In late November 1703, the crew of HMS Northumberland must have thought that things couldn’t get much worse. The warship was newly returned from a long and arduous campaign against the French, but during the voyage home many of its crew had died – not from battle injuries, but from disease. Those who remained were weak and sick, and when their vessel finally made anchor off the east Kent coast, conditions below deck must have been miserable. Their tribulations were far from over, however. On the night of 26/27 November, Britain was struck by what would become known as the Great Storm of 1703, which modern scholars have equated to a Category 2 hurricane.
The author and journalist Daniel Defoe (best known as the creator of Robinson Crusoe) collected eye-witness accounts of the destruction, publishing them in a book in which he described the storm as ‘The Greatest, the Longest in Duration, the widest in Extent, of all the Tempests and Storms that History gives any Account of since the Beginning of Time.’ Defoe’s dramatic text details the destruction of forests and buildings alike, and coastal towns ‘most miserably torn to pieces’. There were numerous casualties both at sea and on shore, and many ships were blown far off course or wrecked. As for the Northumberland, it, together with three other Royal Navy vessels – the Restoration, the Mary, and the Stirling Castle – was driven onto the treacherous Goodwin Sands.
We can only imagine the pandemonium and panic below deck as anchors began to drag and the ships were inextricably pushed towards waters that were known to be extremely dangerous. Measuring 17km by 6.5km wide, the sandbank represents a huge but difficult-to-spot hazard (it is just covered at high tide) within what has long been a major shipping route for trade and travel; today, shipwreck maps are thickly scattered with the locations of thousands of vessels that have been lost there over the centuries. Sadly, the fate of the four ships named here was no different. The entire 387- and 220-strong crews of the Restoration and the Northumberland lost their lives that night, as did two-thirds of those aboard the Stirling Castle. From the Mary’s 270 men there was just one survivor, who might reasonably be called the luckiest of sailors after surviving being shipwrecked twice in one night. This was Thomas Atkins, who managed to scramble aboard the Stirling Castle as his own vessel sank, only to be swept overboard once more – fortunately, he was spotted and plucked from the raging sea by local boatmen. As for the ships themselves, they sank beneath the waves, where they would remain, anonymous and lost, for almost 300 years.
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