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The smaller fry of Channel shipping have crept into Dungeness or the Downs. Some of them have gone to the bottom. Two of them are breaking up on the Goodwins. The Croonah Indian liner is pounding into it all, with white decks and whistling shrouds. The passengers are below in their berths.
They then separated upon the most cordial terms; and Mrs. Lindsay, having mounted her vehicle, proceeded on her way home. She was, however, far from satisfied at the success of her interview with the Goodwins. So far as the consent of her father and mother went, all was, to be sure, quite as she could have wished it; but then, as to Alice herself, there might exist an insurmountable difficulty.
This anchorage, of historic interest, is called the Downs possibly from the French les Dunes, or 'the Sands, a derivation which, so far as I know, was first suggested by myself and is sheltered from the easterly gales to some extent by the Goodwins.
As I tumbled out to go down it was three o'clock. The Third was standing by the reversing gear and I saw by the vacuum gauge that the temperature of the sea was down to forty-eight degrees. 'Fog, sir? says the Third. 'Aye, I said. 'Shut your injection a little. We're off the Goodwins, I suppose. Everything was all right, so I climbed up to look.
So warm, so silent, so lonely was the place that it might have been an island in the Pacific; and upon the same yellow sandbank there basked, quite within view, a great, large-eyed seal. At last we found our way out of the heart of the Goodwins, and got into the deep, wide swatchway called the Ramsgate Man's Bight.
It was a familiar proceeding to all concerned. Many a time before had the Ramsgate boat and steamer rescued men and women and little ones from the jaws of death on the Goodwins, but they were about to experience a few novelties that night. It was very dark, so that the boat had much difficulty in finding the brig.
They thus form a natural and useful breakwater towards the east, creating the anchorage of the Downs. In an easterly gale, notwithstanding the protection of the Goodwins, there is a very heavy and even tremendous sea in the Downs, for the Goodwin Sands lie low in the water, and when they are covered by the tide as they always are at high water the protection they afford is much diminished.
But before this dramatic conclusion, the Kingsdown lifeboat slipped her anchor, to which she never could have got back, and setting her mast and double-reefed storm-foresail, ran away before the wind through the 'heavy boiling surf' on the Goodwins. These are the coxswain's own written words, and I can only repeat they are below the grim reality.
The Royal Arch was drifting at night from her anchorage in the Downs, in an easterly gale towards the surf-beaten shore. The Edina was in the most imminent peril on the edge of the Brake Sand. The Mandalay was on the Goodwins itself, and to save a vessel and her cargo from the Goodwins is no easy task.
Here was a January midnight, black as a wolf's throat thermometer 15° below freezing, a mountainous surf on the Goodwins, and only twelve brave men to face it all; but those twelve men were the heroes of a hundred fights, and were determined to save the men on the wreck or die for it.
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