On the night of November 26th 1703, the Goodwin Sands feast voraciously upon timber and sail, flesh and bone.
A cyclone bore down upon the country from Atlantic origin, and found Admiral Cloudesley Shovell's Royal Navy attempting shelter in crowded anchorage off the Kent coast.
By first morning light, thirteen Men-Of-War and forty merchant vessels had been splintered into oblivion by Mother Nature's wrath. The howling of the storm forever silencing the wretched wails of 2168 men. Their bodies, like their ships, consumed by the sandbank that sits just 6 miles from this gallery.
Daniel Defoe wrote extensively of his witness to this tempest, and described the horror of those that were briefly reprieved upon the sand before having to choose which fate lay in wait - to literally sink into the Goodwins or swim down to Davy Jones.
This is my tribute to those that perished upon the Sands on that most infamous of nights. I have paired a passage of Defoe's with a notch for each of the 2168 lives lost.
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