The military members of the commission recommended that case mated batteries should be constructed on the breakwaters themselves, supported by defences on the shore flanking the approaches to the breakwaters and harbours.
Such is a sketch of the report upon which our government has acted, and in some of its details it is so utterly ridiculous that the nation has reason to blush for the appearance our official science most bear in the eyes of foreigners ; nor have the results actually attained by the works executed been much superior to the so-called scientific reasoning on which they were based. The works at Harwich have been completed, and already the laws of the tides on this part of the coast have produced the silting-up which ought to have been foreseen.
At Dover, the works proceed slowly and with difficulty ; hut already it has been found that they have produced an alteration in the flow of the littoral current, and in the advance of the shingle, which has endangered the stability of the present shore of the west aide of the bay. Any one accustomed to watch the action of marine currents must have known that such would have been the ease ; but then such a person would never have dreamt of judging these questions by the analysis of some bottles of sea-water. Sir W.
Symonds was perfectly correct in his view of the question, and if it were necessary that a great expense should be incurred in the formation of a new harbour of refuge on this coast, it should be placed near Dungeness, or at the mouth of the Ouse, near Newhaven—without, of course, neglecting the improvement of Dover harbour. The works at Portland have been more successful than those at Dover, or at Har wich, or at Alderney ; and those undertaken at Holyhesd seem at present to enjoy a very equivocal reputation.
Meanwhile the want of harbours of refuge on the south and the east coast of England continues to be felt ; for between the Tyne and the Humber, and between the Humber and the Thames, there is no safe refuge ; nor can a vessel of great draught of water find any shelter in the British Channel between the Solent and the Thames. This is a national question; and it is one which it behoves our legislature at once to grapple with, in the interest of our now unprotected com mercial marine.
The commission of 1840 recommended three places as suitable for harbours of refuge—Dover, as first in importance ; Beachy Head, as second ; and Foreuess, as third.
(Report of the Commissioners upon the Subject of Harbours of Refuge, 1845.)