Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 edition. Excerpt: ... on the goodwins. On a fine, calm day from the height of the cliffs betwixt Eamsgate and Broadstairs you may spy at low-water time a yellow vein, like a thin winding of pale gold, a hand's breath this side of the horizon--the famous and fatal Goodwin Sands. I suppose there is no shoal in the whole world that a man whose sympathies are with sailors can view with more interest. Starting from the North Sand Head, which is almost abreast of Ramsgate, and looking east, the eye follows the south-westerly sweep of the Goodwins until the Downs are embraced with all their dim tracery of spars and rigging and faint sinuous lines of steamers' smoke beyond, whilst the giant South Foreland acclivity stares down upon the lightship abreast of St. Margaret's Bay, marking the extreme limits in the south and west of the deadliest stretch of sands upon the face of the globe. Who can view the Goodwins without thinking of the treasures which lie buried in their heart, of the hundreds of ships which have gone to pieces upon them, of the thousands of human corpses which have floated out of their flashing surf to be stranded upon some distant beach, or to drift, maybe for days, upon the bosom of the tides, looking up with blind faces to heaven through the green transparent lid of their sea coffin? There is no spot that has ever been the theatre of wilder human suffering. Again and again as you sail past you see forking up out of them some Mack gibbet-like relic of a wreck a week, a fortnight, a month old. Something of the kind is always visible, as though even on the tenderest of summer days, when the blue water sleeps around, and the heavens are a violet hollow, with a rayless sun making gold of the sea in the west, the deadly suggestiveness of that long sweep...