There may be between Thamesis and the Tyne worse seas and more perilous rocks; but when the north-east wind blows right into that gulf, and the waves of the German Ocean are driven on by the storms of winter, the practised mariner will tell ye that the navigation of the Wash, the Boston Deeps, and the Lynn Deeps, is a fearful thing to those who know the shoals and coasts, and a leap into the jaws of death to those that know them not. Besides the shallows near shore, there be sandbanks and treacherous shoals in the middle of the bay, and these were ofttimes shifting their places or changing their shapes. Moreover, so many rivers and broad streams and inundations, that looked like regular rivers in the wet seasons of the year, poured their waters into the Wash, that it required all the skill of the mariner and pilot to find a way into the proper bed of any one particular river, as the Ouse, the Nene, or the Welland.[109] Here are many quick-sands, fatal to barks, when concealed under the water; and even in summer-tide, when the waters are dried, the shepherds and their flocks,[110] are often taught by a woeful experience that these quick-sands have a wonderful force in sucking in and holding fast whatsoever cometh upon them. In this sort the perils of shipmen are not over even when they reach the shore, and are advancing to tread upon what seemeth like _terra firma_. The Wash and its sand-banks and the quick-sands had made more East-Anglian widows and orphans than were made by any other calamity besides, save always the fierce Norman conquest.