Shallow Waters

By C. R. Benstead

In this unusual book, Benstead tells how the men of the British Isles have matched their skill and courage against the menace of the surrounding sea. The fishermen, life-boatmen, the smugglers and hovellers, the men of the Royal Navy and the Merchant Service and the pilots of Trinity House - these are the actors in a drama of almost casual heroism. It is through their eyes that we see their triumphs and disasters, and the diversity of adventures.

The Armada gales that never blew: the tragedy and glory of the old collier brigs; the place of Scapa Flow in our island history; the fate of the only lighthouse ever built on the Goodwins; what happened at Jutland; what happened when a future King of England was wrecked on the Leman shoal; when the captain of the Vryheid refused to take a pilot; when a party of emigrants lit a fire in a sailing ship's ventilator in order to boil a kettle; and when three young men and a rising lady-novelist disguised themselves as Abyssinian princes and inspected England's latest and most secret battleship - from these random incidents and topics may be seen the scope of a narrative that lacks nothing in entertainment and is often deeply moving. The story of the shallows unfolds as a story of men unceasingly at war with waters where for centuries they have found their sustenance and made a highway for commerce. It is a timely reminder of our heritage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448206087

C. R. Benstead

Mr. C. R. Benstead, a graduate of Cambridge University, has been both soldier and sailor. In the First World War he was mentioned in despatches after the controversial Passchendaele battle in 1917, and won the Military Cross in the fighting near Amiens that followed the great German offensive in 1918. His book Retreat, written against the background of the ill-fated British Fifth Army, created world-wide interest. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was Meteorological Officer of the aircraft-carrier Furious, in which he continued to serve for over two years and he finished the war on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, British Pacific Fleet. After retiring from the Navy, he was, at one time, Senior Proctor of the University.

Book preview

SHALLOW WATERS

by

C. R. BENSTEAD

Contents

Chapter

Preface

I Bound in Shallows

II The Shallow Sea

III Men in Lifeboats

IV Forgotten Fleets

V London’s River

VI Thames Delta

VII Isle of a Great Man

VIII Shippe Swalower

IX Private Enterprise

X Lights across the Water

XI War in the Shallows

XII Wreck of the Sea

XIII Lodemanage

XIV Battles on the Banks

XV Free Trade

XVI The Bridge

XVII Scapa Flow

XVIII Queer Fish

XIX Under the Wight

XX The Apostolic Occupation

XXI The Bay of Royal Blue

XXII Fire on the Water

XXIII North-Western Approach

XXIV The Brotherhood

Preface

NOT LONG ago, after finding two irreconcilable accounts of the same episode, I asked a Cambridge historian what he considered the normal error of his colleagues in their presentation of historical incident, and I suggested ten per cent. He was very brave. I think my estimate astonished him more than the question, for his explanation that historians are concerned with trends and influences rather than detail left me in no doubt that he considered ten per cent far too low. The errors referred to here do not include those usually ascribed to the printer, of course, notable though some of them are. In particular I recall a mishap in the date of a wreck which prolonged the agony of her drowning crew for twenty years.

The problem of choosing between contradictory statements set a task in the writing of this book to which even the middle course was not always a solution, as when Sir William Hillary broke three ribs according to one authority and six according to another. Then there was the difficulty of keeping up with an ever-changing scene, a difficulty which the Official History of the War at Sea, published ten years after the war ended, obviously experienced, and failed to overcome, by sending one of His Majesty’s ships into battle with the armament which was removed from her, and replaced by a more effective pattern, before the war even started. But so small a solecism can never detract from the official courage in admitting that consistency really is the bugbear of little minds by leaving the reader to choose for himself between Skaggerak, Skagerak and Skagerrak for the spelling of that troublesome word.

All in all I feel I have, if not exactly licence, at least an august precedent for any lapses in chronology and consistency, and there is, in addition, always the historian’s comfortable umbrella to cover—I hope with something to spare—those inevitable departures from fact, the sources of which custom ordains I should now reveal in a bibliography. It is therefore just as well that there cannot be one.

In his wholly admirable Thames Estuary, Mr William Addison lists 185 authorities. Here the Thames Estuary forms a single chapter, and there are twenty-three others. So it is not unreasonable to suppose that the number of books bearing on the subject matter of ‘Shallow Waters’ runs into many hundreds, if not thousands, and readers acquainted with the immensity of the University Library at Cambridge will know that they do, just as they will know that I did not read them all! Indeed, I must confess that far more remained undisturbed on their shelves than ever I managed to consult. But it would not be altogether wide of the mark to picture me as a sort of overgrown bee flitting from flower to flower in that profitable growth, for it was there that I gathered most of my honey, and I could no more catalogue my flowers than a bee of normal size. Some I recall for the pleasure they provided, apart from their substance, such as the expert writings of Mr F. C. Bowen, the quaint disinterments of Commander Hilary Mead relating to Trinity House, and Mr Hervey Benham’s astonishingly detailed descriptions of east-coast sailing craft; but my thanks must also go to a host that unavoidably remains anonymous and even, in part, unknown, for I have used material drawn from notes compiled thirty years ago, and what they were based on the Lord alone knows. And to this nameless multitude of authors must be added librarians, curators, private gentlemen and even public servants in Government departments who set aside affairs of state in order to answer my queries, and I trust no one will feel slighted if, in valediction, I single out for particular mention the Royal National Life-boat Institution whose help has been invaluable, and those patient young ladies in the University Library who must surely have thought, ‘Heavens! It’s that man again!’ before hurrying off to ‘The Tower’—fortunately it has a lift—in search of anything from back numbers of The Listener to bygone editions of Lloyd’s List, My thanks go to them all.

C.R.B.

Cambridge, 1957

Chapter I

Bound In Shallows

When darkness fell at Whitby on the evening of Friday, the 8th of February 1861, the signs were not good. The glass was going down. The wind, hesitant earlier in the day, had settled in the south-east and was rising steadily. By dawn it was blowing a gale. For the men of Whitby this was far from a new experience, and they were under no illusions about the demands it could make on them because they had seen too often what happened when sailing fleets were caught on a lee shore in a winter’s gale. Whitby’s sands were notorious. Whitby, indeed, was among the first places in the country to have a lifeboat. Daybreak therefore found these men in oilskins and sea-boots, sheltering in little groups as they stared over a smother of foam at the surf which boiled in the shallows.

The trouble started about an hour after dawn when the Sunderland brig John and Ann drove helplessly on to the sands. Among those watching, as it chanced, were the coxswain of Whitby’s lifeboat, John Storr, and six of her crew. But the lifeboat station was some distance away, too far, in Storr’s judgment, if the brig’s crew were to be saved. So the lifeboatmen took a near-by fishing-coble and launched that. It was a hazardous undertaking in the sea which was breaking on the beach, but they themselves were men of the sea, and they not only reached the disintegrating brig and took off her crew: they brought them safely ashore.

Storr led his men to the lifeboat station, completed his own crew, and waited.

Within an hour the Newcastle schooner Gamma, taking coal to London, had run aground, but there was no need to call out the lifeboat: Storr was on his way almost before she struck, and he saved everyone on board.

No sooner had he brought them ashore than the Prussian barque Clara, bound from Newcastle to Madeira, drove on the sands. So quickly did she break up that Storr barely had time to pull the last of her crew of twelve into the lifeboat before she collapsed in a welter of tossing timber.

The brig Utility was next to ground, and even as the lifeboat strove to reach her, still with the same crew at the oars, the schooner Roe joined her in distress. Storr went first to the Utility, then to the Roe, and returned with both crews crowded in the lifeboat.

That made five—counting the John and Ann. One an hour. And the sixth followed almost immediately when the brigantine Flora tried to reach the harbour and was driven ashore in Collier Hope.

Hardly had the lifeboat attended to her than the seventh, the schooner Merchant, was seen to be helpless in the grip of the gale. It flung her on the sands where the Roe had been.

By now the afternoon was drawing on. Storr and his men were cold and wet; they had eaten no proper meal all day, and they were tired.

The lifeboat put off to the Merchant.

She had cleared the end of the pier and was forcing her way across the toppling ridges of water that raced inshore when one of them all but turned her over. Before she could recover, the next wave capsized her. Wives and families watched from the pier. For a moment Storr was seen clinging to the keel, and there were heads bobbing in the water. Then there was only one, and the men of Whitby saw a lone swimmer slowly working his way to the beach. After they had plunged into the surf and pulled him ashore, they noticed that he was wearing the regulation cork life-jacket, the only one of the crew to do so. The other twelve were drowned.

But there was still the Merchant.

Fortunately the tide was falling, and the men of Whitby were able to reach her with a rocket-line. One by one they hauled her crew to safety. Then she began to break up.

An hour later the brig Urania ran aground, and a line was successfully thrown, but the tide was now falling so rapidly that her crew decided to stay on board. At low water she was high and dry.

It was dark when the brig Tribune struck, not far from the west pier.

When they found that their rocket-line would not reach, the men of Whitby lowered their old lifeboat, the one which the lost lifeboat had replaced, and it was a volunteer crew of six master mariners, one mate, three seamen, one fisherman and two jet-ornament makers that rescued all but one of the Tribune’s crew.

So the gale that blew on the 9th of February 1861 wrote its page in Whitby’s history and died away, and when others followed, another crew in a new lifeboat answered the cry for help.

……

Because the Whitby story is dated by the craft which give it detail, a generation familiar with the two ‘Queens’ is tempted to see the disaster as one that could never happen today. Nor could it—in that detail. Mechanical power has certainly altered the setting and lessened the likelihood with a measure of safety unknown in the days of sail. But the sands and the shoals are still there. Gales have not ceased to blow.

In 1953 January went out in a tempest, and there was much distress among shipping. How the Princess Victoria sank in the Irish Sea with the loss of 128 lives is probably fresh in memory because she was not alone. But others foundered too, and there was nobody to tell of their passing—only Lloyd’s List and Shipping Gazette to post them as missing six weeks later. The Swedish steamer Aspo, laden with pit-props; the Salland, taking china-clay to Delfzyl; the coasting steamer Yew Valley; the Leopold Nera from Zeebrugge; the trawlers Catherine Duyvis and Sheldon of Grimsby, the Guava of Lowestoft and the Michael Griffith of Fleetwood—they just disappeared. And they were power-driven.

Barely a week had gone by when, on the 8th of February, the Fraserburgh lifeboat capsized outside the harbour there with the loss of six of her crew of seven, and later in the year, on the 27th of October, a similar disaster overtook the Arbroath lifeboat, again with the loss of six lives.

More recently, on the 29th of July 1956, Coxswain Grant took the Selsey lifeboat among the rocks off the Bill, and, in the course of a service that lasted ten hours, rescued seventeen men and women and a babe in arms from three yachts in a gale that touched seventy miles an hour—circumstances so perilous that he earned the Royal National Life-boat Institution’s silver medal. Altogether during the twenty-four hours covering the 28th and 29th of July that year, the Institution’s lifeboats were launched fifty-two times, a record in the 132 years of its existence, and 107 lives were saved.

Nor are these rare and isolated incidents. With varying detail they can be repeated until the Whitby episode is seen as what it is—just part of the never-ending story of the shallows. Let us then look more closely at these suspect waters and see whence their malevolence derives.

Shallowness is a relative term. To the sailor waters are shallow when they constitute a navigational hazard, but the oceanographer is dealing with abyssal depths, and where these islands are concerned he has an eye on the underwater shelf which projects from the Continent and supports them. The boundary of that is roughly the 100-fathom line; beyond lies the deep water, and all these islands are therefore technically ‘bound in shallows’.

West of Ireland, at its nearest, the 100-fathom line is some fifty miles off Blacksod Point. It then runs north and east between the Shetlands and the Faeroes, curves south on the far side of the North Sea and briefly penetrates the Skagerrak before bending back and identifying itself with the coast of Norway at Kristiansand. This submarine valley draining the Baltic, as it were, gives the North Sea its only deep water apart from a few pot-holes off Buchan Ness and the Forth.

The real shallows around these islands lie in the southern half of the North Sea and in the Channel at its eastern end, but that is not to say the western seaboard is entirely unobstructed. The Solway Firth is renowned for its sandy flats even though it is off the shipping routes, and Liverpool Bay, which is not, is no more popular in a fog than the Thames Estuary. Nor are sands the only hazards. The Seven Sisters between the Scillies and Cornwall are as wicked a bunch of rocks as ever uncovered at three-quarters ebb, and the Eddystone needs no introduction. Scarcely less famous is the Bell Rock, twelve miles off the mouth of the Tay. Southey knew it as the Inchcape. There is, however, no warning bell for anyone to ‘cut from the float’ today. Since 1811 a slender white tower, supporting a lantern ninety-three feet above high water, has stood on this all-but-submerged mass of red sandstone. Robert Stevenson, the grandfather of R. L., built it, and it is the oldest rock lighthouse still in use. But not the first. That distinction goes to the Eddystone.

Of recent years the Bell Rock light has acquired something of a history of its own with a touch of mystery as well. That the 11,000-ton armoured cruiser Argyll should pile herself on the reef and become a total wreck—this on the night of the 28th of October 1915—is readily explained: she was off course; the war was on, and the light was not therefore burning. Less clear is the reason why it was not put on while the Argyll was in the vicinity, as the naval authorities are said to have requested. Fortunately no lives were lost. Then, in 1941, a German aircraft machine-gunned it, and in 1955, during a fog, a helicopter crashed on its steps.

The Longstone, too, in the Farne Islands, owes much of its fame to Grace Darling’s rescue work when the Forfarshire struck near by in 1838, just as the Daunt Rock off Queenstown, or Cobh, is associated with one of the more incredible exploits of a lifeboat in 1936; but Rockall, out in the Atlantic some two hundred miles west of the Hebrides, was for most people probably no more than a name in a weather forecast for shipping until it was formally annexed to the British Commonwealth in 1955. Yet even this solitary, almost unclimbable, haunt of guillemots and kittiwakes, a pinnacle of granite little more than eighty feet in diameter and seventy feet high, has had its moments, for in 1811 the captain of the frigate Endymion mistook its bird-limed summit for the sails of a ship and gave chase. The discovery that her quarry was no more than a rock seems to have roused a praiseworthy curiosity among her officers, and on the 8th of September an amateur surveying party led by Lieutenant Basil Hall, R.N., made the first recorded landing, Hall himself ascending to the ledge which bears his name. But Endymion is not alone in being deceived. One night during the First World War another of His Majesty’s ships is said to have given the birds a salvo when they failed to answer her challenge. There is, however, no doubt that H.M.S. Vidal knew what she was doing when she took possession on the 18th of September 1955, for her ‘boarding party’ planted a flag and gave notice depriving the birds of ownership with a plaque firmly cemented in the rock. ‘Security’ made this acquisition desirable when the area was chosen as a testing-range for guided missiles. But one cannot help feeling that H.M.S. Vidal cheated by using a helicopter.

Within the 100-fathom line to the north and west of the Hebrides are the ‘Remote Islands’ of Scotland, the stacks and skerries and cliff-girt inhospitable projections from the water which have been uninhabited, except by the keepers of the Flannan light, since the last crofters were taken off St Kilda in 1930. There is also a mystery about this light. During Christmas week in 1940, all three keepers disappeared without trace—swept away by the sea, it is thought.

The reason for the presence of these isolated rocks and islands equally well explains the existence of the British Isles themselves: they are what remained above water when a rising sea submerged the Continental Shelf.

While the last glaciation was at its height some fifty thousand years ago, the ice-sheet lay across England almost to the Thames; the level of the sea had fallen by two hundred feet, if not more, and Neanderthal man could walk along the chalk ridge between what are now Dover and Calais. Before that, as the ice-sheet grew and the sea retreated, the rivers lengthened in pursuit. The Thames joined the Rhine; the Seine flowed along the broad valley betweeen England and France, leaving us today with the Hurd Deep as evidence of its progress; and all along the western seaboard of Scotland underwater contours suggest the drainage system of extensive highlands. There was no English Channel; no Bristol Channel; only dry land where now the great ships pass. Then, yet again, the waters rose.

A secondary consequence of glaciation results from the resilience of the Earth’s crust. This slowly sinks under the weight of the ice-sheet and just as slowly rises when the ice melts, and it may be doing so at the moment. Something is tilting these islands down to the south-east. Of that there is no doubt. Even such modest amounts as three millimetres a year become appreciable over the centuries, and this fact by itself does much to explain why sands which regularly dried on the ebb a few hundred years ago are now covered at every state of the title, and why the level of the sea on the Essex shore of the Thames Estuary is now some twelve feet higher than it was in Roman times. At high water in its lower reaches today the Thames is, in fact, an aqueduct. How long this tilting is likely to continue no one can say, but the 1954 excavations for the South Denes Generating Station at Great Yarmouth did reveal evidence of earlier levels which suggest that the present movement, far from being a steady sinking, is merely part of a periodic rise and fall, each phase of which lasts about a thousand years. If that is so, the East Anglian coast is nearing the end of a descent.¹

The origin of the Dover Strait is also a matter for conjecture. Geologists acknowledge no great cataclysm as the cause, but suggest two long-term possibilities. Once the English Channel had formed, with storm waves funnelled into its apex under the spur of southwesterly gales, the normal erosion of sea and weather on a chalk ridge would ultimately produce a breach. On the other hand, the glacial lake which must have been impounded between the melting ice and the ridge in what is now the southern part of the North Sea would inevitably rise until it spilled over the lowest col, and once that occurred the narrow gorge which just as inevitably resulted would, in course of time, be worn away to the comparatively broad and shallow strait which now exists.

After the land was freed of ice, and the waters had flooded upon it, what was left above them was a plaything for the waves, pounded and scoured by storm and tide and often eaten away. It is not necessary to go to the West Indies for winds of hurricane force—65 knots on the Beaufort scale; nearly 75 m.p.h., that is—for depressions sweep in from the Atlantic bringing gales of alarming violence at times. ‘Phenomenal’ is their official classification, but those who respect the language of the Bible and strive to keep it holy will prefer, I think, the modesty of Admiral Sir William Monson who ‘met with so great a storm and grown seas’ when crossing from the Hebrides to Ireland in 1614 that, he said, ‘it were fitter for a poet than for me to describe it’. Nevertheless, to a well-found ship in open waters, properly handled—Monson’s were not, for one was ‘swallowed’—such seas are not especially dangerous. It is when the water is shallow and the waves touch bottom that danger arises. That is because the water itself now surges forward so that crests topple and crash, and even small undulations rear up and threaten. Seas are always short and steep in shallow waters when strong winds blow.

On shelving beaches storm waves lift themselves to formidable heights, and the blows they deal are titanic. Twice they have swept away Wick’s sadly-named breakwater, the second time lightly tossing aside a piece of it weighing some two thousand tons. And what they can do on shelving beaches they can also do on the Goodwin and Haisborough Sands, in Whitby Bay and all the other shoals around these islands. That is why even sizeable ships have little chance of survival if they ground in a really bad storm. Held fast by rock or sand, they are like Wick’s breakwater. They cannot withstand the battering they receive for long.

That is also why the lifeboats that go to their assistance are no ordinary boats. When Coxswain Patrick Sliney took the Ballycotton lifeboat to the Daunt Rock light-vessel in February 1936, the sea and a wind of hurricane force were between them tearing blocks of stone weighing a ton from the pier and flinging them about ‘like lumps of sugar’, and as the lifeboat forced her way past the lighthouse ‘she met seas so mountainous that their spray was flying over the lantern 196 feet high’.

The part that the tide plays in the shallow-water story is in many ways that of an undercover agent, for it hides its ceaseless attack on man’s crumbling refuge with a seemingly innocent rise and fall, and conspires with the gale to make sport of his puny defences.

The tidal wave proper, the parent wave, is the one that follows the moon down south in the roaring forties. It is an offshoot which afflicts these islands, and that divides when it reaches them, one part to flow up-Channel while the other makes its way round the Orkneys and into the North Sea that way. For this reason spring tides, the highest of all, are two days after full moon in the Channel and two and a half on the east coast.

Off the Flemish coast where the two branches meet, there are tidal abnormalities which are repeated in the Solent where the Channel wave itself divides when it reaches the Isle of Wight. Here one part enters by the Needles and the other by Spithead. Local configuration does the rest, and the result is that, instead of the usual rise and fall, Portsmouth has two low waters with nearly three hours between them, Southampton two high waters with two hours between, and the tides generally are so bedevilled that special tables have to be issued for their prediction under the Wight.

Farther west, where Portland Bill makes a gigantic groyne, there is a double low water known as the Gulder, and the tide also gives Portland its race. But these periodic upheavals of an otherwise placid sea are characteristic of headlands. On the south coast Dungeness alone escapes them, the tide there, one suspects, being too busy enlarging its handiwork to indulge in frivolous acrobatics.

It is drift, however, that is the menace. Not unexpectedly, this movement is east in the Channel and south in the North Sea, and in both the results are spectacular. Each tide, it is said, takes pebbles from Selsey Bill and plants them on Dungeness, just as, round the corner, each adds its quota to Orford Ness. In passing, maybe, it has yet another meal off the gravel and chalk of East Anglian cliffs, or the boulder clay of those north of Spurn Point where wartime pill-boxes are already on the way to becoming underwater obstructions.

Over the years the cumulative effect of this incessant gnawing, assisted by storms of unusual violence, is both catastrophic and all-conquering. On the Holderness coast of Yorkshire, where whole villages have been swept away, the loss since Roman times can now be measured in miles, and that is probably true of the Suffolk coast as well. Nor is man himself always guiltless. At Harwich he spent thirty years in digging away (and selling) some million tons of ‘cement stone’ from Cobbold Point and Beacon Hill, the two natural groynes, and then, after Landguard Spit had grown until it blocked the main channel, he had to devote a comparable period (and much money) to building artificial ones so that Harwich should avoid the fate of Orford.

But nowhere has the change been quite so spectacular in its scenic and economic consequences as along that stretch of the Kent and Sussex shore which, not so very long ago, provided the Cinque Ports of Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, Romney and Hastings. Later these were increased to seven with Rye and Winchelsea, and there were ‘limbs’, or lesser associates, such as Seaford, Pevensey, Hydney and Northeye.

At the time of the Norman kings Dungeness did not exist. Small islands and sandbanks lay off shore, creating an anchorage that surpassed the Downs. Pevensey stood on a promontory in a lagoon that reached back to Hailsham, and the Rother estuary took in Romney Marsh. The Sussex Ouse was navigable as far as Lewes; Seaford was its port; Sandwich, Rye, Winchelsea, Romney and Lydd all stood on islands; and protecting the western flank against tidal menace, then probably unsuspected, were Beachy Head and other buttresses even more prominent than they are today when Lydd is a sleepy little town separated from the sea by six thousand acres of shingle, and Winchelsea slumbers in green fields surrounded by sheep.

The sea played a particularly mean practical joke on Winchelsea.

In the hour of its pride Gwent-chesel-ey—the Island of Shingle on the Level—contributed no fewer than ten ships to the fleet of fifty-seven which the Cinque Ports provided for the king in exchange for privilege, and it was one of the chief ports in the country. But in 1236 the sea began to encroach alarmingly, and fourteen years later came the storm when the terrified inhabitants saw waves burning in the dark as if they were on fire, and, as Holinshed put it, ‘forced contrarie to his natural course, the sea flowed twice without ebbing, yeelding such a rooring that the same was heard (not without great woonder) a farre distance from the shore’. Six churches, three hundred houses and many ships were destroyed in that disaster, but even so the sea had to rise again and submerge the whole town—this in 1287—before the survivors would acknowledge defeat by building a new Winchelsea three miles away on the spur that runs down from the Weald. Edward I encouraged them, and until the end of the fifteenth century they knew something of their old prosperity. Then, almost as suddenly as it had risen, the sea withdrew, leaving its victim stranded, without a livelihood, and in due course Evelyn was to record in his diary that he walked over from Rye ‘to survey the ruins of Winchelsea’.

The destruction of the Cinque Ports began when the chalk of Beachy Head and Fairlight yielded sufficiently to open this stretch of coast to the fury of south-west gales. The protective fringe of islands then disappeared; Dungeness began to grow, shingle bars piled across the mouths of rivers; very soon not only Winchelsea but Seaford, Pevensey and Lydd were fast becoming inland villages; and though the Cinque Ports of Dover, Hastings, Hythe, Sandwich and Rye all sent ships to help Elizabeth I against the Armada, their old effectiveness had gone. Today Dover is synthetic, and Bexhill covers the deep indentation of Bulverhythe which once added so much to Hastings harbour.

Elsewhere the sea’s encroachments keep to a sadly familiar pattern. Off the Atherfield Ledge in the Isle of Wight at low-water springs one can roam among the fallen tree trunks of what was probably a forest when the Solent was a river; and to the east of the Bill, in a deer park drowned in the sixteenth century, lie, it is thought, the foundations of Selsey cathedral. Men say its bells still ring when the sea is rough, but church bells always do in legend. Dunwich, indeed, must be quite noisy in a gale, for twenty-five churches are said to have been drowned there.

The bells of Bowness, however, do not wait for a gale. They were dropped in the Solway by Scottish raiders and ring their vespers in the quiet of the dying day. In retaliation the English acquired two from the other side, and it seems to have become traditional that from time to time the minister of Dornoch, near Annan, should formally request their return, and that the English vicar should no less formally promise their immediate dispatch as soon as his own are delivered.

There are also submerged forests in these parts, off Redkirk Point on the Scottish side and from Silloth to Allonby Bay on the English, but farther north in the drowned valleys of the highlands, an iron-" hard coast lifts itself from deeper waters, and the story is one of roosts and races rather than simple erosion. Here the north-moving branch of the tidal wave spills its waters through the island barrier of the Hebrides, and the result at times is formidable: at Corryvreckan the underwater contours produce a vortex as dangerous as any around these shores. Then, too, the Pentland Firth is notorious. In 1935 the 3,000-ton Swedish motor-vessel Gunnaren was flung on the Swona rocks.

Shallow waters, it would therefore seem, are not of the friendliest, and that is true. Yet, locally, they do have some redeeming features. The Downs and the Yarmouth Roads are shallow enough as navigable waters go. Nevertheless they provided two of the most famous open anchorages these islands had to offer in the days of sail, and they did so for no other reason than that they are protected from seaward by sandbanks, the Downs by the Goodwins and the Yarmouth Roads by the Scroby and Corton and others. At the turn of the century west-bound sailing vessels could still be seen in their hundreds, waiting in the Downs when the wind was foul, and during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the east-coast traffic was at its height, it was by no means uncommon to find as many as a thousand sail off Yarmouth, mostly collier brigs from Newcastle and neighbouring ports crowding with the fishing fleets as they rode out a north-east gale. The record appears to have been reached in 1838 when some two thousand vessels, which had been lying there windbound, sailed for the south at the moment a north-bound fleet arrived, and nearly three thousand vessels passed through the Roads in five hours.

Here, then, are two localities—and Spithead, Weymouth and Cawsand are others—where misery was not the inevitable consequence of entering shallow water, though it must be conceded that the loss of life among those who sought their shelter was grievous enough on occasion, as when the Great Storm of 1703 struck the Downs. It should merely be borne in mind that open anchorages are not harbours with all-round protection.

Nor should it be forgotten that shallow waters provided the fish that kept the population of these islands alive throughout the Middle Ages, and that even now they add a little variety to the national diet.

Moreover it is even possible to say something in their general defence, for winds are not always boisterous beneath the grey wrack of a storm. Fine and gentle days are not unknown. Then the sea sparkles, and the shore is gay and inviting, a colourful frieze against distant hills. Once in a while, too—a very long while, admittedly—you may find yourself in a world of luminous unreality, a breathless dazzling world of palest blue in which the sea about you lies devoid of ripple or swell, a mirror to the sky into which it melts. No horizon holds the eye, only the shining haze. And if the land should poke a rocky finger at you, it is there but momentarily, a faint discoloration quickly lost, like stars at sunset. At times like these the temptation to think that the sea is made for man’s delight is strong. But it will pass. The morrow may well bring fog.

Green days in forests belong to the past, but shallow waters can still provide blue days at sea.

Chapter II

The Shallow Sea

O wha is this has done this deed

And tauld the king o’ me,

To send us out, at this time o’ year

To sail upon the sea?

THE BALLAD OF SIR PATRICK SPENS

If by its colour a sea should be known, then undoubtedly the North Sea would be grey, and a cold forbidding grey at that, for it is not a kindly sea. Even when the sky is clear, its sunlit waters are never the pellucid blue of deep water in mid-ocean. They carry too much sand and silt and organic life, the plankton and minute algae which not only introduce shades of yellow and brown into our own coastal waters, but, farther afield, sufficient colour to name a sea red.

Little, indeed, can be said in favour of the North Sea beyond that it is part of our island moat; that Thomas Dekker’s description of the sea as ‘that great fish pond’ applies to it: that Burnham-on-Crouch and its neighbours provide yachtsmen with