Fleet

On the 17th of April 1747 the ship Hope set sail from Amsterdam for Curacao, then belonging to the Dutch. She would sail on to the Spanish Main to sell her cargo to the Spaniards, who, because of the war with England, were in some distress in the American provinces. In command of the ship was Captain Boon Corneliz, who had at his disposal a crew of 73 men and 30 guns, although on the outward voyage only 21 guns were mounted ready for action against pirates or the English Navy, should they seek to engage. The ship was owned by the Dutch merchant firm Hendrick Hogenberg and Co, who had loaded the ship with cloth and bale goods.

Business done and nearing the end of her voyage home the Hope of Amsterdam was off Portland on the 16th of January 1748, having sailed through storms and tempestuous seas the previous fourteen days. All 30 of the ships guns were mounted, perhaps because the cargo of gold, jewels and other valuable commodities it was bringing home was, by the most conservative estimate, worth at least £50,000. Its guns would have been sufficient to fight off any attacks from pirates but against the elements they were no help and off Portland that night Captain Corneliz and his crew needed all the help they could get.
 
No light was visible from the Portland lighthouse, perhaps because of the mist or possibly due to the neglect of duty by those responsible. It was about one or two o’clock in the morning and very dark when the Hope ran ashore on the Chesil beach. When she struck land the mast fell with the force of impact, the ship shattered into three parts. The upper deck was thrown upon a ridge of pebbles and the cabin was buried in the sands; the hull was never found and was thought to have rolled back into the sea. Amazingly, all of the men aboard got safely to the shore.

Word of what had happened quickly spread. A mob soon flocked on to the Chesil from the adjacent villages and from all parts of Dorset and the neighbouring counties. The men of Portland, Wyke and Weymouth were first on the scene and seem to have had a well rehearsed drill for dealing with these events. They formed themselves into a body with colours to secure the goods that floated along the coast. They split into groups of 20, which united as necessary under a leader. A report written latter suggests there were between three and four thousand local men employed in this endeavour and as others arrived from farther afield the numbers on the beach swelled to several thousand.

For ten days the mob held the beach. One report described “a scene of unheard of riot, violence and barbarity.” Another report described the scene thus: “a crowd swarmed about the water’s edge grubbing for gold, tearing up the shingle with their bare nails, fighting over gleaming coins like starved wolves.”

On January 18th the crew set-off for Holland, except for the Captain, his First-mate and another officer. The Captain was forced to leave the beach; the officers of Customs and the Justice of the Peace officers were overawed by the mob that carried on digging and turning-up the beach. On January 20th several bags of money were found six feet under the pebbles.

After ten days three neighbouring Justices of the Peace with a body of armed men dispersed the mob. An inquiry was held and the authorities set about tracing the possessors of the plundered goods, who were compelled to hand over to the agent of the ship’s owners gold, jewellery and other goods with a value of between 25 and 30,000 pounds. They were allowed something for salvage rights.

Some men were committed to prison and two men appeared before Judge Baron Heneage Legge at the assizes in Dorchester on July 15th 1749, to answer for their actions but they were acquitted. The jury accepted their rather far fetched claim that the Dutch were pirates who had argued amongst themselves over the division of their bounty and then deliberately ran the ship on shore and deserted her for fear of being taken and punished. The two argued that the Dutch had taken the goods from the Spaniards, who had bought and paid for them; thus they maintained it was lawful to plunder pirates. The jury also took into account that only two men were before them when all manner of disorders were committed by many of the reported several thousand men who were on the beach for those ten lawless days and nights.

At the time there were stories of men with “bulging pockets” being robbed and strangled on the beach but there is nothing to confirm this. Men did die on the beach but from the affects of the extreme cold aggravated by high winds.

There are modern day examples of similar occurrences. In 2007 the Napoli, on a voyage from Belgium to Portugal, ran aground off the Devon coast. Several containers loaded with consumer goods floated ashore. Hundreds of people flocked to the scene to see what they could get, some leaving with BMW motorcycles worth thousands. The authorities had to point out that people removing goods and not properly declaring them risked fines of up to £2,500 but this did not deter many people intent on seeing what they could get their hands on.

Even for a county teeming with many natural and historical wonders, Chesil Beach is in a class of its own and something of an enigma. All hypothesising about its origin has been unable to explain why similar offshore spits have not been deposited elsewhere, though tradition has it that the Chesil was laid down in toto during a very severe storm one night. But why should the sea only deposit its pebbles here? Though it is unlikely the legend could be true, the sea became impounded behind the shingle bar, forming the unique ribbon-like lagoon known as The Fleet.

It was the Saxons who gave us the word ‘Chesil’ meaning shingle. At Portland the end of the beach is well defined, but exactly where the western end should be placed has been a matter of dispute. Some authorities maintain that it ends as far westwards as West Bay (to include Burton Beach and Burton Bradstock); while others hold that it ends at Cogden Beach between Burton Bradstock and West Bexington. There is however, agreement that part of the beach is east of West Bexington, and that there the Fleet is at its most spectacular.

Certainly amazing, though less controversial, are the fascinating facts about this freak of nature. The Chesil is 18 miles long between West Bay and Portland, while from West Bexington to Portland it is 13 miles long. In reality the beach is not built up in one terrace but two, against which the waves break upon the lower and discharge their spray over the upper. At its highest the pebble ridge is 45 feet above mean sea level and 200 yards wide to the Fleet. It has been estimated that the beach contains 50 million tons of pebbles, and that if these were packed into the largest lorries permitted on British roads the convoy would stretch from Dorchester to Perth in Australia! Chesil pebbles were collected by the defenders of Maiden Castle, to use as sling-stones against the Roman army when it attacked that hill fort in 43 CE.

The shingle has a distinct gradation along the beach’s length from west to east, with fine creamy-white oolitic limestone pebbles at the west end, known as pea gravel, to large grey cobbles of Portland limestone at the east end. This indicates that the Chesil originated as an east-to-west deposition of long shore drift and could not therefore have been created as a spontaneous storm deposit as folklore implies. It is this gradation of size and texture that gives the shingle bar such a distinctive sound and feel to the soles of the feet. Many have been proud to be able to complete the end-to-end energy-sapping slog that deadens rhythm and makes ankle injury an ever-present risk. 

Fishermen and smugglers have long been able to tell upon which part of the beach they landed after nightfall by the size and feel of the pebbles in their hands. From early times Abbotsbury fishermen have trawled for mackerel off the beach, catching them in seine nets. Daniel Defore writes of these mackerel catches as being so abundant in his day that the fish could be sold onshore at one hundred for just a penny.

No less awesome than the Chesil’s curious facts is its history of notorious savagery towards ships and seamen. Immediately offshore for example, there exists an immensely powerful undertow that can drown even a strong swimmer in only three feet of water five feet from the waterline, and rough seas can throw up fresh shingle banks that can persist for years. During storms the undertow can generate a sucking noise that, it has been said, can be heard in Dorchester. Author Meade Falkner in Moonfleet described how this current caused two fictitious smugglers to fight for their lives in water only three feet deep.

During the age of sail the beach was especially feared. Eastbound ships were in serious difficulties if a storm blew them north-eastwards towards Portland, and there is a sharp shallow water reef that can rip the keels off deep-draughted ships. The combination of the beach’s steep seaward gradient and the underwater current often resulted in shipwrecked passengers and crew being drowned almost in reach of rescuers.

But in 1752 it was said that all of Abbotsbury – including the vicar – were ‘thieves, smugglers and plunderers of wrecks’. In 1822 a Swyre man, Richard Bishop, was jailed for “unlawfully making a light on the sea coast” suggesting that he was signalling to smugglers.

In 1795 seven ships of Admiral Christian’s fleet were lost with two hundred crewmen dead. Then in 1824, during a great storm known locally thereafter as “The Outrage” four ships were lost with all hands (but amazingly the sloop Ebenezer was thrown bodily onto the ridge by a wave, from where it could be re-floated on the Fleet and towed to Portland for a refit). This same gale blew the sea half a mile inland, destroying Fleet village and church before leaving in its wake a hundred bloated corpses on the Chesil shingle. Another storm in 1838 cast five ships onto the shingle bank where they were dashed to pieces, their crews drowned to the last man. A French trawler was wrecked on the shingle bar in 1963.

But the beach has also been the setting for two other non-tragic curiosities. There is a story that  in 1757 a mermaid was washed ashore. It is recorded that many people saw her remains, but they generated little excitement as she was supposed to have been no beauty. Then on May 21st, 1802 the crew of the trawler Greyhound landed a huge fish over 26 feet long, 15 feet in girth and weighing 15 tons; it required fourteen horses to drag it ashore. As this monster was positively not a basking shark, it was more likely a whale shark – as this is the largest fish in the sea – while the “mermaid” may have been a manatee or “sea cow” an animal which certainly could be mistaken for an ‘ugly mermaid’ by people who had never before seen one.

The Fleet is eight miles long, though only seven-and-a-half to fifteen feet deep. At its widest it is 900 yards and just 70 yards at its narrowest point and connected to the sea by a channel less that a hundred yards long known as Small Mouth. The lagoon can be walked beside on the seaward side by the fit and dedicated who can then return along the north side on the Dorset Coast Path. Plants typical of shingle beds grow along the margins such as sea holly, sea campion, yellow horned poppy and sea kale, together with beds of reeds and eelgrass. The Small Mouth has the effect of restricting the flow of seawater, making the Fleet brackish, though towards Abbotsbury the salinity is reduced still further by the input of fresh water from streams draining into the lagoon.

Ecologically the result has been the creation of a richly diverse habitat, making the lagoon a premier nature reserve and SSSI encompassed within the World Heritage Jurassic Coast. A hundred species of plants have so far been identified, and many of these, particularly the eelgrass, provide food for a hundred and fifty species of birds, particularly wildfowl, waders, ducks and geese. The water supports a population of twenty species of fish.

All in all it is not just the shingle that can impress the visitor to Chesil Beach, but the bombardment of the senses from stimuli ranging from the smell of seaweed to the cry of gulls.  And there is also that stark contrast between each side of the walker’s field of perception: to one side the open sea; to the other a marshland thicket. Truly, this must make Chesil Beach a very peculiar and special place.