About twenty years ago a Deal galley punt, and four men, Bowbyas, Buttress, Erridge, and Obree, skilled Deal boatmen, landed on the Goodwins to get some coal from a wrecked collier. All that is certainly known is that they never returned, and that they had been noticed by a passing barge running to and fro and waving, which the bargemen thought, alas! was only the play of some holiday-keepers on an excursion to the Goodwins. They went to the Goodwins in a light south-west breeze and smooth sea. While there the wind shifted to north-east and a tumble of a sea got up, and it is supposed that it then beat into and filled their laden boat, despite the efforts which they are believed to have made to float her or get her ride to her anchor and come head to wind. If this be so, how long and desperate must their struggle have been to save their boat from wreckage, and to pump out the water and heave out the coal. Their anchor and cable, found on the sands and let go to full scope, favours this idea. On the other hand, the fact that they were seen wildly running to and fro looks as if some sudden catastrophe had occurred, as if they had struck on some stump in the water close to the very edge of the Goodwins. The very day on which the photographs were taken which have been used to illustrate this chapter, we were shoving off the steep northern face of the Goodwin Sands, when we saw, not ten yards from the precipitous edge of the dull red sands, in about twenty-five feet of water, and just awash or level with the surface, the bristling spars and masts of a three-masted schooner, the Crocodile, which had been lost there January 6, 1891, in a fearful snowstorm, from the north-east, of that long winter. Had we even touched those deadly points, we too should have probably lost our boat and been entrapped on the Goodwin Sands. The coxswain of the Deal lifeboat was with us, and told how that at three o'clock on that terrible January morning, or rather night, wearied with previous efforts, he had launched the lifeboat and beat in the face of the storm and intense cold ten miles to windward, toward the burning flares which told of a vessel on the Sands. Just when within reach of the vessel, this very wreck, they saw the Ramsgate tug and lifeboat were just before them, and taking the crew out of the rigging of the wreck. In sight of the whole company, for their lanterns and lights were burning, the poor exhausted captain of the schooner, in trying to get down from the rigging, in which he was almost frozen to death, fell into the stormy sea and was lost in the darkness, while the remainder were gallantly rescued by the Ramsgate lifeboat. [Illustration: A wreck on the Goodwins.] It was on the dangerous stumps and masts of this vessel, to save the crew of which the Deal and Ramsgate men made such a splendid effort, that we so nearly ran; and an accident of this kind perhaps sealed the fate of the four boatmen above mentioned.