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.
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