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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.