Heroes of the Goodwin SandsTreanor, Thomas Stanley
History
Heroes of the Goodwin Sands
Treanor, Thomas Stanley
Goodwin Sands (England); Lifesaving -- Great Britain; Shipwrecks
Reading these lines in our quiet homes, and in a comfortable arm-chair
by the fireside, it is hard to realise the position of those eight
boatmen. They were drenched and buried in each wallowing sea, which
strove to tear them from the pin to which each man was belayed by the
line round his waist; and their ears were stunned with the bellow of
each bursting wave. But, on the other hand, their eyes beheld the
grand and cheering spectacle of their brethren in the lifeboat
struggling manfully with death for their sakes, and they heard their
undaunted shouts.
If for a moment they cast off or lengthened their lifelines, they were
washed all over the slippery deck; and brave George Marsh, who was
specially active, was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, having been
dashed against a corner of the wheel-house.
The wheel-house up to this time had afforded some shelter to the men
who ventured on the deck of the wreck, lashed as just explained, of
course, to some pin or bollard; and even they had now and then to rush
up the rigging when a weighter [Transcriber's note: weightier?] wave
was seen coming. But just at this time a great mass of water advanced
and wallowed clean over the wreck, carrying the wheelhouse away with
it, and bursting, where it struck the masts and booms, into a cloud: it
was too solid to burst much, but it just 'wallowed' over the wreck.
Successive seas are, of course, unlike in height, volume, and
demeanour. One comes on board and falls with a solid, heavy lop--there
may be twenty tons of blue water in it--the next rushes along with wild
speed and fury.
Roberts in the lifeboat now saw a great roller of the latter
description advancing; ready to ease his cable, he cried, 'Look out!
Look out! Hold on, my lads!'
But before Wilds, the coxswain, who was not a young man, could turn
round and grasp a thwart, the sea was on him, and drove him with great
force against the samson-post, breaking over and covering the lifeboat
fore and aft in fury. This sea would have washed every man off the
wreck if they had not had ropes round their waists, and fastened
themselves to something; and it most certainly stupefied them and
half-drowned them, fastened as they were.
The blow which Wilds in the lifeboat received would have killed him but
that he was wearing his thick cork life-belt. His health was so much
affected that he never came afloat again, and he never recovered the
strain, the shock, and the exposure of this day. He was a brave man,
and a stout, honest Englishman.
Faithful below he did his duty,
And now he's gone aloft.
And the writer has good reason for sure and certain hope that this is
so. His post as coxswain has since been filled, and nobly filled, by
R. Roberts, for many years second coxswain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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