And in order to know any of his Majesty’s ships when encountered in the East Indian waters the signal was to be as follows:—The ship to windward was to hoist an English Jack at the fore t’gallant masthead, and the ship to leeward was to answer by furling the mizen topsail and hoisting a French Jack at the mizen topmasthead.
The Company had their own agent at Deal, and considering the number of days that were spent by the East Indiamen in the Downs, both outward and homeward bound, his presence was very necessary. The ships were taken down the Thames by the Company’s own pilots, and this corporation owned its own pilot-cutter, which was a 60-ton craft with a master and six men, her cruising ground being between Gravesend and the Downs. However, even then, the Company’s ships were by no means immune from getting ashore, although it ought to be mentioned that by the middle of the eighteenth century a really good chart of the Thames estuary did not exist, and the exact nature of some of the numerous shoals was unknown. It is not surprising, therefore, to find casualties occurring as these big ships went up and down the London river. For instance, in March 1734 the East Indiaman _Derby_, outward bound in charge of a “Pylot,” ran aground “on the Mouse Sand below the Nore.” (This shoal is a few miles to the east of Southend pier.) She sustained so much damage that she had to put into Sheerness for dry-docking and repairs.
So also, a few days before Christmas in the year 1736, the East Indiaman _Lyell_ “by the Unskilfulness of the Pilote has been Onshore on the Spaniard Sand,[D] in going down for the Downs.” So she also had to use Sheerness dock for repairs. Captain John Acton, the commander of the _Lyell_, in his report stated that the “Pylots” pretended not to have seen the “Buoy of the Spill,” and “borrowing too near on the Kentish Shore, he run us aground on the Spaniard at High Water, the wind blowing fresh N.W.” The “Spill,” or, as it is now called, the “Spile” buoy, marks the western end of the Spile Sand. The pilots had clearly got out of their course, for these East Indiamen, drawing as they did 20 feet of water, would never have taken the inner passage along the Kentish shore known as the Four Fathoms Channel. They should have left the Spile buoy to starboard and not to port, as clearly was the case in the present instance among the shoals. The north-west was a fair wind from the Thames to the Downs all the way, so that no one except by accident would have chosen to take such a ship so far out of the main, deep-water channel.