From Yarmouth I Resolved To Pursue My First Design, Viz., To View
The Seaside On This Coast, Which Is Particularly
Famous for being
one of the most dangerous and most fatal to the sailors in all
England--I may say
In all Britain--and the more so because of the
great number of ships which are continually going and coming this
way in their passage between London and all the northern coasts of
Great Britain. Matters of antiquity are not my inquiry, but
principally observations on the present state of things, and, if
possible, to give such accounts of things worthy of recording as
have never been observed before; and this leads me the more
directly to mention the commerce and the navigation when I come to
towns upon the coast as what few writers have yet meddled with.
The reason of the dangers of this particular coast are found in the
situation of the county and in the course of ships sailing this
way, which I shall describe as well as I can thus:- The shore from
the mouth of the River of Thames to Yarmouth Roads lies in a
straight line from SSE. to NNW., the land being on the W. or
larboard side.
From Wintertonness, which is the utmost northerly point of land in
the county of Norfolk, and about four miles beyond Yarmouth, the
shore falls off for nearly sixty miles to the west, as far as Lynn
and Boston, till the shore of Lincolnshire tends north again for
about sixty miles more as far as the Humber, whence the coast of
Yorkshire, or Holderness, which is the east riding, shoots out
again into the sea, to the Spurn and to Flamborough Head, as far
east, almost, as the shore of Norfolk had given back at Winterton,
making a very deep gulf or bay between those two points of
Winterton and the Spurn Head; so that the ships going north are
obliged to stretch away to sea from Wintertonness, and leaving the
sight of land in that deep bay which I have mentioned, that reaches
to Lynn and the shore of Lincolnshire, they go, I say, N. or still
NNW.
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