For ever in our island story there will be a place for the 17 men of Rye who went out one day and never came back.

 

A furious gale was sweeping the Channel. It had borne the ship Alice of Riga on to the shallows halfway between Rye and Dungeness. A message to Rye Harbour told the news an hour before the late November dawn, and in the darkness and the gale the lifeboat put out with 17 men.

Only men without fear, or with the courage that defies it, would have dared to put out in that raging sea. The watchers saw the Mary Stanford and her crew labouring through the heavy seas. They disappeared, and were never there seen again till the lifeboat was washed ashore, bottom upward, and the bodies of the harbour men followed her.

Scrap by scrap the tale of what happened was gathered in. The Alice, though driven into the shallows near the Camber Sands, was not at once broken up, or even helpless. The German steamer Smyrna got near her and took off her crew, landing them afterwards safely at Dover.

This news was known a few minutes after the lifeboat had set out. It was telephoned to the lifeboat station, and rockets were sent to recall her. Her crew, battling with the mounting seas, could never have seen them.

 

The lifeboat went on. It went on till it reached the abandoned Alice. Its task, its courage, had all been in vain. The ship was empty. The Mary Stanford and her crew now had to fight for their own lives.

The gale abated none of its fury. For more than five hours they fought it. They were fighting it still when those on shore saw the lifeboat a mile away, coming home. A mile away, but a mile of raging sea. As every eye was strained to watch the lifeboat she lurched under a fiercer gust; her mast went over the side; she was borne over; she was gone. None would ever reach the shore alive.

 

'Their corpses lay out on the shining sands In the morning gleam as the tide went down,

And the women are watching and wringing their hands for those who will never come home to the town.'

 

So at Rye Harbour was repeated the burden of Kingsley's poem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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