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”:

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.”

And thus, with indignation, he concludes:

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—

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 manoeuvres 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.