Then you discover that, with a little extra effort, you will be able to reach right in to the source of these gifts, to go further and deeper than everyone else, to pluck out items which would otherwise be lost. With the aid of a boat, you can get right down into the half-sodden hold to rescue items otherwise destined to rot with time. You know that the source of these gifts will itself provide all sorts of extras: raw materials, tools, vital supplies. With the help of some wire cutters and an axe, you can liberate any amount of fabulous riches. You need feel no guilt, because if you do not act, then you are storing up problems for everyone, contributing to ecological disaster, degrading your pristine piece of sea for years to come. The local authorities know this too, and would actively encourage you to get out there and start picking things off. You imagine that the ultimate owners of all this free booty live in a far-off country, and that they do not care about this. If you don’t do something about it now, then they will just spend three years arguing over how to avoid dealing with any of it, by which time every last piece will have gone to waste. If you step back and think about it for a minute, you know that all of this represents a kind of divine justice, the sea playing Robin Hood.
And then time passes, and another winter comes. You sit huddled at home through months of gales, punished by the cold northern darkness or incessant Cornish rain. There was a bad harvest last year and some of your livestock died. It rains so hard that water pours in through the roof, spoiling what is left of your stores and rendering every possession spongy to the touch. There’s a death in the family and rumours of redundancies at the area’s main employer. Just when you think you can take it no more, when there’s nothing in the larder and you’re down to rationing soap, you hear on the grapevine that something is coming your way. A ship approaching local waters, laden with everything you need and might wish for: tractors, timber, alcohol, seeds, tobacco. If you do nothing, then that ship will pass by on its way to an undeserving destination, and you and your equally hard-pressed neighbours will just have to watch it vanish. All it would take is something very minor—a small incentive to the local pilot, the unexpected failure of the nearby foghorn or radar beacon. Nothing one could really call sabotage; just anticipated winter damage. And one bright morning after a particularly severe storm, there on the beach is everything you prayed for laid up on the sand. The ship itself has vanished and there’s no sign of the crew, but you feel sure—or as sure as one can be—that someone else will probably have rescued them. And as you cart off the wood and make free with the drink, you only thank God and the fates for hearing your prayers.
It is possible. It happened, and will doubtless happen again. But would you also choose to remember, as you piled your house high, that wrecking is not a victimless crime, and that every gold coin lying unclaimed at the bottom of the ocean was paid for with the bones of ten men dead?
Goodwin Sands
TWO
Goodwin Sands
At 8 a.m. on a day that breaks no records, Ramsgate seafront is deserted. A middle-aged man swings a metal detector in long slow circles round the breakwater while someone from the council drives a machine up and down the beach, laying out the sand smooth and flat in the places where the water does not reach. On one corner of the esplanade, a figure wrapped in wintry rags goes on sleeping through the sound of the machine and the mewling gulls. Even now, the pavement is warm and the sun uncomfortable. According to the radio, this might well be the hottest day of the year, perhaps the hottest day for a decade. A boy on a bike is out early, riding up and down. When people pass by, he stands up on the pedals and guns the bike faster and faster until the handlebars waggle from side to side and his shoulders shake with the effort. After two or three circuits of the pavement, he comes racing down the walkway to the beach, launching himself in the direction of the miniature fairground. The bike’s front wheel hits the soft sand and the boy hurtles over the handlebars, landing with an audible thud. He picks himself up and looks around, grinning sheepishly.
Down on the pier by the marina, Bob Peacock’s car has purple pimp-glass windows and several items of diving equipment in the back. A solid, stocky man in his mid-forties with an air of good-natured authority, Bob greets me, collects a few extra items from the boathouse and drives further down the harbour. We leave the car and load the oxygen tanks onto his boat. Two other divers, Pete and Dave, are waiting behind the breakwater for Bob’s approach. They leap on board and we motor out of Ramsgate towards France. The tide has just turned, and as the sun strengthens, the water begins to glitter. Behind us, Kent’s white cliffs—the unscrubbed colour of a nation left out in the rain—recede in the heat haze. In the boat’s wheelhouse, the dashboard is covered with electronics: radar, GPS, a computerised chart showing the boat’s course across the water, and a depth finder tracing out the surface of the sea bed in pretty multi-coloured spikes. A magnetometer shaped like a giant light bulb lies on the floor of the boat’s saloon. The stern is undecked, with a ladder and tailgate; lockers running down both sides contain cylinders, masks and meters.
Half an hour out of Ramsgate, Peacock shuts off the engine. The rumble of machinery is replaced by the slipslop of the sea against the hull and the splutterings of the VHF. The boat rocks in the water, rotating slowly towards the sun. Ramsgate and England have been reduced to a mirage, a pale strip of haze balancing just over the horizon. As I watch from the wheelhouse, Bob and Dave strip off, douse themselves with talcum powder, and wriggle into black rubber dry suits. On top of the suits they attach a series of pipes, cylinders, metering equipment, masks, snorkels and bags. Finally, they reverse into the straps and belts attaching their oxygen cylinders which, when full, are so heavy that the men cannot comfortably stand upright. Their flippers make it almost impossible to walk, and the mask makes it difficult for them to see where they are going. They stagger blindly over to the tailgate and drop backwards into the water.
Pete and I sit in the middle of the English Channel and wait. Pete is waiting for his own turn underwater, and I am waiting for land to appear. Not to reach land—though unmoored, the boat isn’t going anywhere—but for solid ground to rise up from the water. Sitting here, the notion seems ridiculous. We’re stuck on a boat surrounded by sea; the nearest land from here is several miles away in either direction. There’s just ocean and sky and a couple of divers paddling around somewhere below us. The electronic depth finder registers around 30 or 40 feet of water beneath the boat, and there isn’t a single lighthouse or beacon in sight. But the charts on the screen tell a different story. In lines of stratified yellow and blue, they say that somewhere close by, there is something as solid as fact. At present that something is probably about 7 or 8 feet underwater, but in an hour or so it will be concrete enough to walk on. Even now I’m not sure I believe it. But I also know that this place is littered with the remains of those who did not believe in the Goodwin Sands.
The Goodwins are a series of sand banks lying north-northeast towards the Netherlands, and they are stuck directly in the centre of the world’s busiest shipping lane. All told, the Sands stretch for more than ten miles north-south, and more than four miles east-west, with their seaward side reaching six miles into the narrowest point of the English Channel. Roughly speaking, they are split into three separate parts: the North Goodwins, the South Goodwins and the South Calliper. Between the South Goodwins and the South Calliper runs the Kellett Gut, a deeper channel of water considered a safe passage for boats of shallow draft. But—and it is often a fatal but—not a single one of these measurements is actually true.
The Goodwins are notorious not merely because they stick out, as Bob Peacock puts it, ‘like a pothole on the M25’, but because that pothole has a habit of wandering. These sands are quicksands. What appears as deep water one week may be solid ground the next, and what was sand at Easter could just as well be chalk before Christmas. Even the Kellet Gut, which on current Admiralty charts looks as reliable as a river bed, has a habit of vanishing. In 1926 it was consider
ed to be navigable by ships of deep draught, but the surveys of 1865 and 1896 found no evidence of a channel at all. It was open to shipping in 1850, but fifteen years later had disappeared completely. Every single tide that rises or falls over the Goodwins will move the top foot of sand slightly; a couple of winter gales may make the difference between safe passage and shipwreck.
Broadly speaking, the movements of the Goodwins follow a seven-year pendulum swing from east to west and back again, but winter gales and the Channel’s individual micro-climate mean that the only thing which remains absolutely consistent about the Goodwins is their treachery. Ships are unable to give them too wide a berth because the Channel itself is less than twenty miles wide at this point, and boats which do not run aground on the Sands might just as easily run straight into England or France. Matters are further complicated by tidal variation in the area. Spring tides can rise or fall by 16 feet; during a low spring tide, around twelve miles of the northern and ten miles of the southern sands appear above the surface, but at low neap tides nothing at all can be seen of them.
It is thought that the Goodwins were once an island named Lomea, low lying but static and fertile. In 1014, according to legend, the sea wall collapsed, the waves rushed in and the islands were overwhelmed. Now, twice a day, the Goodwins become islands again, intermittent Atlantises appearing and disappearing with the tides. Hence the diving and the divers—the sea’s resurrection men. This comparatively small area of the Channel has been responsible for more wrecks, and the consequent loss of more lives, than any other sea area around Britain. As Richard Larn, author of the Shipwreck Index of Great Britain puts it: ‘Of the countless thousands of natural obstacles which represent a hazard to shipping in the western world, there is no single headland, island, rock, sandbank or bar which has earned such infamy or been more feared by seamen than the Goodwin Sands.’ The Sands’ mutable habits, the volume of traffic through and across the Channel, and the fact that the Sands provide a breakwater for ships sheltering in the Downs (the stretch of water between the Goodwins and the Kent shore) has ensured that over the years, this apparently placid stretch of coastline has acquired a reputation as violent as Cornwall or the Pentland Firth. Present-day Admiralty charts of the semi-circle of Channel guarded by the Goodwins between Folkestone and Broadstairs show a sea black with wrecks, foul ground and obstructions. Over the centuries the Goodwins became known as the ‘ship swallower’, for their anthropomorphic greed in seizing vessels: all 1,000 tons of one nineteenth-century ship, the Ogle Castle, disappeared within an hour. When the visibility and weather conditions are good, this place is a diver’s paradise.
Bob Peacock is the skipper of the only local boat with an official licence to dive on the Goodwins, and in summer he makes the trip as often as he can. So far, he and his shifting group of assistants have found 1,800 wrecks on the Sands. The finds range from small pieces of flotsam to complete and untouched hulls. It is not merely that there are the remains of so many ships here, or that those ships are of such archaeological value, but that the Goodwins protect what they also destroy. Far below, the sea bed is chalk. Most vessels will vanish through the sand and then settle, embalmed until the seas change shape again.
During the Great Storm of November 1703—still considered the worst storm ever to hit the British Isles—part of the English naval fleet under the command of Sir Cloudisley Shovell had taken shelter in the Downs (Shovell would ultimately meet his fate after being shipwrecked and washed up on a beach in the Scilly Isles four years later). Overnight the wind increased to the point where unbroken seas were sweeping over the mainmasts. Though many of the vessels were new and had struck all sails, by 1 a.m. on 27 November they had begun to drag their anchors. Most were driven onto the Goodwins, watched by their helpless compatriots on shore. In all, four major battleships and almost 1,200 lives were lost that night. Casualties from other parts of the country pushed the total number of deaths up to 2,000—the greatest single loss the Royal Navy has ever suffered, either in war or in peace.
As with several other vessels, the seventy-gun man-of-war Stirling Castle came to rest on the Goodwins. Shortly after the storm the Sands took one of their regular trips westwards, burying the ship as they went. For almost three centuries she remained undisturbed, until 1979, when a small group of divers found her. Cordage, pewter mugs and old wine bottles were strewn on her decks. Below, the divers found shaving kits, porcelain, wooden plates; everything from old grapes to shoemakers’ lasts. Scattered around the surrounding sea bed were the remains of what at first appeared to be cow bones, but were later identified as human tibia. As the divers noted, the bones were clustered most thickly around the areas in which there were also most wine bottles. Knowing the likely fate of the ship, it seems that many of the crew drank themselves to stupefaction before they drowned. When the licence became available for diving the protected sites around the Stirling Castle, the Northumberland and the Restoration (all three of which sank during the Great Storm), Bob Peacock applied. The licence, granted on a ‘look but don’t touch’ basis, allowed Bob to clear the site of detritus before his surveying commenced, thus revealing how much of each ship remained intact.
Bob himself knows the Goodwin Sands well enough not to take liberties. Did he, I ask, ever find them sinister? ‘They’re unforgiving. You make a mistake, they catch you out. If you get above a Force 6 here, what you end up with is all white water—the shore just boils. It’s not a nice place to be. The other side of the Sands is not so bad, but here, there’s no protection.’ Pete, his diving companion, had been working the Goodwins for the past twenty years: ‘It’s horrible when it’s misty. Before I saw the sense of my ways, I used to do quite a bit of fishing over here. We were always out fishing for bass and all sorts. Few times, the same place I’ve gone along, I’ve actually hit the bottom of the boat and then carried on, turned round and come back out. The day before, you’d come through clear. You know it’s low because it goes on the sounder. You think, well, there’s only two, three hours after so we should have a clear run. But it moves all the time. If you put your hand down sometimes, it’s like something’s grabbed your hand—it sucks your arm down. Probably pull it off, if it could. It’s like it’s alive, like little marbles.’ Everyone who has fished or dived in the area has been caught out by the Goodwins at some point—by the rapidity with which fogs descend, by the way in which the Sands pick themselves up and walk, by the pathways and channels silently opening or closing. When the tide is fully out, the surface of the Goodwins is solid and almost rock-like. But when the tide returns, that solidity wavers. George Carter, once a keeper on the North Goodwin lightship, wrote of a trip he took on foot out to the North Sand Head:
Beneath my feet, the sand quivered slightly. The floodtide was returning and the Goodwins were coming to life. Before my eyes the whole face of the sand began to change. The gullies, ‘fox-holes’ and swillies were linking up, and the water in them started to flow. The pleasant tinkle was gone, replaced by a more sinister sound—the soft roar of the returning flood. The Sands were losing their stability; they quaked and shook beneath my hurrying feet, while the low hummocks melted and ran like hot wax.
The returning tides can move shockingly fast; during spring tides, it races at over 5 knots on some parts of the Goodwins. No-one seems to know if the Calliper Sands (a corruption of ‘galloper’) got their name because the tide returned faster than a horse could gallop. But what is certain is that the tides in this area are unusually pronounced. In summer it is possible to hold cricket matches in areas which, two hours later, will be covered by 16 foot of water.
Perhaps the only way to negotiate them with any degree of safety is to keep some form of ‘live’ chart, which marks the changes they make as fast as the sea itself: a fixed paper chart would be out of date by the time it is printed. Though there may be an element of predictability in the way that the Sands move, regular rumblings in the Channel’s own internal equilibrium means that any skipper who comes too close may
find himself watching uselessly as the depth finder registers 40 metres, then 20, 15, 10 . . . 5 . . . 2 . . . To exacerbate matters further, the Goodwins have proved difficult to light and mark. Over the centuries various attempts have been made to alert sailors with fixed lights driven into the chalk bottom. None have proved successful. Nor did an 1841 proposal to build a harbour and breakwater in Trinity Bay between the South Goodwins and the South Calliper. The alternative option—the four light vessels presently moored at the northern, southern, western and eastern extremities of the Sands—have proved as vulnerable as any other ship. In 1954, the South Goodwins light vessel broke her moorings in a gale and was driven ashore on the very spot she was supposed to be marking. All seven of her crew were drowned when she capsized; the only survivor was a birdwatcher visiting from the Ministry of Agriculture.
While the other two dive, Pete remains on board, halfman, half-rubber. The computerised chart shows us twisting ourselves into an electronic scribble. Inside the wheelhouse the depth finder pans round the ocean floor, reducing water and sand to a tiger-striped carpet of colour. Stones and hummocks of sand appear as black, but every so often the screen scans past a spike of red metal—a cannon, a binnacle, possibly a submarine conning tower. The graph gives all of this information quite calmly. It does not include reality’s grainy visibility, its shifting temperatures or its difficulties with subaqueous breathing. According to the computer, everything from top to bottom exists in air-bright water, but in reality the first 10 metres of sea filter out 90 per cent of all light. People describe diving in poor visibility in the same way others have described glaucoma: the descent into dusk, the blurriness, the confusion, the gun-barrel vision, the objects looming huge out of the grey.
The Wreckers Page 5