ALTERATIONS OP COAST LINE. 387 



water. Large storehouses, erected near the harbour, subsided till they were from twenty- 

 four to forty-eight feet under the level of the sea. Many of the buildings appear to have 

 sunk without falling; for the chimney-tops were afterwards seen projecting, in some 

 instances, above the surface of the water, with the mast-heads of several ships wrecked in 

 the harbour. A frigate the Swan which was undergoing repairs at the wharf, was 

 driven over the tops of many of the submerged houses, and at last rested upon the roof of 

 one of them, through which it broke. During the first shock, a tract of land adjoining 

 the town, to the extent of about a thousand acres, was depressed, and the sea immediately 

 rolled in. Such events as these may commend to our attention the ancient accounts of 

 similar catastrophes as substantially true, though invested with fictitious details by the 

 Greek historians and poets the Ogygian flood, the Samothracian deluge, with 



" That watery massacre, which quite destroyed 

 Thcssaly, man and woman, and children frail, 

 Birds, beasts, the very worm, the tree, the flower, 

 When nothing was but ruin, and nought seen 

 But one monotonous dreary waste of waves 

 Tumbling in monstrous eddies." 



These great disturbances, and the changes that transpire in a more gradual manner, led 

 Aristotle to remark, that the " same tracts of the earth are not some always sea, and 

 others always continents, but every thing changes in the course of time." 



Violent tempests, without any submarine convulsions, have frequently brought large 

 portions of the coast under the dominion of the ocean. According to popular tradition, the 

 Goodwin Sands, off the Kentish coast, once formed part of the estate of Goodwin, earl of 

 Kent, which the sea overwhelmed in the year 1099. It is certain that such catastrophes 

 have repeatedly occurred, and our early annalists mention extensive depredations committed 

 by the ocean upon our shores at that time. Florence of Worcester says : "On the third 

 day of the nones of Nov. 1099, the sea came out upon the shore, and buried towns and men 

 very many, and oxen and sheep innumerable." The Saxon Chronicle likewise for that 

 year states : "On St. Martin's-mass day, the llth of Novembre, sprung up so much of 

 the sea-flood, and so myckle harm did, as no man minded that it ever afore did, and there 

 was the ylk day a new moon." The Goodwin Sands are now separated from the coast of 

 Kent by the well-known roadstead of the Downs, a channel which is from three to six 

 miles wide. It has been a common impression that they possess an ingurgitating pro 

 perty, so that ships striking on them are very speedily swallowed up ; but the sand, which 

 rests on blue clay, is found to be of the same quality with that on the shore about Deal ; 

 and, all circumstances considered, there is nothing improbable in the idea, that in the 

 Saxon age this large bank, which is completely covered at high water, was either a 

 cultivated island, or an integral portion of the neighbouring county. An obscure tradi 

 tion likewise floats about Cornwall, that the western extremity of that county once 

 extended farther than at present, and that a tract of country, called, according to Camden, 

 Lionnesse, which the sea has washed away, anciently connected the Scilly Islands with 

 the mainland, and formed part of the territory of the renowned King Arthur and his 

 valorous knights. Although there is no evidence for this story, it may yet be deemed not 

 unlikely, when we consider the general violence of the sea in that region, and the changes 

 which have transpired there within the period of authentic history, and are still in pro 

 gress. The Scilly Islands, though consisting chiefly of granitic rock, are at present 

 slowly yet surely wasting away, owing to the rude assaults of the billows of the Atlantic, 

 while an insulated rock, called the Wolf, lies between them and the main, composed of 

 limestone, which yields more readily to the action of the waves, and may be a surviving 

 fragment of the destroyed Lionnesse. Some Cornish writers suppose the Bay of Pen- 



