But finishing the crossing by rowing-boat was a very ordinary experience because of the state of the harbours. Calais was the better of the two, yet it sometimes happened that passengers had to be carried ashore one hundred yards or more because not even boats could approach. In 1576 an ambassador to France complains that Dover harbour is in such utter ruin that he will cross elsewhere in future; in 1580 Sir Walter Ralegh procured reform, which was perpetually in need of renewal. In time a stone pier was built, small, and dry at low water, as indeed the whole harbour was; the entrance was narrow and kept from being choked up only by means of a gate which let out the water with a rush at low tide. The ancient, quicker route to Wissant, more or less the route which "Channel-swimmers" make for now, had begun to be abandoned when the English obtained a port of their own on the opposite coast, and had been completely dropped by this time. Boulogne had no cross-channel passenger traffic worth mentioning. Dieppe, on the contrary, was as much used as Calais, the corresponding harbour being, not Newhaven, but Rye, which was also the objective on the rarer occasions when the starting-place was Havre. So unusual was the Havre-Southampton passage that among the suspicious circumstances alleged against a Genoese who landed in 1599, one was his choice of this way across.[24] Going by the North Sea the usual havens were Gravesend, and Flushing or Brill, in spite of Brill's shallow harbour-bar, passed on one occasion with only two feet of water under the keel when "Mr. Thatcher, a merchant of London, who had goods therein, was so apprehensive that he changed colours and said he was undone, 'Oh Lord,' and such-like passionate expressions." Harwich was reputed so dangerous a harbour that when Charles I's mother-in-law came to visit her daughter in 1638 and put in there, she found no one to receive her; it not being thought within possibility to expect her to land there. The fact that she did was probably due to her having been seven days at sea in a storm; not that the courtier-chronicler of her voyage allows she was any the worse for it, although he owns of her ladies that "they touched the hearts of the beholders more with pity than with love." A forty-eight-hour passage was nothing to grumble at: Arthur Wilson, the historian of James I's reign, left Brill in an old twenty-five-ton mussel-boat, at the bottom of which he lay, sea-sick and expecting drowning, for three days and three nights until he came ashore at—the Hague.