The Low Island

Salanio: Now, what news on the Rialto?

Salarino: Why, yet it lives there unchecked that Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wracked on the narrow seas; the Goodwins, I think they call the place; a very dangerous fiat, and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried.

--Merchant of Venice, Act III Scene 1

For nearly 1,000 years, brave and able seamen have feared the Goodwin Sands, a ten-mile sandbank just north of Dover. Thousands of ships have foundered in their sucking sands; with the hulks are buried tens of thousands of seamen, and cargoes of gold, silver and jewels.

Last week another Italian vessel came to grief on the Goodwins: the 2,327-ton freighter Silvia Onorato, carrying 2,933 tons of plumbago (graphite). When a lifeboat came through mountainous seas to take off the crew, bushy-browed Captain Francesco Ruocco cried: "Ship go, me go. . . . This ship she mean everything to me and to my bella mia."

After 50 hours of vain efforts to get his ship off the Goodwins, Captain Ruocco sorrowfully went ashore with his crew of 28, two German stowaways and an Alsatian pup. Later he came back to the ship, hoping to jettison the heavy lead cargo. Tide and weather thwarted him. Sturdy little Dover tugs buzzed about the Silvia Onorato, greedy for salvage. But at week's end, the insatiable Goodwins* still held their prize. Said a lifeboat man with a touch of local pride: "I think the Goodwins got her for good."

* The Goodwins did not always feed on misery. Once they were fertile land known to the Kentish peasants as Lomea (The Low Island), and belonged to Earl Godwine, friend of Edward the Confessor. One legend says that Godwine, hard-pressed by his enemies, vowed to the Virgin that if he got back to Lomea he would build a steeple to Tenterden Church; when he escaped he forgot the vow. Another version: that the Abbot of Canterbury built the steeple from money intended for the island's dikes.

Whether for Earl Godwine's forgetfulness or the Abbot's enterprise, deferred punishment came to the island in 1099 when it was submerged by the sea in a storm. Lomea became one of the world's worst perils to shipping. Strong winds and tides pumping through the narrow Straits of Dover have not only built up the Goodwin's seaward side into an almost vertical wall, but driven ships into the sucking grasp of their sands. At low tide, the Goodwins are a desolate, brownish-grey archipelago; between 1824 and 1854, determined cricketers sloshed through four matches on the Goodwins. The record does not say why.

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