Years went by, Gawen Smith died—probably a disheartened speculator; winter gales blew luckless vessels on the Goodwins; and the greedy shoal drank in life and treasure as before; but no project came prominently forward for indicating its danger till the year 1623. Then a more rational proposal was made, and made by men of a very different stamp from Gawen Smith. John, afterwards Sir John, Coke, a nautical expert, proposed means by which a light might be exhibited upon the Goodwins. Unfortunately we do not know exactly what his proposal was, but that it was practical we may guess from the fact that the English and Dutch mariners approved it and were ready to contribute to its support, and it is almost certain that a moored vessel, showing a light by night, was suggested. If so, we have in this proposal the first suggestion of a lightship: the reader will see in a moment on what I base this theory. Sir John Coke’s scheme came to nothing, and a like fate attended those put forward soon afterwards by Capt. Thomas Wilbraham and the Mayor of Rochester and others which were for the same kind of light, whatever that was; but in 1629—four years after Charles I’s accession—almost the same persons petitioned the king for licence to light the Goodwin Sands. In this case their petition is extant, and we see what they propose. After setting forth the dangers of the sands in the usual terms, they state that they are ready, in order to warn vessels of those dangers, to maintain at their own costs, ‘_a light upon the main_’ at or near the Goodwins, ‘whereby every meanly skilfull mariner’ could, on the darkest night, safely pass the place of danger. I think the expression ‘upon the main’ must here mean the main or open sea, especially as the words ‘at or near the Goodwins’ immediately follow: that expression cannot refer to the _mainland_, eight miles off at its nearest point, for lights at the two Forelands were then already established, and the expression ‘on the main’ would not have been used if a tower built on the sand had been intended. There is, I think, but one way of interpreting this and the earlier proposals, and that is, that they were each of them for afloating light or lightship at the Goodwins.