The Isle Of Portland, On Which The Castle I Mentioned Stands, Lies
Right Against This Port Of Weymouth.
Hence it is that our best and
whitest freestone comes, with which the Cathedral of St. Paul's,
the Monument,
And all the public edifices in the City of London are
chiefly built; and it is wonderful, and well worth the observation
of a traveller, to see the quarries in the rocks from whence they
are cut out, what stones, and of what prodigious a size are cut out
there.
The island is indeed little more than one continued rock of
freestone, and the height of the land is such that from this island
they see in clear weather above half over the Channel to France,
though the Channel here is very broad. The sea off of this island,
and especially to the west of it, is counted the most dangerous
part of the British Channel. Due south, there is almost a
continued disturbance in the waters, by reason of what they call
two tides meeting, which I take to be no more than the sets of the
currents from the French coast and from the English shore meeting:
this they call Portland Race; and several ships, not aware of these
currents, have been embayed to the west of Portland, and been
driven on shore on the beach (of which I shall speak presently),
and there lost.
To prevent this danger, and guide the mariner in these distresses,
they have within these few months set up two lighthouses on the two
points of that island; and they had not been many months set up,
with the directions given to the public for their bearings, but we
found three outward-bound East India ships which were in distress
in the night, in a hard extreme gale of wind, were so directed by
those lights that they avoided going on shore by it, which, if the
lights had not been there, would inevitably happened to their
destruction.
This island, though seemingly miserable, and thinly inhabited, yet
the inhabitants being almost all stone-cutters, we found there were
no very poor people among them, and when they collected money for
the re-building St. Paul's, they got more in this island than in
the great town of Dorchester, as we were told.
Though Portland stands a league off from the mainland of Britain,
yet it is almost joined by a prodigious riff of beach--that is to
say, of small stones cast up by the sea--which runs from the island
so near the shore of England that they ferry over with a boat and a
rope, the water not being above half a stone's-throw over; and the
said riff of beach ending, as it were, at that inlet of water,
turns away west, and runs parallel with the shore quite to
Abbotsbury, which is a town about seven miles beyond Weymouth.
I name this for two reasons: first, to explain again what I said
before of ships being embayed and lost here. This is when ships
coming from the westward omit to keep a good offing, or are taken
short by contrary winds, and cannot weather the high land of
Portland, but are driven between Portland and the mainland. If
they can come to an anchor, and ride it out, well and good; and if
not, they run on shore on that vast beach and are lost without
remedy.
On the inside of this beach, and between it and the land, there is,
as I have said, an inlet of water which they ferry over, as above,
to pass and re-pass to and from Portland: this inlet opens at
about two miles west, and grows very broad, and makes a kind of
lake within the land of a mile and a half broad, and near three
miles in length, the breadth unequal. At the farthest end west of
this water is a large duck-coy, and the verge of the water well
grown with wood, and proper groves of trees for cover for the fowl:
in the open lake, or broad part, is a continual assembly of swans:
here they live, feed, and breed, and the number of them is such
that, I believe, I did not see so few as 7,000 or 8,000. Here they
are protected, and here they breed in abundance. We saw several of
them upon the wing, very high in the air, whence we supposed that
they flew over the riff of beach, which parts the lake from the
sea, to feed on the shores as they thought fit, and so came home
again at their leisure.
From this duck-coy west, the lake narrows, and at last almost
closes, till the beach joins the shore; and so Portland may be
said, not to be an island, but part of the continent. And now we
came to Abbotsbury, a town anciently famous for a great monastery,
and now eminent for nothing but its ruins.
From hence we went on to Bridport, a pretty large corporation town
on the sea-shore, though without a harbour. Here we saw boats all
the way on the shore, fishing for mackerel, which they take in the
easiest manner imaginable; for they fix one end of the net to a
pole set deep into the sand, then, the net being in a boat, they
row right out into the water some length, then turn and row
parallel with the shore, veering out the net all the while, till
they have let go all the net, except the line at the end, and then
the boat rows on shore, when the men, hauling the net to the shore
at both ends, bring to shore with it such fish as they surrounded
in the little way they rowed. This, at that time, proved to be an
incredible number, insomuch that the men could hardly draw them on
shore. As soon as the boats had brought their fish on shore we
observed a guard or watch placed on the shore in several places,
who, we found, had their eye, not on the fishermen, but on the
country people who came down to the shore to buy their fish; and
very sharp we found they were, and some that came with small carts
were obliged to go back empty without any fish.
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