“At 8 of the clock I (the Colonel) saw them on sayle and it was afternoone before they were out of sight. The wind (O Providence) held very good till the next morning, to ten of the clock brought them to a place in Normandie called Fackham (Fécamp), some three miles from Havre de Grace. 15 Oct. Wenseday. They were no sooner landed, but the wind turned and a violent storm did arise soe much that the boateman was forced to cutt his cable, lost his anchor to save his boate, for which he required of me 8ll, and had it. The boate was back againe at Chichester by Friday to take his fraught.” Then follows a significant note, “I was not gone out of the towne of Brighthelmstone twoe houres but soldiers came thither to search for a tall black man 6 foot and 4 inches high.” Accounts vary as to whether the King actually came to Shoreham at all. By some it is thought that the day or two previous to his coming to an inn at Brighton were spent at Ovingdean at the house of a Mr Mansell about three miles from Brighton, or what is now Kemp Town. That the King did not always, after his Restoration, remember those who had been of service to him during the period of his adversity is proved by the story that even Tattersall was forgotten. The old seaman took a curious way of reminding his Sovereign of his neglect. He sailed the boat in which he had carried Charles to Fécamp up the Thames and moored it off Whitehall. The hint was taken. Charles directed that the brig should be taken into the Royal Navy as a fifth-rate ship of war, and renamed her the _Royal Escape_. Tattersall himself was duly appointed captain with a substantial salary, and a pension in addition of £100 per annum, an amount equal in value to about £380 of present-day money. This was also for several generations paid to Tattersall’s descendants. An ivy-clad cottage on Southwick Green is still pointed out as that in which Charles slept on the night before his escape to France. It is known as King Charles’s Cottage, but how far tradition is to be relied upon in this instance we are unable positively to assert. Shoreham harbour formerly was of much greater area than nowadays, when, as one writer puts it, “Nature has been too kind to Shoreham folk by giving them too much land, by taking from them most all the water save that which lies in the channel of the Adur.” In former times, indeed, Shoreham had some reputation for the building of fast-sailing luggers and other craft, many of which, in the last half of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries, were engaged in smuggling ventures and privateering. And who could blame the descendants of the men who suffered so much in early times from the attacks of their neighbours across Channel if they profited by the purchase of their goods in the shape of cognac and lace, or, at a pinch, helped themselves without purchase when the two countries found themselves at war? [Illustration: LOW TIDE AT LITTLEHAMPTON]