For a good many years we had another chance, though a poor one, and that was to make a longish leg off shore and then run in before the wind and cross the Barnard into Covehithe Channel through what we called the Wreck Gat--a cut in the bank that the currents made striking against a wrecked ship buried there. The Wreck Gat is gone now--closed by the same storm that nearly closed my life for me--and you will not find it marked nowadays on the charts. Its going was a good riddance. At the best it was a desperate bad place to get through; and at its worst it was about the same as a sea pitfall: and that nobody knows better than I do, seeing that I was the last man to get through it alive. But when you happened to be to windward of it, if it served at all, it served better than running down a half mile farther and trying to round the tail of the bank.
Very many craft beside our own fisher-boats find their death-harbour on our East Anglian sands. Our coast, as it has a right to be, is the dread of every sailor man who sails the narrow seas. Great ships, storm-swept on our sands, are sucked down into the depths of them, or are hammered to pieces on the top of them, as light-heartedly as though they were no more than cock-boats. And the supply of ships to be wrecked there is unending--since the half of the trade of the world, they say, sails past our shores. From every land they come: and many and many a one of them comes but never goes. Down on them bangs the northeast wind with a roar and a rattle--and presently our sands have hold of them with a grip that is to keep them fast there till the last day! Sometimes the dead men who were living sailors aboard those ships come ashore to us, though they are more like to find graves in the sands that murdered them or to be swept out to sea; sometimes, by a twist of chance that you may call a miracle, the sea has a fancy for casting one or two of them ashore alive. Dazed and half mad creatures those live ones are, usually: their wits all jangled and shaken by the great horror that has been upon them while they tossed among the waves.
And so, as you may see, we men of the Suffolk and Norfolk coast need the stiff backbone that we have as our birthright for the sea-fighting that is our life-work; and it is not to be wondered at that our life of sea-fighting makes us still more set and stubborn in our ways.