Sol: Now, what news on the Rialto?
Sal: Why yet it lives there uncheck’d, that Antonio hath a
ship of rich lading wrack’d on the narrow seas; the
Goodwins I think they call the place, a very dan-
gerous flat, and fatal, where the carcases of many a
tall ship lie buried, as they say,—if my gossip Report
be an honest woman of her word.
William Shakespeare, Act III, Scene 1 (“Venice. A Street”), in The Merchant of Venice [1605], ed. John R. Brown (London: Methuen & Co. LTD and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 70.