want of any foundation for this legend, the
question was further confused by the old man of Latimer’s story
associating the existing fine and stately Perpendicular tower of
Tenterden church with the disaster. The old belief obviously went back
to a remote period and referred to some ancient steeple at Tenterden
that he never knew.

This folk-tale does not by any means agree with the ancient and
widespread legend that the Goodwins form the site of an island called
Lomea, said to have been overwhelmed in the great storm of 1099,
mentioned in the Saxon Chronicle. John Twyne, or Twine, who in 1590
published a work he called _De Rebus Albionicis_, appears to give the
earliest mention of “Lomea.” He says it was “a low fertile island,”
but it is not known whence came his authority for the existence of the
isle, or the description of it.

Lomea is said to have been given by Edward the Confessor to Earl
Godwin, father of King Harold; but Godwin (from whose name the Goodwin
Sands are said to take their title) died in 1053, and no mention is
found of Lomea or any such place in charters of that time; nor does it
appear in Domesday Book. But it is quite obvious that an island must
at some time have existed where the fatal sands now stretch, for most
legends contain some nucleus of fact; and it is to be noted that, to
the eastward of the North Goodwin, the water is shoaled by a chalk
ridge, often said to be the site of that vanished isle.

The marvel-mongering monks of ancient times had their own version of
the destruction of Earl Godwin’s island. According to them “it sonke
sodainly into the sea,” as the punishment ordained by Heaven for his
sins. Another absurd story, accounting in a quite different way for the
existence of the Sands, declared that they first appeared above water
after Holland had been overflowed by the sea; the greater distribution
of water reducing the sea-level.

There is indeed a very wide choice of tradition and legend from which
to select the most likely story, and in addition to those already
cited there is a tale of how Earl Godwin, in one of his predatory
expeditions, penetrating into the weald of Kent and finding himself
in a desperately dangerous situation, vowed, if he were permitted
to return in safety, that he would build a steeple at Tenterden.
Neglecting to fulfil his vow, his island was destroyed by a justly
offended Providence. A variant of this declares that, anxious to fulfil
his pledge, in doing so he neglected the dams and seawalls of his
domain, which was accordingly overwhelmed in the next great storm.

The Goodwin Sands are of irregular shape, constantly changing in
detail, but in general are considered to resemble the form of a
lobster, and thus the North and South Callipers stand for the claws.
So long ago as 1845 an official report stated that the Brake Sand had
moved bodily inwards towards the shore, 700 yards within fifty years.
By 1885 the Bunthead Shoal had disappeared and the South Calliper
had moved one mile to the north-east; and in 1896 it was discovered
that the Goodwins had continued a general movement, already noticed,
towards the coast, and that the area of drying sand at low tide had
largely increased.

For the Goodwin Sands have this peculiarity, among others, that they
show above water at the ebb. The North Goodwin indeed is not covered
by more than eight or ten feet at high water; but the South Goodwin
is submerged some twenty-four feet. It is no uncommon adventure,
although apt to be a risky one, to land upon the sands at low tide;
and cricket-matches have on several occasions been played upon them,
although, being more or less yielding, and intersected by pools and
runnels, they do not form an ideal site for the purpose. The first
match played here was in 1824, when all details of it were arranged
by Captain Kennet Martin, who, as harbour-master at Ramsgate, was
thoroughly acquainted with the Sands, and was able to bring the
occasion to a successful issue. Another match, played in 1839 by a
party from Deal, had not concluded when the wind freshened and they
found it an ill thing to be on the Goodwins with only a small boat
that, useful enough on a calm sea, was of no use at all in half a gale.
No oarsmen are strong enough to pull away from the Sands under those
circumstances; and there those adventurous cricketers had to remain,
facing death, or the alternative of their danger being recognised
by their friends ashore. Fortunately for them, one of the hovelling
luggers of Deal was despatched in time.

Two other matches have been played on the Goodwins, one in 1844, and
another in 1855; and on August 31st, 1887, a one-mile cycle race was
run by three foolhardy cyclists from London. The time taken by the
speediest of the three was three minutes, thirty seconds.

Boethius, an old-time writer, described the Goodwin Sands as “a most
dreadful gulph and shippe-swallower,” and he was well within the mark
in doing so, for the dreaded Sands do, in fact, not in any metaphorical
sense, often swallow ships up whole. The number of wrecks, too, in
spite of the three lightships that mark the Sands, is still very great;
according to the Board of Trade Wreck Abstracts from 1859 they average
twelve a year, British shipping, exclusive of foreign vessels. The four
lifeboats that divide the sands between them--those of Ramsgate, Deal,
Walmer, and Kingsdown--have saved upwards of 2,000 lives in peril here.

The greatest disaster that ever happened here was during the terrible
fourteen days’ storm of November 1703. On November 26th no fewer than
thirteen men-o’-war were cast away, and Admiral Beaumont and twelve
hundred officers and men were drowned. The story of the wrecks since
then would take long in the telling; let us therefore choose only a few
of the most outstanding. There was the transport _Aurora_, which sailed
straight on to the Goodwins in a fog, and was wrecked with a loss of
over three hundred. The wreck of the _British Queen_ in 1814 was due
to a like cause. The sole fragment ever found was a portion of the
stern, with the ship’s name: the hungry sands had swallowed all else,
ship and crew!

The mail-packet _Violet_, from Ostend, was lost at two o’clock in
the morning of January 5th, 1857. She had started the night before,
at eleven. An hour after she had struck upon the Sands there was no
one left aboard to answer the signals of the steamer and the lifeboat
that set out to the rescue; at seven there was nothing to be seen of
the _Violet_, crew, or passengers but a portion of one mast and the
lifebuoy picked up with the lifeboat, in which lay three dead men.

In recent years these insatiable sands have claimed more ships.
There was the steamship _Dolphin_ in 1885. After being thrown out of
her course in a collision with the _Brenda_, she drifted here and
became a total loss. Seventeen men were drowned on that occasion, and
thirty-three were rescued. On April 20th, 1886, the Norwegian brig
_Auguste Hermann Franche_, with a cargo of ice, went ashore on the
Goodwins in a fog. Of the crew of seven, only one was saved. On the
night of May 14th, 1887, the large schooner _Golden Island_ was lost,
but all hands were rescued. On April 8th, 1909, the four-masted iron
passenger steamer _Mahratta_ struck upon the Fawk Spit, and although
a number of powerful tugs tried to drag her off, all efforts were
useless. The passengers were safely landed, and work was proceeding to
jettison some of the cargo, with the object of lightening the vessel,
when she broke in half, with a noise like thunder, and it was not long
before the sands swallowed her.

The appearance of the Goodwins when exposed at low water is thoroughly
in keeping with the melancholy story of the Sands. The stranger does
not find a broad or long uninterrupted stretch of firm sand, but great
dismal wastes with here and there a navigable channel between, called
by local seafaring men “swatches,” or “swatchways”; and in every
direction, except after unusually calm weather, the sand is ribbed and
hollowed into irregular furrows, water and sand alternating. To remain
standing in one place for a short time is to find one’s self sinking
gradually, and sometimes even suddenly, for these are in many places
quicksands; and innocent-looking pools, apparently quite shallow, give
the incautious a bad shock by often proving to be perhaps anything from
six to sixteen feet deep. They are locally known as “fox-falls,” and
form but one of the many unpleasant surprises the Goodwins are capable
of giving. Another strange thing is the extraordinary steepness of the
Sands on the north side of the North Goodwin. The popular idea of a
sandbank is of a gradual shoaling of the water, but at this point it
falls almost sheer away into deep sea, about ninety feet.

[Illustration: THE GOODWIN SANDS: “A DANGEROUS FLAT AND FATAL.”]

The Sands, even on the brightest day, are the abomination of desolation
to the last detail. They are, it is true, “ship-swallowers,” but are
sometimes nice in their appetite, or over-gorged, and cannot fully
dispose of every wreck; and so the clinching evidence of disaster is
rarely lacking, in the protruding timbers of a lost ship, or the fluke
of an almost entirely buried anchor; although it becomes the duty of
the Trinity House to remove--generally by blowing up with dynamite--
any wreckage here that is considered to be dangerous to navigation.

To stand contemplative upon the Goodwins is a strange and deeply
impressive experience. The expanse of doleful grey sand, almost
mud-coloured, fully bears out the Shakespearean description of this
“dangerous flat and fatal.” It is so nearly awash and so mixed up with
watery gullies that the waves that come curling and snarling upon the
edge appear about to overwhelm you. Except for the sound of them,
an uncanny stillness prevails, and the great expanse of the sky and
the distant white cliffs from near Deal on to Ramsgate intensify the
loneliness. A horror of the solitude seizes you, not lessened by the
strange tameness of the gulls that numerously patter about and seem to
welcome your company.

Attempts have from time to time been made to provide some warning
beacon to mark the Goodwins, but it is now recognised that lightships
form the only practical solution of the difficulty. It was at about the
close of the seventeenth century that the first effort to establish a
beacon was made; but the borings failed to reach any firm basis, and
the Sands were declared to be of unfathomable depth. Even in modern
times they have been held by marine surveyors to be of the great depth
of some eighty or ninety feet. Sir Charles Lyell, on the other hand,
stated them to be only fifteen feet deep, resting on a base of blue
clay. The opinion of the seafaring men of the Kentish coast, who are
not geologists, or by way of being scientific men, but who have at any
rate a practical acquaintance with the Goodwins in all weathers, is
that the depth is indeed very great.

[Illustration: THE EAST GOODWIN LIGHTSHIP]

The first lightship to mark the Goodwins was that on the North Sand
Head, established in 1795. The Trinity House placed a beacon on them a
few years later. It was a primitive affair: merely an old hulk filled
with stones, and was perhaps more dangerous than useful to shipping.
Several others were erected, from time to time, all short-lived and
ineffectual. The last was the “refuge beacon,” erected in 1840. This
was the invention of the then Captain (afterwards Admiral) Bullock, and
consisted of a tall mast strengthened by stays and provided with a kind
of “crow’s nest” into which wrecked mariners were supposed to climb. In
this refuge were stored supplies of food and restoratives. There do not
appear to exist any records of this beacon proving its usefulness in
any way; and in 1844 it was destroyed by a vessel running into it. The
growing traffic in the Channel has gradually led to the provision of
other lightships; the Gull in 1809, the South Sand Head 1832, and the
East Goodwin 1874.

CHAPTER XVII

THE DOWNS AND THE DEAL BOATMEN

It has been shown that the Goodwins have from the earliest times
greatly exercised the imaginations of all kinds of people, and that the
bones of countless dead have found sepulture there, but it would scarce
be supposed that any one would choose to be buried on the Goodwins. Yet
there are at least two instances known of such a strange choice; one
of them prominently recorded in the well-known--perhaps better known
by repute than actually read--Evelyn’s “Diary.” John Evelyn, in the
pages of that not very lightsome record, has an entry dated April 12th,
1705: “My brother-in-law Granville departed this life this morning,
after a long, languishing illness, leaving a son by my sister, and two
granddaughters. Our relation and friendship had been long and great.
He was a man of excellent partes. He died in the eighty-fourth year of
his age, and will’d his body to be wrapp’d in leade and carried downe
to Greenwich, put on board a ship, and buried in the sea betweene
Dover and Calais, on the Goodwin Sands, which was done on the Tuesday
or Wednesday after. This occasioned much discourse, he having had no
relation whatever to the sea.”

A similar interment took place forty-six years later, and forms the
subject of a paragraph in the _London Evening Post_ of May 16th, 1751:

“We have an account from Hamborg that on the 16th April last, about six
leagues off the North Foreland, Captain Wyrck Pietersen, commander of
the ship called the _Johannes_, took up a coffin made in the English
manner and with the following inscription upon a silver plate: ‘Mr.
Francis Humphrey Merrydith, died March 25th, 1751, aged 51;’ which
coffin the said captain carried to Hambourg and then opened it, in
which was enclosed a leaden one, and the body of an elderly man,
embalmed and dressed in fine linen. This is the corpse that was buried
in the Goodwin Sands a few weeks ago, according to the will of the
deceased.”

Much has already been said of the dangers of the Goodwins, but they
are not altogether evil. Like human beings, they are compact of good
and ill. Their useful and beneficent function is to provide a kind of
natural breakwater forming the roadstead famous for centuries in naval
and mercantile shipping annals as “the Downs”:

    “All in the Downs the fleet lay moored,”

as the song goes, in Gay’s “Black-eyed Susan.”

Here, in the comparatively smooth water of this anchorage, stretching
from Walmer, past Deal, nearly to Sandwich, the navies of Rodney’s and
Nelson’s times gathered, either for strategical reasons or in stress
of weather. The Downs--whose name comes from _dunes_, referring to
the Goodwin Sands and the wild wastes of sand-dunes between Deal and
Sandwich--are safe and sheltered in all winds, except a southerly
gale; and thus in old times, when tempests blew from any other quarter,
all the shipping in the Channel made haste to ride out the storm in
these waters. In those times four hundred vessels were often seen
at once sheltering here; but steamships are less dependent upon the
weather, and, now that sailing-vessels are comparatively few, the Downs
are never so crowded as of yore.

The days when the Downs were crowded with many a ship that in the
fine old descriptive phrase--which really was description and not
imagination--“walked the water like a thing of life,” are long since
done, and now the vessels that in fewer numbers ride out the worst of
the Channel gales here are things of iron that sit deep and wallow
in the water like the tanks they really are; things of steam, with
a walking-stick by way of mast and quite innocent of bowsprit. They
are vessels in the truest and most exact form of the word, floating
tanks, made to hold things, not ships that sit upon the water, as the
old sailing-ships did, like swans, or, as the poet says, “walked the
water.” There are walks and walks, and I figure the gait of an old
frigate, or even of a barque or brigantine, under full canvas, not as
a pedestrian’s stride, but as the graceful carriage of a lady in a
spacious drawing-room.

The ’longshoremen of all these sixteen miles of roaring storm-bitten
coast between the Forelands are men of a courage and endurance proved
so long ago that it has become proverbial. Nowhere have those fearless
and staunch qualities been displayed to such a degree as at Deal. The
“Deal boatmen” are a race famous in the troubled annals of the sea.
Between their windy and exposed foreshore, from whose unprotected
beach no howling gale has been fierce enough to daunt their putting
off, between their shore and the Goodwins they have earned a hard-won
livelihood, or have dared the worst of weathers in life-saving, for
no reward. There is a nice distinction between the ’longshoremen of
Ramsgate and Margate and Dover, and those of Deal; for while all have
that “’longshore” appellation, only those of Deal are “boatmen.” All
own boats, it is true; but the boats of Deal are different from those
of the other towns, and only at Deal did the “hoveller” flourish.
It is to be feared the day of the hoveller is done, now that steam
is superseding sails. There are those who consider that the word
“hoveller” is a corruption of “hoverer,” and it was the business--
and a highly remunerative business too--of these men, in their stout
luggers, to put forth in stormy weather and cruise about amid the
tempest-tossed waters in search of distressed vessels that might wish
to be navigated into port. In these modern times of surveillance and
overmuch governing no man may, without a licence from the Trinity
House, or other port authorities, take a piloting job, and pilots
form a class of men who are chosen by examination and may only charge
according to scale. This is by no means to say that the law against
“illicit piloting” is not very frequently set at defiance. It is, in
spite of penalties; for, given a ship’s captain of a saving disposition
and a Deal boatman of pressing needs--and the boatmen of Deal are
too often in that category--a bargain is sure to be struck between
the two, when they are in hailing distance of one another, somewhere
out yonder in the Channel, for something under official rates; and
although the offender be not, in fact, licensed and has never gone up
for examination, he commonly knows the coast round between Deal and
Gravesend, and all its many shoals, swins, and swatchways, as well as
the certificated pilots, though it is not in human nature--in official
human nature, at any rate--to allow the truth of it.

But there is a vast difference in taking a vessel round the North
Foreland into London River, and in snatching her off the very edge of
the Goodwins on to which she is blundering in fog or storm. _That_
was the hoveller’s ostensible business of old, in conjunction with
the undeclared addition of smuggling. It was ever the smuggling, with
a good deal of rascally cable-slipping and prowling the seas for
wreckage, that made hovelling the fine and conscienceless trade it
may most fitly be described, and incidentally made the Deal boatmen
the finest sailors in the world. Their present-day representatives
are fallen upon the worst of times, and now that days and nights of
cruising these waters at their worst yields but an occasional job, the
Deal lugger is becoming something of a rarity, and even that other
peculiarly localised craft, the “knock-toe,” or galley-punt, does not
seem to be as numerous on the beach as of yore. The Deal lugger is no
longer built. It was a sailing craft, of some fifteen to twenty tons,
undecked except for a forepeak. The galley-punt is built to combine the
qualities of a rowing-boat and a sailing-vessel, and is thirty feet
long, with a beam of five feet, a single mast, stepped amidships, and
four oars.

The old story of Deal shows the boatmen of some two hundred years ago
to have been as thorough a crew of scoundrels as might have been found
along our coasts, except perhaps in the West, where the wreckers of
Cornwall were unsurpassed in cold-blooded, calculating ferocity. We
do not read of the ’longshoremen of the Kentish coast luring vessels
ashore, but we hear a very great deal of their heartless leaving the
shipwrecked to perish on the Goodwin Sands and busying themselves in
searching for valuable wreckage the while. Defoe, one of the greatest
and most industrious journalists who ever lived, whose amazing
fecundity staggers research, wrote and published a book called “The
Storm” in 1704. It described the great storm of 1703 and reflected
with just severity upon the inhumanity displayed here. “I cannot omit,”
he says, “that great notice has been taken of the townspeople of
Deal, who are blam’d, and I doubt not with too much reason, for their
great barbarity in neglecting to save the lives of abundance of poor
wretches; who, having hung upon the masts and rigging of the ships,
or floated upon the broken pieces of wrecks, had gotten ashore upon
the Goodwin Sands when the tide was out. It was, without doubt, a sad
spectacle to behold the poor seamen walking to and fro upon the sands,
to view their postures and the signals they made for help, which by
the assistance of glasses, was easily seen from the shore. Here they
had a few hours’ reprieve, but had neither present refreshment nor
any hopes of life, for they were sure to be washed into another world
at the reflux of the tide. Some boats are said to have come very near
them in quest of booty and in search of plunder, and to carry off what
they could get, but nobody troubled themselves for the lives of these
miserable creatures.”

   “Those sons of plunder are below my pen,
    Because they are below the names of men;
    Who from the shores presenting to their eyes
    The fatal Goodwin, where the wreck of navies lies,
    A thousand dying sailors talking to the skies,
    From the sad shores they saw the wretches walk;
    By signals of distress they talk:
    Here with one tide of life they’re vext,
    For all were sure to die the next.
    The barbarous shores with men and boats abound,
    The men more barbarous than the shores are found.
    Off to the shatter’d ships they go,
    And for the floating purchase row.
    They spare no hazard, or no pain,
    But ’tis to save the goods, and not the men;
    Within the sinking suppliants’ reach appear,
    As if they mock’d their dying fear,
    Then for some trifle all their hopes supplant
    With cruelty would make a Turk relent.”

And thus, with indignation, he concludes:

   “If I had any satire left to write,
    Could I with suited spleen indite,
    My verse should blast that fatal town,
    And drowned sailors’ widows pull it down.
    No footsteps of it should appear,
    And ships no more cast anchor there.
    The barbarous hated name of Deal shou’d die,
    Or be a term of infamy.
    And till that’s done, the town will stand
    A just reproach to all the land.”

A bright contrast was afforded by the noble conduct of the Mayor of
Deal, one Thomas Powell, a slop-seller, who appealed successfully to
these callous wretches’ hopes of gain by offering five shillings a
head for every life saved. He had in the first instance entreated the
Customs House officials to put out to save them, but without success,
and the boats were refused; whereupon he and his mercenaries took them
by force. More than two hundred of the shipwrecked were thus rescued;
but even when brought ashore there was no shelter or food to be
procured for them by appealing to officials, and the generous Powell
was at the costs and charges of feeding, sheltering, and clothing the
castaways. Further, he buried those who died, and paid the travelling
expenses to Gravesend of the survivors.

Defoe’s biting indictment came home to the inhabitants of Deal, and,
after a considerable time for thinking it over, they grew angry and
resentful about it, in proportion to the truth of the charges. Thus we
find them on June 21st, 1705, despatching the following letter:

“Whereas there has been this day produced to us a book called the
‘Storm,’ printed in London in the year 1704, for G. Sawbridge, in
Little Britain, and sold by J. Nutt, near Stationers’ Hall, pretending
to give an account of some particular accidents that happened thereby.
We find, amongst other things, several scandalous and false reflections
unjustly cast upon the inhabitants of the town and borough of Deal,
with the malicious intent to bring a disreputation upon the people
thereof, and to create a misunderstanding between her Majesty’s
subjects which, if not timely confuted, may produce consequences
detrimental to the town, and tend to a breach of the peace. To the
end thereof, that the person who caused the publication thereof may
be known, in order to be brought to condign punishment for such his
infamous libel; we have thought fit, therefore, to appoint our Town
Clerk to proceed against him in a Court of Law, unless he shall within
the space of ten days thereof make known to us the person or persons,
and where he or they may be found, who furnished the libellous article
in the book commencing page 199 to the end of page 202, to which we
expect a truthful answer within the time specified.”

There followed upon this hectoring document the signatures of the then
Mayor, Jurats, and Corporation of Deal. But it proved to be all sound
and empty fury, for nothing came of it.

Such men as these were the ancestors of the Deal boatmen of to-day;
a race now very much down on its luck. The very town of Deal, one
may almost say, is a survival. The causes that conjured it up, or at
any rate, brought about its growth from a mere village, along the
unprotected stark shingle beach, have ceased to operate, and great
ships no longer sit for weeks in the Downs, awaiting a breeze, or
in any numbers ride out storms in that once providential anchorage,
all immensely to the profit of the purveyors of ships’ stores and to
that of the boatmen. Deal in those times was one vast general shop,
in which the mariner might buy anything, from anchors and cables,
down to “salthorse” and ships’ biscuits. Those days of pigtails,
hemp, and sails brought Deal to its time of greatest prosperity, and
the present-day appearance of the town still tells the tale of it.
Smuggling was then in its prime, and many a lugger constantly made
successful runs on dark starless nights, or crept cautiously across
Channel when the air was thick as a blanket with fog, under the very
bows of the frigates at anchor in the roadstead.

I do not know that the Deal boatmen of to-day think much of this
ancestry of theirs, or set much store by it. They are too much
concerned, poor fellows, in considering how they are to get a living in
these hard times; times particularly hard for them. But their daring
and accomplished launching of a galley-punt and their handling of it in
a seaway are exhibitions of craftsmanship impossible to be demonstrated
except by these men, who have the hereditary aptitude.

To a landsman, the launching of one of these heavy, lug-sailed,
undecked boats off such a beach as this, in a raging surf such as these
shores alone can know in time of storm, is a marvel. The breakers are
coming in snarling and screaming, in cruel, curving walls of water from
whose crests the wind whips off the stinging brine that flies through
the hurrying air in particles half in the likeness of sleet and half in
that of fog. Here, and at such times, if anywhere, is--

    “The scream of a madden’d beach dragged down by the wave”--

so finely phrased by Tennyson, in _Maud_, to be heard.

A launch would seem impossible, but down the beach the galley-punt is
run, her keel scrunching through the pebbles with a hurrying roar that
rises even above the clamour of wind and waves, and in a moment she
is off, her crew of three leaping or tumbling in like jumping-jacks,
and in another moment she is clear of the breakers and heading out
to where some steamer is dimly seen rolling and pitching yonder in
the obscurity, flying a signal for the landing of the pilot, who has
brought her round from the port of London and has now finished his job
and is going home by train, as the custom is with pilots.

To such work as this did the Deal boatmen’s lives come: hard work, and
often hazardous; and, considering the casual nature of it, not well
paid. Landing a pilot is, or was, worth twenty-five to thirty shillings
or thereabouts, and it is obvious that this sum, casually earned and
divided among a crew of three, is a poor recompense. But even this
standby has been snatched away from the Deal boatmen since the Trinity
House has established a steam pilot-cutter at Dover, which cruises
about to land pilots from outward-bound ships at a fixed charge of £1.
It is an excellent institution from the pilots’ point of view, but it
is the last blow to the boatmen of Deal. Steam has ever been their
enemy.

Dirty weather is, perhaps, more than ever the opportunity of this hardy
and hard-bitten race, of whom it has been said that “every finger is a
fish-hook, every hair a rope-yarn, and whose blood is pure Stockholm
tar.” Mother Carey’s chickens--by which I mean, of course, the gulls--
are not more at home amid the mountainous waves at such times. They
cruise about in these dangerous seas in search of some captain who has
lost his way. It is exquisitely true that other people’s misfortunes
are their opportunity, and a ship likely without the aid of their
expert knowledge of these waters to come to grief on the Goodwins, or
other shoals, to say nothing of getting under the unkindly cliffs, is
like a choice bone to a hungry dog. I hope I do no injustice to these
men in the comparison. It simply discloses the measure of their needs
and of their prize. It is a desperate livelihood for these days for
them. The winter is hard, the summer season is short, and the fishing
and the money earned in taking visitors for a sail form but a scanty
and uncertain support for wives and children. Therefore, a ship in
difficulties is a godsend that is worth a good deal of cruising for,
and worth a good deal of hardship endured and bitter disappointments
suffered. But when that ship is picked up there are no more savage
and determined men to be found than these. They are embittered by
much fruitless quartering of violent seas, and spurred by the thought
of weeks of enforced idleness ashore, and by the spectre of empty
cupboards at home. A shipmaster in peril out there is their legitimate
prey, and they bear down upon him out of the driving spindrift as
saviours, at a price. These men, who would, and do, man the lifeboats
for life-saving with no after-thought for profit, are close dealers in
these cases, and if a ship-master declines, for reasons of economy,
their help, he may drive on sands or under cliffs or lose his ship in
any way that chance may dictate, and they will not lend a helping hand.
And quite rightly, too. Help under such circumstances is well worth the
paying for.

“Want any help, sir?” Thus, or in some such way, comes their hail as
their craft comes round in the eye of the wind and manœuvres carefully
in the swashing seas. It is odds whether the captain, asking perhaps
where he is, will be told, or whether he is flatly invited to “find
out,” in the extremely strong language of these parts. Perhaps he asks
“how much to take her into Ramsgate,” or whatever port he is making for.

“Twenty pounds”--or ten or fifteen, as the case may be, according to
his emergencies.

Bargaining is little use. An offer of half, or more, is pretty sure to
be curtly rejected, with “So long, captain; no time to waste.”

And then the bargainer almost invariably submits, ungraciously enough
with “All right, you ---- pirates,” or “beachcombers,” or something
equally offensive. Strong language is cheap on the seas, and no one
resents it, least of all the hovellers and the boatmen who have thus
gained their point: it is all the harassed master has left him, and
he may put his tongue to what strange curses he will, if it be any
satisfaction.

And then, at a carefully chosen moment, as the vessels large and small
set to one another in a peculiarly violent kind of maritime dance and
the boatmen’s little craft swings dizzily up on a wave alongside, a
rope is thrown and one of the galley-punt’s crew clambers breathlessly
aboard, dashes the brine from his eyes, and is ready to navigate his
charge through the seething waters as surely as a cab-driver takes a
fare through well-known streets. His companions, sitting like statues
in the boat, in streaming yellow oilskins, fade away like ghosts in the
turmoil, and make for home.

Such are at those times the men you will see lounging the summer days
on Deal beach and suggesting to visitors that it is a “fine day for
a sail.” It looks a lazy life, this lounging, with hands in pockets,
day after day, varied by an occasional turn with the tar-brush or
paint-pot upon boat or timbered shanty; but it is really a life of one
long waiting for something to turn up, and there is nothing else for it
but to lounge hands in pockets. And to do the Deal boatmen the merest
justice, they lounge extremely well. Do not mistake me: I do not mean
that they do it elegantly. The figure of your typical ’longshoreman,
bargelike and extremely solid, does not permit of that. No, I mean
that he absolutely abandons himself to it. There used to be in London,
and in society, the Bond Street and the Hyde Park lounge. I believe
the exquisite _insouciance_ thus indicated is long since extinct. No
one lounges now, in these days of motor-cars and general hustle; no
one, that is to say, except the ’longshoremen of Deal and elsewhere,
but here at Deal it is perfected. The lounge of Hyde Park--you may
see it represented in _Punch_, in many of du Maurier’s drawings--was
a graceful droop over the railings of the Row; but the lounger had
always in the look of him a curious mixture of world-weariness and
self-consciousness. He knew he was beautiful, as beautiful as his
tailor and toilet-club could make him. Now the ’longshoreman cannot
droop, gracefully or otherwise. He is not built that way. There is
about him a breadth of beam and an appalling negation of waist that
vehemently forbids the very thought of it. He is not beautiful, nor, on
the other hand, is he self-conscious. He is of that solid bulk, despite
his privations, poor chap, which makes the crazy old capstans on the
beach creak and complain, and the tarred shanties shiver when he leans
against them. And his costume has been the delight of serious artists
and comic for at least a century. His trousers, of some astounding
dreadnought material that might almost stand by itself, come a much
longer distance up his body than such articles of attire commonly do,
and end, according to the caricaturists, under his armpits. According
to the same unveracious authorities, they are invariably re-seated, and
with materials of an altogether alien colour from the original fabric
and generally with some uproarious pattern.

CHAPTER XVIII

WALMER CASTLE--KINGSDOWN--ST. MARGARET’S BAY

The low, beachy shore of Deal continues westward through Lower Walmer,
the chief part of Walmer lying inland where the road begins to take its
rise towards the high rolling downs which fill the miles on to Dover.
The beach road runs on for two miles and a half, past Walmer Castle to
Kingsdown, where it abruptly ends.

The historic part of Walmer Castle, which is now under the direct
control of His Majesty’s Office of Works, may be inspected for the
modest fee of threepence, at times when the Lord Warden is not in
residence. The plainly furnished little bedroom in which the great
Duke of Wellington died in 1852, and the room where Pitt and Nelson
planned those naval operations which put an end to Napoleon’s designs
upon this coast, are shown. The approach is imposing, the entrance
by a bridge across the deep, dry moat made more picturesque by the
early eighteenth-century additions of a bell-cupola and an oriel
window above the gateway. Some of the ivy which too thickly covered
the fine old stonework has now been removed. It has never been the
fate of Walmer Castle to fight the enemy, and its castellans for a
hundred years past have been those ornamental officials, the Lords
Warden, who have no duties and receive no emoluments. Thus, as a
residence, it has received certain accretions which rather lessen its
character as a stern, business-like fortress; although, to be sure, the
ingenious planning of the interior, with its massive brick passages and
unexpected turns, would result in any enemy who succeeded in entering
at once losing his way. It is very curious to note, in the construction
of this sixteenth-century castle, the survival of mediæval ideas,
with a difference. Thus, while ancient Gothic castles had projecting
machicolations over the exterior of their gates whence melted lead,
boiling oil, and such-like deterrents could be poured upon the enemy,
here are great holes overhead, _within_ the entrance, for the same
purpose; an exquisite refinement upon the original idea, which was
merely to check the enemy and persuade him to retire. Here you first
caught the enterprising foe, and, having got him within one of the
artfully contrived bastions, you simply overwhelmed him at leisure.

[Illustration: WALMER CASTLE.]

Among the greatest of the Lords Warden was William Pitt, who was here
throughout the Napoleonic scare. The beautiful wooded park owes much of
its charm to his niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, who kept house for her
bachelor uncle, and in particular planted the fine Portugal laurels
which are among its chief ornaments. Pitt’s own avenue of sycamores
has grown to great nobility. Cobbett, who could pen the most wonderful
descriptions of scenery and the most virulent personal abuse, describes
in one of his “Rural Rides” how he came from Dover to Walmer and Deal,
and handles Pitt pretty severely on the way. “I got to this place
(Deal) about half an hour after the ringing of the eight o’clock bell,
or curfew, which I heard at about two miles’ distance from the place.”
This was the curfew, still rung nightly from the Norman church-tower
of St. Margaret-at-Cliffe. From the town of Dover you come up the
Castle Hill, and have a most beautiful view from the top of it. You
have the sea, the chalk cliffs of Calais, the high land at Boulogne,
the town of Dover just under you, the valley towards Folkestone and
the much more beautiful valley towards Canterbury; and, going on a
little farther, you have the Downs in full view, with a most beautiful
corn country to ride along through. The corn was chiefly cut between
Walmer and Dover. The barley almost all cut and tied up in sheaf.
Nothing but the beans seemed to remain standing along here. They are
not quite so good as the rest of the corn, but they are by no means
bad. When I came to the village of Walmer, I inquired for the Castle--
that famous place, where Pitt, Dundas, Perceval, and all the whole
tribe of plotters against the French Revolution had carried on their
plots. After coming through the village of Walmer, you see the entrance
to the Castle away to the right. It is situated pretty nearly on the
water’s edge, and at the bottom of a little dell, about a furlong or
so from the turnpike-road. This is now the habitation of our great
Minister, Robert Bankes Jenkinson, son of Charles of that name. When
I was told by a girl who was leasing in a field by the roadside that
that was Walmer Castle, I stopped short, pulled my horse round, looked
steadfastly at the gateway, and could not help exclaiming, ‘O! thou who
inhabitest that famous dwelling! thou who hast always been in place,
let who might be out of place! O thou everlasting placeman! thou sage
of “over-production,” do but cast thine eyes upon this barleyfield’--
and so forth.

[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO WALMER CASTLE.]

Onward from Walmer Castle, along the beach to the “Ville and Hamlet
of Kingsdown,” we come at length to the end of the coastwise road.
Kingsdown is a fishing village on a very wide bank of shingle-beach,
with scattered shanties built on it, and old windlasses and a very
abandon of quaint seashore properties. It is perhaps possible at low
tide to scramble along under the lofty cliffs all the three miles or
less to St. Margaret’s Bay but it is dangerous, and there is no means
of climbing its cliffs. Old people still talk of a road that once ran
all the way; but encroachment of the sea has long destroyed it.

It is therefore necessary to climb the exceedingly steep and very
pretty leafy lane from Kingsdown to the high road and the grim bare
downs. Against the sky, as you proceed, is the tower of Ringwould
church, crested with its Dutch-like cupola. Looking backwards you see,
peering over the verge of the naked fields, the little bell-turret of
Kingsdown church, seeming pitiably insignificant; the church so small,
the sea out beyond so immeasurable, and such an aching void.

Passing the beautiful woods of Oxney Court, in a sharp dip of the road,
and coming up to the cross roads called “Martin Cross,” the village of
St. Margaret-at-Cliffe is one mile to the left. It has a particularly
fine Norman church with lofty interior and an enriched western doorway.
Here the curfew-bell is still rung in the winter months; but this is
not the genuine curfew of Norman times; dating only from 1696, when
the income from five roods of land was bequeathed by a shepherd for
this purpose. By the chance ringing of this bell he had been saved from
walking over the cliff in the dark.

[Illustration: WALMER CASTLE, FROM THE SEA.]

From this windy cliff-top village of St. Margaret-at-Cliffe whose
inhabitants appear to live by selling picture-postcards to the stranger
and each other, an amazingly steep road zigzags down four hundred feet
through the chalk and flint to the beach of St. Margaret’s Bay. I envy
the explorer his first discovery of this exquisite little spot, that
rare, nay, almost phenomenal thing along the crowded, over-exploited
coast of Kent--a sequestered and little-known place! Well do I
remember my own first discovery of it; the more delightful inasmuch
it was unexpected. This is the purest joy of journeying without a
guide-book: that you have no certain expectations, and commit yourself
in a complete ignorance to absolute chance. Every explorer knows that
it is sometimes the most joyous thing to wend your way uninformed
beforehand, without map or description. On the other hand, to fare in
this fashion may bring you the most harrowing adventures. Try it both
ways, and see what fortune sends you!

[Illustration: ST. MARGARET’S BAY.]

Every man should be his own discoverer. It matters nothing to me that
numerous others must either intentionally or by chance have come down
here into St. Margaret’s Bay--seeing that there is an hotel on the
beach: an hotel with a singular name, whose meaning, although I have
stayed there myself, I by no means fathomed. It is called the “St.
Margaret’s Bay and Hotel Lanzarote.”

There is not, I think, so much actually of a bay down here below the
towering cliffs of the South Foreland, which rise to a height of 500
feet. If you glance at the map, it will be noticed that the coastline
at this spot exhibits the merest setback from the bold front between
Deal and Dover; and a bay (this is a dim memory from school-days)
should be something in the nature of a semicircle, large or small,
should it not, with enfolding horns, capes, or headlands? To the
ordinary observer, this so-called bay appears to be just about a
half-mile length of narrow shingly foreshore along a stretch of coast
where the cliffs for the most part descend precipitously to the sea
at high water; and at either end of this unusual selvedge here it is
either impossible to proceed further, or else the doing so is a more
or less difficult and dangerous matter. Hence the seclusion of St.
Margaret’s Bay; which, however, if plans and schemes of the last few
years come to pass, will at no distant date be exchanged, in certain
foreshore reclamation works, for a three-miles undercliff drive from
Dover. Woe the day!

I do not mean to hint, even remotely, that because St. Margaret’s Bay
does not figure forth the typical bay of a geographical primer, it is
any the worse for it. Not at all; perhaps, I am willing to allow, it
is even the better. At any rate, it is entirely delightful as it is.
And what, in detail, is it? Let it first be premised that no one has
ever yet succeeded in conveying the subtle charm of the place. It is
easy enough to describe the surroundings; the South Foreland above,
the little beach below, with its modest selvedge of grass; the cosy,
home-like hotel, the little “Green Man” inn, and the scattered twenty
or so little houses; but the spirit of the place is elusive and refuses
to be captured and written down and printed.

St. Margaret’s Bay claims much: “the air of Margate and the sun of
Torquay, the position of Ramsgate and the quiet of Ventnor,” and I
think all these varied charms may well be conceded. Certainly it is
quiet, and surely it is warm, sheltered, and sunny.

Wild-flowers grow in abundance down here, amid what may at first sight
seem the sterile chalk: St. John’s Wort, feather-grass, convolvulus,
scarlet poppies, hare-bells, the lovely borage, an exquisite blue, the
speedwell, a lighter blue, hawkweed, and many others.

The place is recommended as “a quiet retreat for tired brain-workers,”
and certainly there is nothing here to disturb or startle. Those who
want to be amused--that great desideratum of the brainless and the
uncultivated--will not come to St. Margaret’s Bay, or, if by any
chance they do so, they speedily climb out of it again; that is to say,
as speedily as the extravagantly steep road permits; but to those who
have resources within themselves this untroubled strand has an enduring
charm. I do not think a motor-car has ever been down here, which is so
much to the good; plenty of them fuss and stink along the road above.

No parade, or esplanade, or such formality affronts the dignity of the
sea here, and although the more or less interesting fact may be gleaned
that the London and Paris telephone-cable, completed in March 1891,
lands here from Sangatte, on the French coast, one might well go in
ignorance of it, so far as any visible evidence goes.

One simply idles here, and reads and rests those tired brains--if one
is happy enough to possess any. Almost unconsciously, like Mr. Silas
Wegg, the idler drops into poetry:

   “Here spreads a little sheltered bay,
      Beneath the tall and windy downs,
    All undisturbed by nigger lay;
      Far from the clustered seaside towns.

   “Here haply by the world forgot
      I linger on the pebbly beach,
    And seat me where the sun is hot,
      And colour like the ripening peach.

   “Here workers come to rest their brains,
      O’erwrought in search of fame and pelf--
    And so would I, to ease such strains,
      Did I possess some brains myself.”

They have a saying down here in St. Margaret’s Bay that “the Channel
is as well lighted as Regent Street,” and it is indeed on some dark
evening a striking and a beautiful sight to gaze out across these
waters upon the many lights flashing and sparkling out there; including
not only those of the lightships and the lighthouses, but the lights
of Ramsgate eleven miles away, twinkling quietly, the riding-lights of
vessels at anchor in the Downs, and the brilliant illumination of some
great liner surging past.

Beyond the clustered lamps of Ramsgate flashes the occulting North
Foreland light; and out to sea the position of the Goodwin Sands is
marked by the Gull Lightship, with its recurrent flash every twenty
seconds; the North Goodwin Lightship, with three flashes in quick
succession; the brilliant South Goodwin, with its double flash every
thirty seconds; the South Sand, visible ten miles; the East Goodwin,
easily distinguished from its fellows by flashing a green light every
fifteen seconds; and the Varne Lightship, far away in the south-west,
a crimson flash. To these add the electric beam of the South Foreland
lighthouse overhead, the distant radiance of Dover town; the similar
every five seconds’ flash of Cape Gris Nez and the more frequent gleam
of Calais Harbour, and you have an extraordinary galaxy, not easily to
be matched elsewhere.

[Illustration: WESTCLIFFE.]

The South Foreland lighthouse has always been used more or less
experimentally. Here magnifying lenses were first installed, in 1810,
and here Faraday, in 1853, experimented with the electric light. In
1862 lime-light was tried. It now displays from its height above the
sea of 374 feet a powerful electric occulting beam distinguishable at a
distance of twenty-six miles. The lower lighthouse, used in conjunction
with the upper light before the installation of the present brilliant
flash, was discontinued in 1905, and the building has since been let
as a private residence.

Some day in the near future, when St. Margaret’s Bay is joined to
Dover by the foreshore road at the foot of the cliffs--a road now
in the making--it will be a magnificent route of some three miles
between those now sundered places. But again, woe the day! At present
to climb up out of the bay and up across the foreland, and so along
the coastguard path, and past the Convict Prison and by the North Fall
Meadow behind the Castle, to Dover is a weariful business. Less weary,
perhaps, but longer, and along by-roads, is the way past the tiny
secluded village of Westcliffe; and then down the main road, past the
Duke of York’s School, and still steeply down Dover Castle Hill, into
the town, lying there, seething populously in the constricted valley of
the Dour.

CHAPTER XIX

DOVER--THE CASTLE AND ROMAN PHAROS--“QUEEN ELIZABETH’S
POCKET-PISTOL”--THE WESTERN HEIGHTS

The great and growing town of Dover looks forward to a greater fame
than even the historic past has conferred upon it. The measure of
Dover’s greatness is not the usual measurement, that of population, for
the town numbers only some 44,000. Rather does it lie in its defensible
and strategic situation. Dover has ever, from Roman times, been a place
of arms, and was, an old chronicler tells us, the “lock and key of the
whole kingdom.” That being so, it has always behoved us to make it one
of the most strongly fortified places on our coasts. On either side
of the deep and narrow valley in which the town lies, the great chalk
downs and cliffs rise steeply and massively, and all are in military
occupation. The morning drum-beat reverberates from the Western Heights
to welcome the rising sun, and the Last Post from the Castle sounds
the requiem of the departed day; and in between them the tootling and
the fifing, the words of command, the gun-firing, and all the military
alarms and excursions of a garrison-town help to convince even the
most timid that we are being taken care of.

Dover offered more opportunities for the artist in those far-away days
when Hollar made his view of it from near the castle heights. At that
time the river Dour flowed visibly into the sea, through a valley
so sparsely settled that the ancient church of St. Mary, now almost
hidden amid the clustered houses of the thronged town, stood out with a
cathedral-like prominence. Hollar shows us the ships clustered at the
river mouth, but at an earlier time they ascended far up the valley
and anchored where the busiest streets are now found. Leland, somewhat
earlier than Hollar, speaking of the Dour and the ancient inland haven,
says, “The ground which lyeth up betwixt the hilles is yet, in digging,
found wosye”--by which he meant “oozy”; and in modern times there
have been discovered, in the course of excavations, relics of Roman
occupation, when the inhabitants of the Dour Valley crossed the river
and the marshes by boats and wooden causeways.

[Illustration: DOVER CASTLE.

                        _After W. Daniell, R.A._
]

No one who has not viewed Dover from the sea can have a full
appreciation of the majesty of its site. But you must not merely
glimpse it from the pier-heads or from a boat. Nothing less than the
home-coming from continental travel, when the sentiment of “home” gives
an added value to the impressive scene, will serve.

The “white cliffs of Albion” have rightly been the subject of comment
and description from the earliest times, for there is nothing in the
rest of the whole wide world in the least resembling them. Except for
a little of the same chalk formation on the other side of the Channel,
at this narrow pass, we in England have a world-monopoly of chalk,
and a brave show of bastioned chalky heights the Kentish coast makes.
Nowhere else are they so stately as at Dover, for here military art has
crowned and set a seal upon the defensible works of nature. But to see
those white walls at their best, in whiteness and in rugged grandeur,
you must see them from the Channel. Coming across from France, they do
indeed gleam milk-white, and the Castle and the Roman pharos beside it
seem to be neighbours almost with the clouds. But, examined close at
hand, the cliffs of Dover have been plentifully smirched, and I think,
from personal observation, that the chalk cliffs of the South Coast are
actually at their natural whitest at Seaford, in Sussex.

[Illustration: COLTON’S TOWER, DOVER CASTLE.]

Dover Castle, that “great fortress, reverend and worshipful,” sits
regally on the lofty cliffs and looks (what it has several times proved
not to be) impregnable. It occupies a site of thirty-five acres within
its ceinture of curtain-walls, studded at intervals with twenty-six
defensible towers, of every size and shape. The chief entrance to the
Castle precincts is by the great “Constable’s Tower,” also variously
styled Fiennes, or Newgate Tower, to distinguish it from the Old Tower,
formerly the principal entrance. The others have, for the most part,
names sounding as strangely as those of Arthurian romance: Abrancis,
or Rokesley Tower; Colton’s; Arthur’s, or North Gate; Armourer’s; Well
Tower; Harcourt’s; Chilham, or Culderscot; Hurst; Arsic, or Sayes
Tower; Gatton; Peveril’s Gate, also called Beauchamp, or Marshal’s
Tower; Porth’s, Gasting’s, or Mary’s Tower; Clopton’s; God’s-foe;
Crevecœur’s, Craville’s, or the Earl of Norfolk’s Tower; Fitzwilliam or
St. John’s; Avranches, or Maunsel’s; Veville, or Pincester; Ashfordian
Tower; Mamimot, or Mainmouth Tower; Palace, or Subterranean Gate;
Suffolk Tower; and the Arsenal Tower. Besides this imposing array there
were, and there remain still, profoundly deep ditches outside the
walls. In midst of all these outworks, rising bold and massive as the
great keep of the Tower of London itself, is the Palace Tower, or Keep.
This is not the actual “castellum Dofris” which Harold, under stress
and durance, was made to swear on the bones of the saints that he would
yield to William Duke of Normandy, “with the well of water in it,” but
a later array of buildings; the Keep being Norman work of about 1153.
The actual well is the one now arched over and covered up in the north
angle of the Keep.

The last occasion on which Dover Castle was the scene of warlike
operations was when it was captured from the Royalists on August 1st,
1642. This successful enterprise was the work of a mere merchant, one
Drake, and a dozen men, who at dead of night, by means of ropes and
scaling-ladders, climbed the cliffs at an “inaccessible” point; as such
left unguarded. Seizing the sentinel, the gates were thrown open, and
the officer on duty, thinking the invading party was a much larger one,
surrendered.

[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF ST. MARY-IN-THE-CASTLE, WITH THE ROMAN
PHAROS, DOVER.]

The most ancient and venerable object here--it is the oldest building
in England, supposed to have been built A.D. 49--is the Roman
pharos, or lighthouse, one of two that once guided the ships of the
Roman emperors into the haven that was situated where the Market-place
of Dover now stands. The other, of which only the platform and one
fragment of stone have been found, was situated on the western heights.
The fellow-tower at Boulogne, the _Gessoriacum_ of the Romans, still
remains. The rugged, roofless tower of this venerable beacon curiously
neighbours the quaint early church of St. Mary-within-the-Castle,
itself of great and uncertain age, and both contrast strangely with the
modern evidences of casemated batteries and the sentry-go of soldiers.
Many generations have tinkered and repaired the Roman pharos, whose
original tufa blocks and courses of red tiles still defy the elements
and the ravages of mischievous hands, while the casing of flint and
pebbles set in concrete, added some two centuries ago, long since began
to decay. The Roman windows were altered by Gundulf, and the upper
story would seem to be the work of Sir Thomas Erpingham, Constable of
Dover Castle in the reign of Henry the Fifth, for his sculptured shield
of arms appears on it.

The church of St. Mary in 1860 experienced a narrow escape from
complete destruction by the War Office, and was only with difficulty
rescued by dint of urgent protests from antiquaries. The Department has
experienced the like elsewhere, and doubtless wishes all antiquaries at
the devil. The building had at that time been reduced to the condition
of a coal-bunker, a process begun about a hundred and fifty years
before, when it had been ruthlessly cleared out and converted into a
storehouse. Among other ejected objects was the monument of the Earl
of Northampton, already noticed at Greenwich. The building was opened
again in 1862, after restoration.

The twenty-four-foot long brass cannon within the castle grounds, known
as “Queen Elizabeth’s Pocket-pistol,” is by far the best-known and
most popular object here. It is not given to every one to appreciate
the Roman pharos or the Norman architecture of the keep, but this
long, slender piece of ordnance makes a direct and easily understood
appeal to the sympathies of the crowd, largely on account of the rhyme
associated with it, supposed to be a translation of the inscription in
Low Dutch that is to be seen on the cannon itself, amid the arabesque
devices that decorate its whole length. This familiar jingle runs thus:

   “Load me well and keep me clean,
    And I’ll carry a ball to Calais Green.”

It could, of course, do nothing of the kind, nor anything like it; and
the inscription says nothing of the sort. Here it is, in its original
grotesqueness:

   “Breeck scuret al muer ende wal bin ic geheten,
    Deor berch en dal boert minen bal van mi gesmetem.”

The literal translation is:

   “I am bid break all earthworks and walls.
    Through hill and dale bores the ball flung by me.”

But it has been well put metrically, without departing to any degree
from exactness:

   “O’er hill and dale I throw my ball;
    Breaker, my name, of mound and wall.”

This beautiful work, enriched, together with its wheels, with
elaborate ornament, was cast at Utrecht in 1544, and presented by the
States-General of the Netherlands to Queen Elizabeth, defender of the
reformed religion.

It is fitting in the completest degree that Dover should have figured
in the quarrel that sent the patriot Englishman Earl Godwin, into
revolt and exile. The true story of Godwin and his stand for the rights
and liberties of Englishmen is well known to history, but it has never
been made sufficiently intimate, and the memory of that great man,
blackened by lying Norman monks, suffers to this day. The fame of the
weak and alien-loving King Edward the Confessor, has, on the other
hand, been well cared for, and he has long been regarded as a saint.
The trouble arose from a visit in 1051 of Eustace, Count of Boulogne, a
brother-in-law of the King, one of the arrogant Normans who even thus
early conceived themselves able to insult and ill-treat the people of
that Saxon England they were destined to conquer in the succeeding
reign. The outrage was deliberate. Halting his party within a mile of
Dover, the Count of Boulogne left the saddle of his travelling palfrey,
and, putting on his armour and his helmet adorned with the two long
whalebone aigrettes that marked his authority along the seashores of
Boulogne, he mounted his war-horse, and, with his followers armed in
like manner, entered the town. Arrived there, they thrust themselves,
uninvited and undesired guests, upon the chief burgesses. Such was
the custom in feudal Normandy, but it was unknown in England, and as
greatly resented as unknown. One indignant Englishman promptly thrust
out one of these unwelcome guests who had taken veritable “French
leave.” In return, the stranger drew his sword and wounded his “host,”
but was promptly set upon and slain. When this incident became known
Eustace and his party stormed the house, and the brave defender of
the sanctity of his hearth was murdered. An armed foray through the
town followed, in which the foreigners fared ill, for nineteen of
them were slain by the infuriated townsfolk, and the departure of the
remainder across sea was prevented. The King was at Gloucester, and to
that city Eustace and those who remained of his retinue hastened, to
seek revenge. Edward was enraged, and ordered Godwin to waste the town
of Dover with fire and sword. That, you perceive, was the quality of
the Confessor’s saintliness! Godwin, one of the greatest in the land,
himself father-in-law of the King, who had married his daughter Edith,
refused to punish without a hearing the men who had merely resented
insolence. They should be tried lawfully, and punished only if guilty.

This refusal led directly to Godwin and his son Harold being outlawed,
to the raising of rebellion, and eventually to the larger issue, after
the death of Edward the Confessor, of the invasion and conquest of
England by William of Normandy.

Dover Castle is in most respects, with its pierced and honeycombed
cliffs, an up-to-date fortress, but it was realised over a hundred
years ago that the corresponding cliffs on the other side of the town
required to be fortified; and thus the gun-galleries, the barracks,
and the many military developments of the “Western Heights” came into
being. One reaches these lofty altitudes most conveniently, but up
infinite staircases, by that extremely dirty and dismal specimen of
engineering skill, “the Shaft,” in Snargate Street. Some three hundred
(or is it 3,000?) steps lead up to those heights, where the Romans had
a companion pharos to that on the castle cliffs, and where the Knights
Templar founded a twelfth-century church with a round nave, built in
imitation of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. Here are the foundations,
all now left, of that church, the smallest of the “round churches” in
England, carefully preserved by the Office of Works, and here King
John’s shameful homage to the Pope was made, “Apud Domum Militiæ Templi
juxta Doveriam,” May 15th, 1213.

The spot is not, nowadays, of romantic appearance. Modern military
barracks are utilitarian rather than beautiful. Sometimes they have
even a note of squalor.

Some large fragments of concrete, reared up on end in the Drop
Redoubt, form what is called the Bredenstone, or Braidenstone, once
sometimes called the “Kissing Stone,” for ages an object of traditional
veneration; why, none knew. They combined something of the majesty of
the unknown, like that belonging to the Coronation Stone in Westminster
Abbey, with a good deal of the half-humorous importance of the famous
Blarney Stone. Really, they were, and are, after all, remaining
portions of the vanished Roman pharos buried in the eighteenth century,
when the Drop Redoubt was constructed, on the spot called the “Devil’s
Drop.” From time immemorial the Lords Warden of the Cinque Ports had
been sworn in upon this Ara Cæsaris, as antiquaries styled it; and
after the platform and the “Bredenstone” were exhumed, about 1854,
Palmerston was sworn in on the spot, in 1861; and Lord Dufferin in
1891. Lord Salisbury, however, and later holders of the office, were
installed in the town, in the grounds of Dover College, on the site
of the ancient Priory of St. Martin; but on July 18th, 1914, the old
traditional site was resumed, when the new Lord Warden, Earl Beauchamp,
was installed on these heights.

In 1823 Cobbett found Dover “like other seaport towns; but really much
more clean, and with less blackguard people in it than I ever observed
in any seaport before.” Things have changed since then, in a woeful
way, and with Dover’s growth has come squalor and dirt.

He visited the Western Heights, to see with his own eyes, as he tells
us, “something of the sorts of means that had been made use of to
squander away countless millions of money. Here,” he continues, “is a
hill containing, probably, a couple of square miles or more, hollowed
like a honeycomb. Here are line upon line, trench upon trench, cavern
upon cavern, bomb-proof upon bomb-proof; in short, the very sight of
the thing convinces you that either madness the most humiliating, or
profligacy the most scandalous must have been at work here for years.
The question that every man of sense asks, is: What reason had you to
suppose that the _French would ever come to this hill_ to attack it,
while the rest of the country was so much more easy to assail? However,
let any man of good, plain understanding, go and look at the works that
have here been performed, and that are now all tumbling into ruin. Let
him ask what this cavern was for; what that ditch was for; what this
tank was for; and why all these horrible holes and hiding-places at an
expense of millions upon millions? Let this scene be brought and placed
under the eyes of the people of England, and let them be told that Pitt
and Dundas and Perceval had these things done to prevent the country
from being conquered; with voice unanimous the nation would instantly
exclaim: Let the French, or let the devil take us, rather than let us
resort to means of defence like these.

“This is, perhaps, the only set of fortifications in the world ever
framed for mere _hiding_. There is no appearance of any intention
to annoy an enemy. It is a parcel of holes made in a hill, to hide
Englishmen from Frenchmen. Just as if the Frenchmen would come to this
hill! Just as if they would not go (if they came at all) and land in
Romney Marsh, or on Pevensey Level, or anywhere else, rather than come
to this hill; rather than come to crawl up Shakespeare’s Cliff. All
the way along the coast, from this very hill to Portsmouth, or pretty
nearly all the way, is a flat. What the devil should they come to this
hill for, then? And when you ask this question, they tell you that it
is to have an army here _behind_ the French, after they had marched
into the country! And for a purpose like this; for a purpose so stupid,
so senseless, so mad as this, and withal, so scandalously disgraceful,
more brick and stone have been buried in this hill than would go to
build a neat new cottage for every labouring man in the counties of
Kent and Sussex!”

Cobbett here gives way to a fit of senseless vituperation; the more
obviously senseless since this rabid tirade comes only two days later
than his ride along the coast from New Romney to Hythe and Folkestone,
where of course he encountered the martello towers; erected there for
the purpose of guarding those levels against a threatened invasion. He
raves at them equally as he raves at the works on the Western Heights,
and, in short, behaves on the principle of the Irishman who acted
on the policy of “whenever you see a head, hit it.” It is very fine
fighting form, but it is the very negation of logic.

CHAPTER XX

THE CHANNEL PASSAGE--THE NATIONAL HARBOUR AND ITS STRATEGIC PURPOSE--
SWIMMING AND FLYING THE CHANNEL

Dover has ever been a favourite port with travellers. The advantage
of lying near to the opposite coast determined its fortunes from the
earliest times, for sea-sickness has naturally always rendered the
shortest passage the most popular. Little need, then, it might be
thought for proclamations and Acts of Parliament insisting upon this
being the port of arrival and departure. Yet we find enactments in the
reign of Edward the Third not only regulating “the fares of the passage
of Dover” (1330), but in 1335 a law passed that “no pilgrim shall pass
out of the Realm, but at Dover.” This was supplemented in 1464–5 by an
ordinance, “For compelling persons to take passage and land at Dover.”

They well knew, those old travellers, the miseries of _mal-de-mer_;
the rich and powerful among them no less than the poorer sort, and it
was one of these--none other than the great Hubert de Burgh, Earl
of Kent and Chief Justiciar of Kent, who, about 1208, founded the
Maison Dieu, with its establishment of Master, brethren, and sisters,
for the lodging, and entertainment of “poor strangers and pilgrims on
their way beyond seas.” It may be supposed that pilgrims coming as
well as going were guests of this charitable establishment. In fact,
they did you so well at this place that several shabby-minded monarchs
and their retinues, and others who were certainly not poor, did not
scruple to quarter themselves here. King John, who was mean enough
for anything, set this fashion. A somewhat older place of sojourn for
travellers was in St. Martin’s Priory, where the Strangers’ Hall, of
Late Norman architecture, is still to be seen. The manor of Archer’s
Court, some three miles out of Dover, is associated with the sea, in a
quaint tenure, by which the owner held it of the King on condition that
“he should hold the King’s head when he passes to Calais, and by the
working of the sea should be obliged to vomit.”

Dover has regained in the last few years all its ancient importance--
and more, and has in four or five respects bulked largely in public
affairs. The completion of the great National Harbour stands easily
foremost; and next in importance comes the story of the proposed
Channel Tunnel; followed by the long-drawn search for coal that is
still being prosecuted; by the many attempts to swim the Channel; and
the several successful flights across it, to and from this point.

The first attempt to make a national harbour at Dover may be traced to
the reign of Henry the Eighth, when a long pier formed of timber piles
and heavy stones was built out to sea on the site of the modern arm
known until recently as the “Admiralty Pier.” It cost some £80,000, but
seems never to have been quite completed, and was, like the Admiralty
Pier itself, until the completion of the great harbour in 1910, merely
a breakwater, not a harbour. It broke to some extent the force of the
strong set of the currents that sweep towards the east through the
narrow Straits, but was washed away at last. The loss of Calais, the
last relic of the English possessions in France, during the reign of
Mary, led to renewed activities here, for in the words of Raleigh, “no
promontory, town, or harbour in Europe is so well situated for annoying
the enemy, protecting commerce, or sending and receiving despatches
from the Continent”; but the English seamen of that great age dealt
roundly with the enemy on the high seas, outside harbours, and,
although other works were casually undertaken, the making of Dover a
great war-harbour and place of assemblage was not yet.

The great works now happily completed originate in the foresight
displayed by the Duke of Wellington, who, convinced of the strategical
value of Dover, strongly urged the construction of a harbour here,
where the Navy could rendezvous at the threat of war. In 1840, and
again in 1844, a Royal Commission sat upon the subject, took evidence,
and issued a report; but the estimated cost of such an undertaking,
then placed at two millions sterling, appeared to be too great, and
only a portion of it was built. This, the Admiralty Pier, was begun
in 1847. It occupied twenty years, and was built largely by convict
labour. In its well-remembered original form it extended a distance
of 2,000 feet, and was finished off at the seaward end with a fort
mounting two big guns, which were but rarely fired, because the
concussion generally smashed all the windows along the front.

[Illustration: THE NATIONAL HARBOUR, DOVER.]

It was not until 1894 that the old question, then mellowed by half a
century, of providing a National Harbour was revived. The Admiralty
were urged to consider it anew, in view of the altered conditions
of naval warfare brought about by the gradual perfecting of that new
engine of destruction, the torpedo, which had rendered the Downs, that
old rendezvous of the fleet, no longer safe from attack. The result
of these new deliberations was the letting of a contract in November
1897 to Messrs. Pearson & Sons, by which enormous works, costing
considerably over £3,500,000, and taking twelve years to complete, were
embarked upon.

To construct a deep-sea harbour at Dover, open at all states of the
tide, was an anxious work. Nature has appeared to sternly deny to any
of the South Coast towns between Ramsgate and Portsmouth anything of
the kind, and such small havens as existed have been mostly silted up.
That is the familiar tale of Hythe, of Winchelsea, and of many another.
Ramsgate harbour has been kept open only by dint of constant and costly
dredging, which has made its harbour-dues almost prohibitively heavy.
The natural haven of Dover, in the hollow of the hills, long ages
ago became a portion of the town; and the inset of the coast is so
insignificant that it is fighting elemental forces in the open to build
strong granite piers and breakwaters in deep water, ranging to a depth
of forty feet at low tides, which rise eighteen feet nine inches and
through which runs a five-knot current. But the contest is ended, and
the eye now ranges from the heights of Shakespeare’s Cliff or those of
the Castle upon such a harbour as Raleigh never dreamed. The length
of the old Admiralty Pier has been doubled; an eastern arm stretches
out from under the Castle to a length of 2,942 feet, and between their
seaward extremities stretches, parallel with the shore, a breakwater
4,212 feet long, enclosing, together with the Commercial Harbour,
the vast area of 685 acres. The eastern and the western entrances,
at either end of the breakwater, are respectively 650 feet and 740
feet wide. The entire Navy can assemble comfortably in Dover Harbour,
without fear of torpedo or submarine attacks, and guarded by the
frowning forts of the Castle and the Western Heights while other forts
and searchlight stations are placed on the piers and breakwaters. In
addition, there are torpedo and submarine stations here for attacking
any foe.

The proverbial luck of England is very marked here. When the great
harbour was decided upon, the menace of a German Navy and of the
remarkable German war preparations at Emden had not arisen. The Germans
themselves were still enjoying the fun of calling the German Emperor
“gondola Willy,” in ridicule of his desire to create a fleet. No one
laughs now at the spectacle of a German Navy, which is emphatically
“a fleet in being”; and the strategy of the Board of Admiralty is
now directed, in consequence of that new factor, rather to guarding
the North Sea than the seas patrolled by the old Channel Fleet.
Bismarck once rightly described the Baltic Sea as “a hole,” in which
a German fleet could be easily shut up. The Baltic Canal was cut by
the Germans as a way, and a short way, out of that hole; but the new
British strategic base at Dover, closing the English Channel to the
passage either way of a hostile fleet, has, together with other naval
bases, constructed, or constructing, along the East Coast and up to
the extreme north of Scotland, and in the Orkneys, rendered the North
Sea itself something of a “hole,” on a larger scale. If we take a map
and look at the relative positions of Great Britain and Germany, we
shall clearly see that Britain, with the will to do it, can stop the
way, and in the event of war close both the Channel and the way round
by the North; thus preventing an attack upon the British possessions
over-seas, even though we bear the shock of war along our whole eastern
face. But Harwich, Grimsby, and the Tyne; Rosyth, Dundee, Wick, and
Scapa Flow, will in due course be able to stiffen the new front of our
position. That the rise of the German Navy has made the North Sea our
front is seen in the new dispositions, by which the Channel and the
Mediterranean have lost their relative importance, while the North Sea
is now the cruising-ground of some thirty of the foremost ships of the
Navy.

The last word, the final appeal, is with the land and sea forces of
the nation. Orators in Parliament, or stumping the country, may thrill
audiences with enthusiasm or indignation, but there is no thrill
to equal that which comes of conscious power. Such a thrill the
Englishman may experience here. Let us hope politicians, in their party
juggling, may not starve our defences too often, so that they be found
wanting in our hour of need.

We have beheaded a King, with some justice, we have shot an Admiral,
without justice or sense in the doing of it, and we have from time to
time degraded Generals; but, strange to say, we have never yet hanged
a statesman, although the occasion has warranted, often enough. It
seems a strange immunity! Yet in the coming great struggle, if we be
unprepared, it may well be that this immunity will no longer hold.
Tennyson, many years ago, contemplating some such national disaster,
had a vision of the mob’s way with recreant ministers:

    “The wild mob’s million feet shall kick you from your place.”

It was mildness itself--that is to say, if we take the million kicks
figuratively. The proper treatment in such an eventuality would be,
not merely to remove those ineffectual persons from their place, but
to hang them from the most prominent lamp-posts available; no adequate
revenge, but as earnest of popular feeling.

In these later and more striving and hard-working times for the
Navy, and in the new strategical dispositions necessitated by modern
political developments, the new harbour of Dover is destined to
play a prominent part. The old--but still quite recent--days of
the Channel Fleet are done. The English Channel was never an ideal
cruising-ground: it has its moods--some of them extremely vicious
and surly--but the proximity of the kindly coastwise towns and their
snug harbours, and the entertainings and courtesies and general social
amenities of a sailor’s lot that were generally to be enjoyed ashore
savoured life in that fleet with a pleasant flavour. Things are
something more Spartan in the North Sea, or--horrid alternative--
“German Ocean,” and although courtesies are given and received, they do
not bulk so largely as in the days when the generous hospitality aboard
sent many a guest ashore incoherent but voluble in praise of the way
they had with them in the “Flannel Sheet.”

The Government works here are by no means the only great undertakings
that have been in progress for some years past. The Dover Harbour
Board, in conjunction with the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway
Companies, has been engaged in providing a great new Commercial Harbour
within the shelter of the Admiralty Pier. It was long before those
bodies obtained parliamentary sanction for their proposal to widen
the pier at its landward end, and to build wharves and a great new
station, rather larger than Charing Cross, where for many years past
weatherbeaten travellers have been landed in all the discomforts of
what was at its best a makeshift arrangement. The railway and steamship
companies had for long, by special permission, used the Admiralty
Pier as a landing-stage; but the great increase of traffic, no less
than the discontent of passengers put ashore in the open, on a narrow
breakwater exposed to the full fury of sea and wind, led them to seek
powers for very ambitious new works. The difficulties encountered in
dealing with no fewer than seven Government Departments interested:
the Treasury, Admiralty, War Office, Board of Trade, Home Office,
Post Office, and the Board of Works--give a comic-opera touch to the
negotiations; they were at last overcome, and now close upon £2,000,000
has been spent upon the works, a sum provided largely by the income
derived from the proceeds of a poll-tax levied on all passengers
embarking or landing at Dover. When first introduced, in 1891, it was a
shilling a head; but in the way usual with most taxes not strenuously
resisted, this proved only the modest beginning of things, and it was
raised in 1900 to half a crown.

I have read somewhere a funny story, which really appears to be true as
well as funny, of a witness in the local police-court, who, asked his
occupation by the Bench, replied that he was a professional man.

“What profession?” inquired the magistrate.

“Well,” said the witness diffidently, “I walk on the pier of an
afternoon, and see the boats in!” This sly humorist--if that is his
proper description--narrowly escaped committal for contempt of court.

But the Admiralty Pier has ever been the resort of people, resident
in Dover, whose chief interest in life has seemed just this same
seeing in the boats; and now that the Admiralty Pier and the great
new harbour-works have provided a much more extended promenade, the
“profession” has become correspondingly enlarged.

Dover is an ambitious place, and intends to compete vigorously with
Southampton, Plymouth, and Liverpool for overseas traffic. That is all
very enterprising, but what it gains as a strategic base, as a place of
arms, and as a great commercial port, it will inevitably lose in its
capacity as a residential and seaside town. For the rest, it is rapidly
becoming a place of monuments. Prominent among these is the bronze
portrait-bust of Captain Webb, the first person to swim the Channel.
It was unveiled early in 1910, and stands upon a red granite obelisk
bearing an inscription recording his famous swim from Dover to Calais,
21 miles in 21 hours 55 minutes, August 24th, 1875.

Many attempts--much advertised and conducted with every aid to
success--have since been made to rival Webb’s fine performance; but
all proved failures until September 6th, 1911, when Thomas William
Burgess, after numerous disappointments, swam from near the South
Foreland, Dover, to Le Chatelet, near Calais, in 22 hours 35 minutes:
40 minutes longer than the time taken by Captain Webb. It was his
sixteenth attempt. The occasion was made the very most of, in the
hysterical manner of the age; from a congratulatory telegram from the
King down to the excited comments of the halfpenny press. Webb’s finer
performance of thirty-six years earlier was a comparatively obscure
affair. It is a rather saddening instance of the decay of the national
character, under the lead of advertisers and half-educated journalists,
bent upon sensation-mongering.

The Channel crossing is no longer solely concerned with tunnelling,
swimming, or steamboat travelling. The conquest of the air provides a
newer way. So long ago as March 22nd, 1882, Colonel Burnaby crossed
in a balloon from Dover. Starting at 10 a.m., he landed at Montigny,
Normandy, at 2.15 p.m.

Burnaby knew Dover well. An out-of-the-way association with him will
be found in the hill-top cemetery, where one epitaph at least has the
rare quality of true sympathy. It was placed by him over the grave of
his servant, George Radford, and runs: “True as steel. This stone is
erected by the man he served so well.”

Nowadays, in flying matters--in aviation, as the new word has it--it
is the aeroplane, the heavier-than-air machine with the petrol-engine,
that attracts attention and performs most of the marvels. Already,
at the present time of writing, there have been numerous successful
attempts to fly the Channel by aeroplane. It was on Sunday, July 25th,
1909, that the pioneer, M. Blériot, voyaged by monoplane from Calais,
landing on Dover cliffs in thirty-seven minutes. A monument, in the
shape of a concrete model of his machine, has been let into the grass
of the North Fall Meadow. On May 21st, 1910, the Comte de Lesseps, from
the same starting-point, landed near St. Margaret’s Bay, in two minutes
less. These exploits were followed on June 2nd, 1910, by the Honourable
C. S. Rolls, flying from these Dover cliffs to the French coast near
Sangatte and back again; and on August 17th by Mr. J. B. Moisant,
an American, of Spanish extraction, who, in the course of an effort
to fly from Paris to London, crossed the Channel from Calais with a
passenger, and landed at the inland village of Tilmanstone, midway
between Sandwich and Dover. With the flight of eleven airmen across the
Channel, on July 3rd, 1911, on their way from Calais to London, the
brief era in which such things were regarded as marvels may be said
to have ended. Already the newspapers have ceased to decorate their
accounts of these doings with the startling headlines first accorded
them; and there now appears to be no reason why more astonishment
should be exhibited at such sights than at the familiar one of a
motor-car careering the road: itself a spectacle thousands of people
assembled to see, not so many years ago. Wonderful! But some things--
really, after all, the essential things--are as impossible as ever to
combat. Age and pain, poverty, sorrow, and death, remain the lot of
mankind, and none may make flight from them.

A fine bronze statue of Charles Stuart Rolls, “the first man to cross
the Channel and return in a single flight,” stands on the Parade of
Dover, looking seaward. It is a good likeness, in a characteristic
pose, of that ill-fated airman, killed little more than a month later
at Bournemouth, July 12th, 1910. He is represented standing, in his
well-remembered stooping pose, hands behind his back, and gazing with
a peculiar intensity out across the sea, towards the misty coast of
France; with rather a fateful look, as though with prescience of his
end. Something of the sculptor’s romantic imagination is in that, for
Rolls was essentially of a joyous and forceful nature.

CHAPTER XXI

SHAKESPEARE’S CLIFF--SAMPHIRE--THE CHANNEL TUNNEL--COAL IN KENT--
THE WARREN

“Dost thou know Dover?” asks Gloucester, in the pitiful tragedy of
_King Lear_.

Aye; and knowing Dover, we cannot but be well acquainted with that--

   “Cliff whose high and bending head
    Looks fearfully in the confinèd deep.”

It is Shakespeare’s Cliff. “Here’s the place,” says Edgar.

            “... Stand still. How fearful
    And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
    The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
    Show scarce so gross as beetles: half-way down
    Hangs one that gathers samphire--dreadful trade!
    Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
    The fishermen that walk upon the beach
    Appear like mice; and yon tall anchoring bark
    Diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy
    Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge,
    That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafes,
    Cannot be heard so high.--I’ll look no more,
    Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
    Topple down headlong.”

[Illustration: SHAKESPEARE’S CLIFF.

                        _After W. Daniell, R.A._

]

The height of Shakespeare’s Cliff is said to be 365 feet; but it looks
more, owing to the grand outline it presents to the sea. It was once
much taller, but for centuries the waves have been nibbling at it. In
1847 some 48,000 tons of chalk fell, and numerous other falls have
taken place since.

Not even the ugly tunnel by which the South-Eastern Railway penetrates
it can spoil the majesty of Shakespeare’s Cliff, whose bastioned steeps
present so romantic a profile to the surges. It stands boldly out
before you, as you essay the toilsome cliff-walk, by way of Archcliff
Fort, to Folkestone.

Samphire, the gathering of which, as Shakespeare truly says, is a
“dreadful trade,” still grows plentifully here; and is also found
growing amid the shingle by Shoreham Harbour, near Brighton, well above
the reach of high water. It has been much esteemed from early times as
a pickle. Thus we find, in Gerald’s “Herbal,” of 1596, “Rock samphire
groweth on the rocky cliffs of Dover, Winchelsea, about Southampton,
and the Isle of Wight. The leaves, kept in pickle and eaten in salads,
with oil and vinegar, is a pleasant sauce for meat.”

This curious aromatic plant, with the fleshy, glaucous leaves and
yellow flowers, is not uncommon, but at the same time it is very
choice and selective in its habitat. Although to be found in the
crannies of coastwise cliffs, there are few among the great crowds of
holiday-makers by the sea, other than botanists, who have ever set
eyes upon it. Curiously enough, although it looks upon the sea from its
favourite spots, it will only grow in situations well out of the reach
of salt water.

Samphire is said to be “St. Peter’s plant,” and to derive its name from
“St. Pierre.” It is nowadays known in France as “Passe-Pierre,” or
“Christe marine,” and in Italy is called “Herba di San Pietro.”

Samphire-picking is carried on in May, when the leaves of the plant are
young and succulent. One must needs be young or active, and of a good
nerve, to be a samphire-picker, for it is generally only in the more
dangerous and inaccessible situations that it is to be found; and many
have in years gone by lost their lives in the “dreadful trade,” not in
these latter days so greatly followed, although, to be sure, bottles
of samphire pickle are to be purchased at Pegwell Bay. The samphire
nowadays more generally appeals to the collecting instincts of those
devastating persons, the amateur botanists, and enthusiasts in what is
known, in the latest fashion, as “Nature Study,” who are stripping the
country of all its ferns and desirable wild plants; and many must be
the narrow escapes every year of those who climb cliffs in search of it.

The “samphire pickle” sometimes to be bought is not always what it
pretends to be, for here, as so often elsewhere, adulteration’s artful
aid is called in, and the more plentiful and much more easily gathered
glass-wort, which grows on mud-flats, and greatly resembles samphire,
without its aromatic qualities, is bottled with vinegar, to the
deception of a trustful public.

The cliffs along the way to Folkestone are of quite extraordinary
interest, so numerous are the schemes and exploitations they display.
Here, looking over the edge, you see, on a scrap of foreshore where
the railway emerges from the tunnel, a siding with works of sorts and
a smoking chimney. This is the site, not only of the Channel Tunnel
works, but also of the Shakespeare Cliff Colliery.

The idea of a Channel Tunnel, under consideration so long ago as 1867,
was originally received with great favour in both France and England,
and an agreement upon the subject was arrived at in 1876, by which it
was to be begun simultaneously from either side.

It was, however, regarded as a commercial project and in no sense as
a Government undertaking, the respective Governments merely adopting
a benevolent attitude toward the scheme. Some years passed before the
Channel Tunnel Companies on either side commenced operations from
Dover and Sangatte. It was due to the energy of that arch-contriver,
Sir Edward Watkin, that the scheme at last took definite shape and was
translated into action. As chairman of what was then the Manchester,
Sheffield, and Lincolnshire Railway (now the Great Central) and of the
South-Eastern Railway, he was generally credited with a bold plan for
creating a through trunk line from Manchester to London and Dover,
and thence beneath the Channel and so on to France, without change
of carriage. Like many another Moses, he saw his Promised Land, but
could not enter upon it. He brought the old M. S. and L. to London and
lived to see it the “Great Central,” but his Channel Tunnel, begun
so bravely, was stopped by a nervous Government in 1886, when it had
progressed 5,500 feet. A like distance had been tunnelled from the
French coast.

It was an alarmist article in the _Nineteenth Century_ that spoiled
his pet scheme, and although Watkin on several occasions went to the
great trouble and expense--or perhaps it would be more correct to say,
saddled the South-Eastern Railway shareholders with a great expense--
of inviting parties of statesmen and influential personages to inspect
the works and to partake of costly luncheons on this spot, he never
gained any return for his outlay on chicken and champagne.

The plans for the Tunnel had originally provided for starting actually
from the Dover side of Shakespeare’s Cliff, instead of from the present
obscure situation; but the War Office insisted upon the change,
although it is the simplest proposition in strategy that the mouth of
the Tunnel, placed where at first intended, would have been easily
controlled by the Dover forts. The selected spot, supposing the work
ever to be completed, is far more capable of being used by an enemy,
being relatively away from observation and masked from gun-fire by the
intervening shoulders of the hills.

The plan for tunnelling the twenty-three miles was for parallel
tunnels, each carrying a single line. The original estimate was
£10,000,000, but the work, as it progressed through the chalk, proved
so easy that these figures were reduced to £4,000,000, largely because
it was found that the chalk was watertight and required no casing.
The abandoned works remain quite dry to this day. The scare, shared
though it was by Lord Wolseley and other eminent authorities, does not
seem very creditable, and there can be little doubt but that, sooner
or later, the Government bar upon the progress of the work will be
removed, and the Tunnel become an accomplished fact. Meanwhile the
Channel Tunnel Company continues to hold its annual meetings, and new
Parliamentary Bills are duly promoted. “Public sentiment has been
aroused against the Tunnel,” remarked the chairman recently, “and it
must abide its time and opportunity.”

From railway tunnelling to coal-mining the transition, for the scheming
brain of Sir Edward Watkin, was easy. An idea had long been current
that coal existed under the Kentish chalk. Geologists considered
that the French and Belgian coalfields naturally continued under the
Channel, and that borings would disclose coal-measures, probably at
considerable depths. Many borings were made at various places, among
others at a spot north of Battle, in Sussex, in 1872, where a depth of
1,905 feet was reached, without result.

[Illustration: SHAKESPEARE CLIFF COLLIERY, AND THE COAST TOWARDS
FOLKESTONE.]

The selection of Dover as a likely place was due to the stopping of the
Channel Tunnel works by the Government, in 1886, when the tunnelling
machinery was thrown idle and the employment of it in shaft-sinking
for coal on the same site was suggested. Coal-seeking was thereupon
begun, in spite of the already long-expressed opinion of Sir Roderick
Murchison, one of our most eminent geologists, that the existence of
any _productive_ coalfields in the south-eastern counties was in the