Sailing upriver
Joseph Conrad, the seafarer turned novelist, wrote a vivid description of a journey up the Estuary in his autobiographical work, The Mirror Of The Sea (1909):
For a long time the feeling of the open water remains with the ship steering to the westward... There are no features to this land, no conspicuous, far-famed landmarks for the eye; there is nothing so far down to tell you of the greatest agglomeration of mankind on earth dwelling no more than five and twenty miles away...
The first place a ship passes is the Nore, a wide sandbank on the south side of the estuary. A historic Naval anchorage, this was the site, in 1797, of the worst mutiny in British history. The sailors, protesting at their terrible conditions, seized all 21 ships of the fleet, and refused to obey orders for a month. The mutineers were eventually starved into submission, and 29 ringleaders were hanged from their ships' yardarms.
Dangerous wreck
South of the Nore, you can see the masts of the USS Richard Montgomery, rising above the water. This was a munitions ship, packed with bombs, which sank here in 1944. It is carefully monitered, though it has been judged too dangerous to move. It has been calculated that, if the ship ever exploded, it would throw up a 1,000ft-wide column of water and wreckage 10,000 feet in the air, and generate a 16ft-high wave. Every window in the neighbouring town of Sheerness would be shattered.
