Partly because of that darkness, diving is only possible in relatively shallow water, though the whole kit—rubber masks and silly feet—only serve to emphasise how alien all divers are to this element. As they slide slowly through the metres, do they become curiosities themselves? What do the fish make of these subterranean fetishists, miming and poking through the blizzards of sand? Without all this comic technology, there would be no wreck exploration and no penetration of these depths. As it is, Bob and Dave cannot stay down for more than forty minutes, and will not know until they dive whether or not they will be able to see anything except their own dials and meters. They are also limited by the tides: diving is only possible at slack water and best during neaps when the tides are weaker.
After a while, Peacock and Dave heave themselves out of the water, strip off their gimp kit and adjust the boat’s position by a few feet. Pete splashes himself with talcum powder and falls backwards into the sea. The sun burns, and around us the sea behaves as it does when there’s 400 fathoms below the keel instead of a mere few metres. Bob sits in the wheelhouse unravelling a warm cheese and ham pasty and dabbing at the electronics. He looks at his watch. ‘We’ll be back in Ramsgate by noon,’ he says. The useful thing about diving on the Goodwins is that you can combine it with a more sensible life. Peacock and his co-divers come here as a hobby. Occasionally that hobby can prove lucrative, but generally they do it just for the pleasure of indulging an available obsession. Since they cannot stay down for long, and since the trip from Ramsgate is only worthwhile on the balmiest of summer days, it is the sort of part-time occupation which lends itself well to a double life. ‘I got up this morning at 5 a.m., we’ve got twenty-five staff, and it’s wages day today,’ Bob tells me, ‘I’m manager of a residential home, but I have managers who can do some of the work for me, so I can walk away, you know? Pete, he works round this area, and so does Dave. It means you can have a dive, but not disrupt your whole day.’ Bob used to work in a power station, but took up diving after they started shutting the stations down. ‘I was born in Ramsgate—I’ve always been interested in the sea. I got my first boat, and then I sold that and got Tusker 2’—named, I subsequently discover, after his favourite beer. ‘After the initial excitement of learning to dive, you try and give yourself other interests. I’ve always been interested in history, and when I started diving the wrecks, I decided I’d like to learn more about it. So I did some research on that, and that led into archaeology, and understanding the principles of working underwater. It can get boring if you keep diving the same sites, but that’s where the archaeology comes in. Then you’re looking at smaller things, you’re trying to extract information from finer details. That one today, it’s probably going to take thirty or forty dives to establish what we actually have.’
A few moments later, Pete surfaces. ‘Crap vis’,’ he grumbles as he removes his mask and stands dripping on the deck, ‘couldn’t see more than a foot in front of me.’ Bob waits resignedly until Pete has removed his tanks and then turns the boat back towards England. It’s hot and getting hotter; the water flings little glimmers of light onto the walls of the wheelhouse. Around us there is just the same scene as there was two hours ago: the sea, the sky, the little white strip of England. The water hasn’t changed, the weather hasn’t changed and England hasn’t moved. Perhaps the Goodwins won’t appear. I lean back against the gunwhales. The boat motors northwards.
Five minutes away from the wreck site, Bob shouts something over the sound of the motor. ‘There you go!’ he yells. ‘There’s the Goodwins for you!’ I look up. To begin with, I can’t see anything more than a slight tremor in the water on the port side. The sea is still the same colour, the water still stretches as far as I can see. But as I watch, the ripples become smaller and more agitated, as if the sea is encountering some form of subterranean resistance which had not been there five minutes before. Over to the west, it is just about possible to make out what looks like a faint rind of white surf. A little further on, the slight whiteness becomes more distinct. The computerised chart shows us moving slowly over a curve of pale blue, with the Kellet Gut just to starboard.
And then, suddenly, there are islands rising up from the sea. In place of unimpeded water, there is a huge golden dune stretching out to the west. Round its edges, the water whitens and surges, reshaping itself around the sand’s resistance. Already its seaward sides have been colonised by a party of seagulls and a few grey seals, lying heavy as wrecks on the edge of their new shore. Over on the other side of the boat, there is surf and tropical orange as far as the eye can see. I almost expect to see someone trundle past with a hot-dog stall and a sun lounger, looking for the optimum sunbathing spot. And these beaches aren’t small, they are great big swathes stretching towards the Kent coast. The speed with which they have been appropriated by the birds and seals only emphasise the sense that these beaches have always been here, that it could only have been absent-mindedness or myopia that stopped me seeing them before.
There is nothing which prepares one for the strangeness of this elemental conjuring trick. In some parts of Britain, the variation between the tides is so great (upwards of plus or minus 20 feet) that England or Scotland or Wales gain an additional mile of foreshore every twelve hours. There are offshore reefs which appear and disappear with the rhythm of the water level, rocks and sandbanks which only ever show themselves at the spring and autumn solstices. If you potter around on a beach for long enough, you get used to the landscape’s twice-daily exits and arrivals. Literature is littered with legends of lost and found lands; Atlantis was supposed to have been located somewhere in southern Cyprus, and Robert Louis Stevenson invented a treasure island which later turned out to be a perfect (and perfectly unconscious) copy of an island where his Uncle David once built a lighthouse. Even Britain itself rises and falls with the millennia. But to watch a fully-populated 9-mile island surface from a clear blue sea is different.
‘I’ve had picnics on the Goodwins,’ says Bob, following my thoughts, ‘and there have been people who have gone bowling on the Sands. You can do that. You can get a boat to take you out here, mess around for a couple of hours and go back to Ramsgate when the tide turns. They used to land a hovercraft on them—it just depended where the wind was.’ He revs the engine and we motor off again. I turn to say something to Pete. By the time I turn back, the Sands have slid away. Not just receded behind us, but gone, completely vanished. There was land, and now there is no land, no birds, no seals, no unarguable expanse of sand and surf. Nothing. Just the sea again, and the approaching cliffs of Ramsgate. It is that disappearance—the reverse of their earlier metamorphosis—which makes the Goodwins so eerie. One minute, they are there, as sure as land can ever be. The next, there is nothing. Just the bright deceiving waters of the English Channel.
Andy Roberts is a Deal man who also has first-hand knowledge of the Goodwin Sands. Before joining the Maritime and Coastguard Agency he piloted the hovercraft which used to pass the Sands every day on its way from Ramsgate to Calais. He’s a warm, energetic character, with a sharp stare and a tidy beard. His conversational style, with its combination of officialese and casual mannerisms, gives an impression of someone comfortable with his responsibilities. Like Bob Peacock, he has been at sea since childhood, and now stares out towards France from the first floor of the coastguard station along the Deal seafront. Looking through the high-powered binoculars at the white water which marks the edge of the Goodwins, he recalls seeing them close-up. ‘When I worked on the hovercraft, when there were big storms, we used to go up onto the Sands and run along them. Sometimes you’d see ships or bits of ships regurgitated, and then three months later they would have vanished again. It must be a maelstrom underneath there. You think of the people who were shipwrecked there, and they got off the boat and they’re standing around on the Sands waiting for the tide to come in . . . ’ He pauses. ‘Their death is arriving, and there’s nothing they can do. Ail they can do is wait for the tide to come in.
If they could only talk, those Sands, they’d tell a tale or two.’
But the Goodwins do talk. They murmur, they rage, and occasionally they even confess. ‘There’s 3,ooo-odd wrecks out there on the Sands. You know that expression, “worse things happen at sea”? It came from the Great Storm of 1703, because Deal was devastated by that storm, and whenever anyone in Deal spoke about it afterwards, the answer was, “worse things happen at sea”, because 2,000 people had been drowned just a few miles away.’
As Roberts points out, it was hardly surprising that the Goodwin Sands became a perfect Mecca for wreckers. Over the centuries, the inhabitants of the coastal towns overlooking the Downs—Deal, Ramsgate, Walmer, Sandwich, Dover—concluded that the best way to live with the Sands was to go into business with them. Like politicians dealing with intransigent donors, the local fishermen understood that dealing with the Goodwins required a combination of guile, respect, venality and boldness. Those who approached without caution risked being swallowed themselves, but those who studied the tempers of the tides could return with a year’s salary stashed in the hold. Besides, even without the Goodwins on their doorstep, the sheer quantity of shipping passing through the Channel would have provided plenty of employment mending, resupplying and piloting ships. The Downs had been used for centuries as safe anchorage by ships waiting for a fair wind to carry them down towards the Bay of Biscay, since the Goodwins acted as a natural breakwater against bad weather coming from the Continent. Entire naval or merchant fleets would often linger in the Downs for weeks or even months, embayed by gales or undertaking repairs. In part, the immensity of the naval losses during the 1703 storm was due to that reliance on a single small stretch of water. A sizeable portion of the English naval fleet had taken shelter en route to overwintering in the River Medway; when the storm arose they had nowhere to hide.
But the Great Storm was an exception by any standards, and in general the combination of a safe anchorage, a 9-mile sandbank and a major shipping channel provided the local boatmen with plenty of legitimate employment. The 1867 ‘Report on the Subject of Wreck and Salvage’ for Lloyd’s Salvage Association detailed the working methods of the Deal men: ‘Each port has its peculiar kind of boat. Ramsgate boats, Broadstairs boats, and Deal boats, all differ from one another, and are immediately distinguished by a person who knows them as he does. No-one whose attention has once been directed to it can mistake a Deal boat.’ As with the Scilly gigs and the Pentland yawls, the Deal boatmen adapted their boats to suit their environment. A Deal lugger was a long, lean, speedy clinker-built boat, open-decked except for a 10-foot stretch at the stern to provide lockers and berths, and propelled by a single square-headed lugsail. Crucially, they were boats with a very shallow draught, making it possible for them to sail over sandbanks in just a few feet of water and allowing the boatmen to get to parts of the Goodwins which other boats could never hope to reach. Sometimes, explained the Lloyd’s author, the Deal boatmen would ‘provision a lugger and set off on a ten or twelve days’ cruise, seeking jobs’.
All of which sounded perfectly innocuous. The trouble arose when the boatmen gave their jobs a more entrepreneurial twist than strictly necessary. Over the centuries, the Kent men had perfected their nautical skills to the point where they had evolved several separate sub-species of wrecker. In place of the ordinary Cornish version, the Kent men had hovellers, smugglers, pilots and salvors all working the Sands and all devoting themselves to different aspects of both healthy ships and wrecks. In general, each boatman had one main source of employment—such as fishing, salving or piloting—but would also supplement his income by taking other, smaller jobs as and when they arose.
This blending and intersecting of roles made it difficult to say with authority who did what, or who could be considered either angel or devil. The confusion between differing job descriptions arose both out of necessity and because such distraction could prove useful as a method of misleading officialdom. Pilots would perform a perfectly legal service in guiding an East Indiaman past the Goodwins one day but be first on the deck of a disabled frigate the next. Hovellers could be resupplying a ship or finding medical care for its crew at the same time as stripping that vessel of every last rivet when it then ran aground. All four breeds of boatmen would race to sea at the first cry of a ship on the Goodwin Sands. Sometimes, it was claimed, there would be over a hundred boats casting off from Ramsgate or Deal. Competition occasionally became so ferocious that boatmen would remain at sea for several days during a gale in the hope of making it to a shipwreck faster than their neighbours. At times, the rivalry became so great that there was not only bad blood between the separate coastal towns, but rivalry between the two different parts of Deal itself. To outsiders, the fine geographical or professional distinctions between the boatmen were irrelevant; they were villains to a man, and that was that. In his account of the 1703 Great Storm, Daniel Defoe earned permanent opprobrium for his views on the Deal men:
Those sons of plunder are beneath my pen,
Because they are below the names of men . . .
The barbarous shores with men and boats abound—
The men more barbarous than the shores are found:
Oft to the shattered 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 suppliant’s reach appear
As if they mocked their dying fear
If I had any Satire left to write,
Could I with suited spleen indite,
My verse should blast that fatal town . . .
That barbarous hated name of Deal should die,
Or be a term of infamy—
And till that is done, the Town will stand
A just reproach to all the land.
More than a century later, the Deal men’s reputation had not improved. The Reverend Robert Eden, Rector of Leigh in Essex, a little further round the coastline from Deal, described the impact of their reputation in his 1840 Address to the Depredators and Wreckers on the Sea Coast. ‘I well remember,’ he wrote,
from very early days, hearing and reading of a class of men called ‘wreckers’ who dwelt upon the sea coast, and whose fiendish habit was to rejoice in every wreck which occurred, to gloat in savage pleasure over the groans and agonies of the perishing sufferers and to live by the plunder which they then heaped to themselves—a plunder which was too often stained with blood—a plunder which was always stamped with the curse of God. And I well remember thinking that it could not be possible, that Englishmen could so act.
As the Lloyd’s salvage report pointed out, the villages nearest the Goodwins were well prepared:
Deal might have been built for smuggling; which is the same thing as saying it is exactly constructed for wrecking. The streets run parallel to the beach, and close to it and are connected by numerous narrow alleys out of which open doors, leading into yards and sheds. The beach extends some miles and at various parts of it, on the shingle itself, stand roomy wooden sheds, belonging to the boatmen. There cargoes of a whole fleet of ships, once landed on the beach, might be so effectually disposed of in these yards and sheds in a few hours, that not a trace of them would remain.
Nor was this mere paranoia on Lloyd’s part. The report listed several known incidences of wrecks being disguised, including ropes being cut or spliced, sails cut up, and metal melted down within hours of salvage.
As often as not, the hovellers were smugglers with extra time on their hands. They supplemented their income by assisting the vessels anchored in the Downs and by waiting for storms. The captain of a ship at anchor could use the hovellers as couriers, shopkeepers or pilots, paying them to ferry letters to and from the shore, to resupply the ship’s provisions or guide them past the Goodwins out to sea. During the sea’s peacetimes, the hovellers relied on the traditional rules of supply and demand. When a ship arrived in the Downs, the waiting boatmen
would launch their luggers and sail towards it, knowing that whoever reached the ship first or negotiated the best terms got the job. A captain who needed a couple of extra lengths of rope, a spare sail or an able seaman would pay the hovellers for their skill and speed as suppliers. The arrangement worked much like a concierge service: in return for an agreed fee, the hovellers would provide the goods and experience that ships could not supply for themselves.
During the summer months the hovellers would remain on shore, smoking, gossiping and repairing their boats. But when the weather turned and the barometer fell, they would train their telescopes on the stretch of visible sand seven miles beyond the shore. Once a gale was at its height, they would race their boats into the surf and sail out towards the Goodwins. They were looking for ships in distress, either in order to find work as pilots, or as salvors or—if they thought they could get away with it—as straightforward wreckers. In cases where ships proved unsalvable, the hovellers would occasionally work in conjunction with the lifeboats to take off the crew and to render assistance.
That was the theory, anyway. In practice, it was alleged, captains supplied and hovellers demanded. Those who refused their services found themselves the victims of seaborne extortion rackets, their cables cut, their anchors stolen and their crews overpowered. The 1867 Lloyd’s report claimed that:
The Wreckers Page 6
