Anxiety and terror prevailed in the city, and people were removing their goods--the thoughtful Mr Pepys making a girdle to carry 300 pounds in gold about his body. The alarm is further increased when a neighbour comes up from Chatham, and tells him that that afternoon he "saw the _Royal James_, the _Oake_, and _London_ burnt by the enemy with their fire-ships; that two or three men-of-war come up with them, and made no more of Upnor Castle's shooting than of a fly; that the Dutch are fitting out the _Royal Charles_." Ships were to be sunk in the river, about Woolwich, to prevent the Dutch coming up higher. "The masters of the ships that are lately taken up, do keep from their ships all their stores, or as much as they can, so that we cannot despatch them, having not time to appraise them, nor secure their payment. Only some little money we have, which we are fain to pay the men we have with every night, or they will not work. And, indeed, the hearts as well as the affections of the seamen are turned away; and in the open streets in Wapping, and up and down, the wives have cried publickly, `This comes of not paying our husbands; and now your work is undone, or done by hands that understand it not.'" Some of the men, "instead of being at work at Deptford, where they were intended, do come to the office this morning to demand the payment of their tickets; for otherwise they would, they said, do no more work; and are, as I understand from everybody that has to do with them, the most debauched, swearing rogues that ever were in the navy, just like their prophane commander." "Nothing but carelessness lost the _Royal Charles_, for they might have saved her the very tide that the Dutch came up. The Dutch did take her with a boat of nine men, who found not a man on board her; and presently a man went up and struck her flag, and jacke, and a trumpeter sounded upon her, `Joan's placket is torn;' they did carry her down at a time, both for tides and wind, when the best pilot in Chatham would not have undertaken it, they heeling her on one side to make her draw little water, and so carried her away safe." "It is a sad sight to see so many good ships there sunk in the river, while we would be thought to be masters of the sea." He also examines the chain which had been carried across the river, "and caused the link to be measured, and it was six inches and one-fourth in circumference."