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Updated: August 21, 2024
At any rate the Mandalay mistook her bearings, and managed to get into the very heart of the Goodwin Sands. In the darkness she probably sailed into what is called the Ramsgate Man's Bight, though this is only a conjecture. This bight is a swatchway of deep water, and the Mandalay then struck the Sands on the eastern jaw of another channel into the Goodwins.
This swatchway runs N.E. and S.W., and leads from the deep water outside the Goodwins into the inmost recesses of the Sands; that is, into a shallowish bay called Trinity Bay; and it is much harder to get out of this bay than to get in, like many a scrape of another kind. The swatchway leading into Trinity Bay was about seven fathoms deep, but only fifty fathoms or one hundred yards wide.
The strain of the second tug-boat was now felt by the moving vessel, and then came the scrapes and the crunches and the thumps as she was pulled over the sand towards the deep swatchway. Her head sails were set, to pay her head off still more, and at last the victorious tug-boats pulled her safe into the swatchway, accompanied by the lifeboat.
In the end we traversed the Steil Sand again, but by a different swatchway, and anchored, after an arduous day, in a notch on its eastern limit, just clear of the swell that rolled in from the turbulent estuary of the Elbe. The night was fair, and when the tide receded we lay perfectly still, the fresh wind only sending a lip-lip of ripples against our sides. 13 The Meaning of our Work
The Mandalay was then towed out of the swatchway by the Cambria into deep water, and round the Goodwin Sands, with the lifeboat alongside her, into the anchorage of the Downs by the half-divided hawser.
The men of the lifeboat, now cold, wearied, and hungry, managed to get an exceedingly frugal meal of tea and some bread and meat, and about 4 or 5 p.m. the light N.W. breeze fell away to a calm. Towards 7 p.m. the Champion lugger at anchor hoisted her light, to indicate the channel or swatchway by which the Mandalay would have to come out if ever she moved at all.
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.
But the most furious sea raged on the western jaw of the deep swatchway; there currents and cross seas met, and the breakers rose up and clashed and struck together in weightier masses and with especial fury. Now a black cloud covered the moon, and again as it swept away came the clear moonlight, but in the darkness and in the moonlight the scene was equally tremendous.
It was now about 3 p.m., and the tide was again falling when the lugger Champion, of Ramsgate, appeared and anchored in the swatchway spoken of above. Some of her crew also went on board the Mandalay, and under the directions and advice of Roberts and Hanger, the two Deal coxswains, who were determined to win, all hands turned to throwing overboard the cargo to lighten the vessel.
At one o'clock this wild winter morning the time came for a final effort to float the ship; and the steam-tug Cambria that had been waiting outside the Sands now moved in, and, guided by the riding light of the Champion lugger, anchored for this purpose in the swatchway, was cautiously manoeuvred in through the narrow channel, and feeling her way with the lead at great risk came even into the broken water in which the Mandalay was lying.
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