Coordinates: 51°16′25″N 1°30′30″E / 51.27361°N 1.50833°E
The Goodwin Sands are a 10-mile-long sand bank in the English Channel, lying six miles east of Deal in Kent, England. As the shoals lie close to major shipping channels, more than 2,000 ships are believed to have been wrecked upon them, and as a result they are marked by numerous lightships and buoys. Notable shipwrecks include the VOC ship Rooswijk, HMS Stirling Castle, the SS Montrose, which once carried the convicted murderer Dr. Crippen, and the South Goodwin Lightship. The Brake Bank lying shorewards is part of the same geological unit.[1] Several naval battles have been fought nearby, including the Battle of Goodwin Sands in 1652 and the Battle of Dover Strait in 1917.
There is currently a lightship on the end of the sands, on the farthest part out, to warn ships. The sands were once covered by two lighthouses on the Kent mainland, one each at the north and south ends of the sands. The southern lighthouse is now owned by the National Trust, and the northern one is still in operation.
In 1974 a plan was put forward to build a third London airport on the Goodwin Sands, with a huge harbour complex, but the idea faded into obscurity.
When hovercraft ran from Dover, they used to make occasional trips to the sands. An annual cricket match was until 2003 played on the sands at low tide, and a crew filming a reconstruction of this for the BBC television series Coast had to be rescued by the Ramsgate lifeboat when they experienced difficulty in 2006.[2]
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In 1817, borings in connection with a plan by Trinity Board to erect a lighthouse on the Sands revealed, beneath fifteen feet of sand, a stratum identified by Charles Lyell as London clay lying upon a chalk basement. Based on this, Lyell proposed that the Sands were the eroded remains of a clay island similar to Sheppey, rather than a mere shifting of the sea bottom shaped by currents and tides.[3][4] Lyell's assessment was uncritically followed until the mid-twentieth century, and enlarged upon by G.B. Gattie[5] who asserted, based on unsourced legends, that the sands were once the fertile low-lying island of Lomea, which he equated with an island said to be known to the Romans as Infera Insula ("Low Island").[6] This, Gattie said, was owned in the first half of the 11th century by Godwin, Earl of Wessex, after whom the sands are named.[7] When he fell from favour, the land was supposedly given to St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, whose abbot failed to maintain the sea walls, leading to the island's destruction, some say, in the storm of 1099 mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. However, the island is not mentioned in the Domesday Book, suggesting that if it existed it may have been inundated before that work was compiled in 1085–86.[8] The earliest written record of the name "Lomea" seems to be in a 1590 work De Rebus Albionicis by a John Twyne (or Twine), but no authority for the island's existence is given.[9] There is a brief mention of a sea-tide inundation in 1092 creating the Godwin sands in a 19th century book of agricultural records, re-issued in 1969.[10]
The modern geological view is that the island of Lomea probably never existed.[11] Although the area now covered by sands and sea was once dry land, the Strait of Dover opened in the Weald-Artois chalk range in prehistory – between around 7600 BC and 5000 BC[12] – not within historical time.
In the Great Storm of 1703 at least 13 men-of-war and 40 merchant vessels were wrecked in the Downs, with the loss of 2,168 lives and 708 guns. Yet, to their credit, the Deal boatmen were able to rescue 200 men from this ordeal.
Naval vessels lost to the sands included:
According to legend the Lady Lovibond was wrecked on the Goodwin Sands on February 13, 1748, amidst alleged controversy over the cause of her sinking in which all hands were lost. She is said to reappear every fifty years as a ghost ship. No references to the shipwreck are known to exist in contemporary records or sources, including newspapers, Lloyd's List or Lloyd's Register.
The brig Mary White was wrecked on the Sands in a storm in 1851; seven men of her crew were rescued by the lifeboat from Broadstairs.
The Belgian cargo ship SS Cap Lopez was wrecked on the sands in 1907.
Two ships named SS Mahratta ran aground on the Sands, one in 1909 and the other in 1939.
The passenger ship SS Chusan collided with the freighter Prospector near the Sands in June 1953, severely damaging and nearly sinking her.
The Radio Caroline vessel MV Ross Revenge drifted onto the Sands in November 1991, effectively ending the era of offshore pirate radio in Britain.
William Shakespeare mentions the Sands in The Merchant of Venice, Act 3 Scene 1:
Herman Melville mentions them in Moby-Dick, Chapter VII, The Chapel:
R. M. Ballantyne, the noted Scottish writer of adventure stories, published The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands in 1870.
W. H. Auden quotes the phrase "to set up shop on Goodwin Sands" in his poem In Sickness and in Health. This is a proverbial expression meaning to be shipwrecked.[14]
G. K. Chesterton's poem The Rolling English Road refers to "the night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands."
Ian Fleming refers to the Goodwin Sands in Moonraker, one of the James Bond novels, as well as making them a major plot point in his children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
GOODWIN SANDS, a dangerous line of shoals at the entrance to the Strait of Dover from the North Sea, about 6 m. from the Kent coast of England, from which they are separated by the anchorage of the Downs. For this they form a shelter. They are partly exposed at low water, but the sands are shifting, and in spite of lights and bell-buoys the Goodwins are frequently the scene of wrecks, while attempts to erect a lighthouse or beacon have failed. Tradition finds in the Goodwins the remnant of an island called Lomea, which belonged to Earl Godwine in the first half of the 11th century, and was afterwards submerged, when the funds devoted to its protection were diverted to build the church steeple at Tenterden. Four lightships mark the limits of the sands, and also signal by rockets to the lifeboat stations on the coast when any vessel is in distress on the sands. Perhaps the most terrible catastrophe recorded here was the wreck of thirteen ships of war during a great storm in November 1703.
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Categories: GOE-GOR
   | snippet - Origines celticae (a fragment) and ... - Google Books |
| | The Rolling English Road - The Rolling English Road - Wikisource |
| | An historical sketch, including a map of the sands and their environs - The Treacherous Goodwins - White Cliffs Country |
| | Now that's a real wash-out - Now that's a real wash-out | Cricket Features | Wisden Cricketer | Cricinfo.com |
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