Goodwin Sands

The Goodwin Sands are a 10-mile-long sand bank in the North Sea, close by the narrow channel of the Straits of Dover. The sands lie six miles east off Deal in Kent. The Brake Bank lying shorewards is part of the same geological unit.

The Goodwin Sands are notorious amongst mariners. They lie close to major shipping channels, hidden just beneath the surface, visible at low tide, and shifting from year to year; more than 2,000 ships are believed to have been wrecked upon the Goodwin Sands, and as a result it is marked by lightvessels and buoys.

Notable shipwrecks include the Dutch East Indiaman Rooswijk (1740), HMS Stirling Castle (1703), the Montrose (1914), and the South Goodwin Lightship itself.

Several naval battles have been fought nearby, including the Battle of Goodwin Sands in 1652 and the Battle of Dover Strait in 1917.

Navigational aids

East Goodwin Lightship

There is currently a lightship on the end of the sands, on the farthest part out, to warn ships. The sands were once covered by two lighthouses on the Kent mainland, one each at the north and south ends of the sands. The southern lighthouse is now owned by the National Trust, and the northern one is still in operation, under Trinity House.

Notable events

17th century

• John, the son of Phineas Pett of Chatham, was involved in an ordeal in the beginning of October 1624, when occurred:

"a wonderful great storm, through which many ships perished, especially in the Downs, amongst which was riding there the Antelope of His Majesty, being bound for Ireland under the command of Sir Thomas Button, my son John then being a passenger in her. A merchant ship, being put from her anchors, came foul of her, and put her also from all her anchors, by means whereof she drove upon the brakes [the Sands], where she beat off her rudder and much of the run abaft, miraculously escaping utter loss of all, for that the merchant ship that came foul of her, called the Dolphin, hard by her utterly perished, both ship and all the company. Yet it pleased God to save her, and got off into the downs, having cut all her masts by the board, and with much labour was kept from foundering."

Phineas Pett received news of the shipwreck at Deal, and was dispatched by the Lord Admiral to attend to the ship and use his best means to save her. He used chain pumps, replaced the rudder, and fitted jury masts, by which effort she was safely brought to Deptford Dock.

• In 1690 HMS Vanguard, a 90-gun second-rate ship of the line, struck the Sands, but was fortunate enough to be got off by the boatmen of Deal.

Great Storm of 1703

In the Great Storm of 1703 at least 13 men-of-war and 40 merchant vessels were wrecked in the Downs, with the loss of 2,168 lives and 708 guns. Yet, to their credit, the Deal boatmen were able to rescue 200 men from this ordeal.

Naval vessels lost to the storm on the sands in that one storm included:

• HMS Northumberland, lost with all hands
• HMS Restoration, lost with all hands
• HMS Stirling Castle
• HMS Mary, totally overwhelmed with the loss of 343 men
• HMS Mortar, a boom ship, lost with all 65 of her crew

18th and 19th centuries

According to legend the Lady Lovibond was wrecked on the Goodwin Sands on 13 February 1748, with the loss of all hands. Of which wreck lurid tales of murder and rivalry in love are told, and she is said to reappear every fifty years as a ghost ship. No references to the shipwreck are known to exist in contemporary records or sources, including newspapers, Lloyd's List or Lloyd's Register.

The brig Mary White was wrecked on the Sands in a storm in 1851; seven men of her crew were rescued by the lifeboat from Broadstairs.

20th century

Wreck of the Mahratta

The Belgian cargo ship Cap Lopez was wrecked on the sands in 1907.

Two ships named Mahratta ran aground on the Sands; one in 1909 and the other in 1939.

The passenger ship Chusan collided with the freighter Prospector near the Sands in June 1953, severely damaging and nearly sinking her.

The Radio Caroline vessel Ross Revenge drifted onto the Sands in November 1991 during a storm at sea, effectively ending the era of offshore pirate radio in Britain.

A Dornier Do 17 Z2 made an emergency landing in the sea over the sands on 26 August 1940 after a bombing raid. Two of the four man crew were killed on impact, the remaining crew becoming POWs. The Dornier was located on the sands in September 2008 and plans are being made to recover it, as it is the only aircraft of this type in existence.

Proposals for reclamation

The August 1969 issue of Dock and Harbour Authority magazine carried an article 'A National Roadstead' which reported on a 1968 proposal to the Ministry of Transport for construction of a deep water port on the reclaimed Goodwin Sands. In 1985 consultants Sir Bruce White Wolfe Barry and Partners promoted a proposal for developing an International Freeport combined with a two runway airport located on three reclaimed islands on the sands. In 2003, the idea was reported to be still under consideration. Being far from residential areas it has the advantage of 24 hour-a-day take-offs and landings without causing disturbance.

The "Island of Lomea"

In 1817, in connection with a plan by Trinity House to erect a lighthouse on the Sands, bores were sunk which revealed, beneath fifteen feet of sand, a stratum identified by Charles Lyell as London clay lying upon a chalk basement. Based on this, Lyell proposed that the Sands were the eroded remains of a clay island similar to the Isle of Sheppey, rather than a mere shifting of the sea bottom shaped by currents and tides. Lyell's assessment was uncritically followed until the mid-twentieth century, and enlarged upon by G B Gattie who asserted, based on unsourced legends, that the sands were once the fertile low-lying island of Lomea, which he equated with an island said to be known to the Romans as Infera Insula ("Low Island"). This, Gattie said, was owned in the first half of the 11th century by Godwin, Earl of Wessex, after whom the sands are named. When he fell from favour, the land was supposedly given to St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, whose abbot failed to maintain the sea walls, leading to the island's destruction, some say, in the storm of 1099 mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. However, the island is not mentioned in the Domesday Book, suggesting that if it existed it may have been inundated before that work was compiled in 1085–86.

The earliest written record of the name "Lomea" seems to be in the De Rebus Albionicis (published 1590) by John Twyne, but no authority for the island's existence is given. There is a brief mention of a sea-tide inundation in 1092 creating the Godwin sands in a 19th century book of agricultural records, re-issued in 1969.

The modern geological view is that the island of Lomea probably never existed.

As to the origin of the name "Goodwin Sands", ownership of the supposed island by Godwine was proposed without any evidence. Another theory is that the sands' name comes from the Old English god wine meaning "good friend"; an ironic name given by sailors.

Cricket

In the summer of 1824, Captain K Martin, then the Harbourmaster at Ramsgate, instituted the proceedings of the first known cricket match on the Goodwin Sands, at low water. Such was the tenacity of local mariners that a tradition sprang up that survives to this day, whereby those so inclined make the journey to the Sands for a leisurely few hours in pursuit of this very British pastime.

When hovercraft ran from Dover, they used to make occasional trips to the sands. An annual cricket match was until 2003 played on the sands at low tide, and a crew filming a reconstruction of this for the BBC television series Coast had to be rescued by the Ramsgate lifeboat when they experienced difficulty in 2006.

Literary references

• William Shakespeare mentions the Sands in The Merchant of Venice, Act 3 Scene 1:

Why, yet it lives there uncheck'd that Antonio hath
a ship of rich lading wrecked on the narrow seas;
the Goodwins, I think they call the place; a very
dangerous flat and fatal, where the carcasses of many
a tall ship lie buried, as they say, if my gossip
Report be an honest woman of her word.

• Herman Melville mentions them in Moby-Dick, Chapter VII, The Chapel:

In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands...

• R M Ballantyne's wrote the adventure story The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands, published in 1870.
• W H Auden quotes the phrase "to set up shop on Goodwin Sands" in his poem In Sickness and in Health. This is a proverbial expression meaning to be shipwrecked.
• G K Chesterton's poem The Rolling English Road refers to "the night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands."
• Charles Spurgeon mentions them in The Soul Winner, chapter 15 "Encouragement to Soul-Winners."

Their theology shifts like the Goodwin Sands, and they regard all firmness as so much bigotry.

• Ian Fleming refers to the Goodwin Sands in Moonraker, one of the James Bond novels, as well as making them a major plot point in his children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
• The sands are depicted in the 1929 film The Lady from the Sea, which is sometimes known by the title of Goodwin Sands.

Outside links

• The Goodwin Sands 2009 survey. The United Kingdom Hydrographic Office.
• An historical sketch, including a map of the sands and their environs
• Historic Deal information on the Goodwin Sands

References

Books

• Richard Larn and Bridget Larn - Shipwrecks of the Goodwin Sands (Meresborough Books, 1995) ISBN 0-948193-84-0
• Steve Conway - Shiprocked - Life On The Waves With Radio Caroline (Liberties Press, Dublin, 2009) ISBN 978-1-905483-62-4 (author gives his account of running aground on the Goodwin Sands and helicopter rescue)
• Raymond Lamont Brown - 'Phantom’s of the Sea' (Taplinger Publishing Company, NY 1972) ISBN 0-8008-5556-6