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Updated: May 22, 2025
Dungeness was drawing nearer slowly, to appearances, and I was beginning to look out for a pilot; when Talcott, who had the watch, about three in the morning, came with breathless haste into the cabin, to tell me there was a sail closing with us fast, and, so far as he could make her out in the darkness, she was lugger-rigged.
Comte de Saxe is veritably at Dunkirk, since Saturday, March 1st: busy shipping his 15,000; equipments mostly shipped, and about 10,000 of the men: all is activity there; Roquefeuille hanging about Dungeness, with four of his twenty great ships detached for more immediate protection of Saxe and those Dunkirk industries.
So on, before "a fair Etesian gale," which follows clear and bright out of the south-southwest, glide forward the two great fleets, past Brighton Cliffs and Beachy Head, Hastings and Dungeness. Is it a battle or a triumph?
Proceeding up the strait about seventy miles, a long low sandy point attracted Vancouver's attention; from its resemblance to Dungeness, on the coast of Kent, he named it New Dungeness, and found within it good anchorage in from ten to three fathoms; beyond this the coast forms a deep bay about nine miles across; and three miles from its eastern point lies Protection Island, so named from the position it occupies at the entrance of Port Discovery.
That outlook on the marsh was, indeed, one of the finest views I have ever seen. I suppose Dungeness was fifteen miles away; it lay like a raft on the sea, and farther westward were the hills by Hastings under the setting sun. Sometimes they hung close and clear, sometimes they were faded and low, and often the drift of the weather took them clean out of sight.
Meanwhile the French court proceeded with their preparations at Boulogne and Dunkirk, under the eye of the young pretender; and seven thousand men were actually embarked. M. de Roquefeuille sailed up the channel as far as Dungeness, a promontory on the coast of Kent, after having detached M. de Barreil, with five ships to hasten the embarkation at Dunkirk.
Under these circumstances, Sir Harry thought it prudent to anchor under Dungeness until he could communicate with the Admiralty. This we did; but it was a time of great anxiety, for the mutineers might consider it important to capture us, to hold Sir Harry and his officers as hostages, and to wreak their vengeance on our men. We got springs on the cable, and the ship ready for action.
With the further fortunes of the brave inventor we have no more to do, as that part of his history intimately connected with Dungeness ends here. His subsequent trials, disappointments, triumphs, all the world knows.
Not a vestige of vegetation was anywhere to be seen, and I am quite at a loss to imagine what the guanacos and ostriches, with which the chart tells us the country hereabouts abounds, find to live upon. About twelve o'clock we made Cape Virgins, looking very like Berry Head to the north of Torbay, and a long spit of low sandy land, stretching out to the southward, appropriately called Dungeness.
One of them, I saw, was on her course for France, a couple of miles away already; the other was going for Dungeness, no doubt to pick up more hands somewhere on the Dunge Marsh. It was like them, I thought, to go off like that, leaving us to have the worst of the fight and every chance of being taken; they only thought of their own necks.
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