rance, 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 insid