The mail-packet _Violet_, from Ostend, was lost at two o’clock in the morning of January 5th, 1857. She had started the night before, at eleven. An hour after she had struck upon the Sands there was no one left aboard to answer the signals of the steamer and the lifeboat that set out to the rescue; at seven there was nothing to be seen of the _Violet_, crew, or passengers but a portion of one mast and the lifebuoy picked up with the lifeboat, in which lay three dead men. In recent years these insatiable sands have claimed more ships. There was the steamship _Dolphin_ in 1885. After being thrown out of her course in a collision with the _Brenda_, she drifted here and became a total loss. Seventeen men were drowned on that occasion, and thirty-three were rescued. On April 20th, 1886, the Norwegian brig _Auguste Hermann Franche_, with a cargo of ice, went ashore on the Goodwins in a fog. Of the crew of seven, only one was saved. On the night of May 14th, 1887, the large schooner _Golden Island_ was lost, but all hands were rescued. On April 8th, 1909, the four-masted iron passenger steamer _Mahratta_ struck upon the Fawk Spit, and although a number of powerful tugs tried to drag her off, all efforts were useless. The passengers were safely landed, and work was proceeding to jettison some of the cargo, with the object of lightening the vessel, when she broke in half, with a noise like thunder, and it was not long before the sands swallowed her. The appearance of the Goodwins when exposed at low water is thoroughly in keeping with the melancholy story of the Sands. The stranger does not find a broad or long uninterrupted stretch of firm sand, but great dismal wastes with here and there a navigable channel between, called by local seafaring men “swatches,” or “swatchways”; and in every direction, except after unusually calm weather, the sand is ribbed and hollowed into irregular furrows, water and sand alternating. To remain standing in one place for a short time is to find one’s self sinking gradually, and sometimes even suddenly, for these are in many places quicksands; and innocent-looking pools, apparently quite shallow, give the incautious a bad shock by often proving to be perhaps anything from six to sixteen feet deep. They are locally known as “fox-falls,” and form but one of the many unpleasant surprises the Goodwins are capable of giving. Another strange thing is the extraordinary steepness of the Sands on the north side of the North Goodwin. The popular idea of a sandbank is of a gradual shoaling of the water, but at this point it falls almost sheer away into deep sea, about ninety feet. [Illustration: THE GOODWIN SANDS: “A DANGEROUS FLAT AND FATAL.”]