Chapter III: Part 3

I never understood why he took some pains to enlist me as his accomplice, or could imagine that he had found in me a congenial spirit. More than once he asked me to his house in the Isle of Wight; but it proved well that I never accepted any hospitality from him. To oblige my friend the editor, whose only fault in the matter was a generous trustfulness, I did write for his organ on subjects in my own line; but my misgivings held me back from personal intercourse with the proprietor. The last time I saw him was at a dinner party, some way out of London, given to make him acquainted with the staff of his literary enterprise. He had now come to whispering that he was no less than a prince, who for certain reasons preferred to be _incognito_; and some of us needy scribblers were much impressed by his condescension. He pressed on me the honour of having a lift back to town in his carriage, which I accepted very unwillingly, so strong had grown my suspicions. On our drive, I remember, the main drift of his conversation was contempt for the company we had just left; and he abused the host for asking the like of him to meet such outsiders; but I did not respond to the flattery implied in such confidences, with which once more he seemed inviting me to intimacy. I congratulated myself on my reserve, when next week a reward of £1000 was offered for the arrest of this pseudo-prince, set in his true light by a notorious trial that followed in the spring of 1877, after he had been run to earth in Scotland, somewhere about the Bridge of Allan.

This was known as the Turf Frauds case; but I forgot the precise details of the ingenious swindle which Benson, along with several accomplices, was convicted of practising on a French lady, the Comtesse de Goncourt. As ringleader, and as formerly convicted of forgery, he was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. In the course of the trial, it came out that he had managed to corrupt some of the minor officials of Newgate, and to keep up relations outside, by whose help this cripple had plotted a daring escape. Then, his fate being decided, he sought to gain some remission of his punishment by turning informer on another set of accomplices; and the public was amazed, not to say dismayed, to learn that several of the detective inspectors of Scotland Yard had been in this scoundrel’s pay, hobnobbing with him as his guests, and serving warnings on him instead of the warrants entrusted to them. The story is too long to tell that came out in a three weeks’ sensational trial at the end of the same year. One or two of the accused detectives got off in a cloud of suspicion; but the others, as well as a solicitor who had been leagued with them, convicted chiefly on Benson’s evidence, were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, from which a couple of ex-inspectors emerged to start in the shady profession of private inquiry agents.

I am not sure if Benson served his full term in England; but it was many years afterwards that I heard of him as having again got into trouble in Switzerland. This time, he must have come off easily, for when three or four more years had passed, he is seen seeking fortune in the New World. Here his last trick was as ingenious and bold as his first appearance at the Mansion House. A great singer, Madame Patti if I mistake not, was eagerly expected at the Opera House of Mexico City. A few days in advance of her, came to the Iturbide Hotel a polite gentleman giving himself out as her agent. This was Benson, who, having sold all the boxes and stalls, made off with his plunder in a special train, and managed to get out of the country, but was arrested, I understand, in New York, to be held for extradition. It is probable that Mexican penal servitude has terrors even for habitués of Newgate and Dartmoor. At all events, poor Benson, in despair, committed suicide by throwing himself over a landing in his prison. So ended my would-be host in the Isle of Wight, where he entertained worthier guests than me, not to speak of his train of friendly detectives.

This is but an ugly story to tell of such a pretty place as Shanklin, an older and a choicer resort than Sandown, favoured by visitors both in winter and summer, and with a good share of permanent residents attracted by its charms. As in the case of Lynton and Lynmouth, Shanklin has a double character. By the sea has sprung up a new bathing-place with a smart esplanade, showy pier, a disfiguringly convenient lift to the top of the cliff, and everything spick and span. The old Shanklin behind offers a contrast in its nucleus of embowered cottages, and its irregular High Street hugging an inland hollow, about which villas are half-buried in blooming gardens and clumps of foliage, like the huge myrtles that enclose the little parsonage near the churchyard in its grove of gravestones. But for some rawer rows of houses stretching out towards the cliff, upper Shanklin has lost little of the charm that struck Lord Jeffrey,

when he described the village as “very small and _scattery_, all mixed up with trees, and lying among sweet airy falls and swells of ground which finally rise up behind the breezy Downs 800 feet high, and sink down in front to the edge of the varying cliffs which overhang a pretty beach of fine sand, and are approachable by a very striking wooded ravine which they call the Chine.”

An earlier visitor was Keats, who is understood to have written his _Lamia_ in a cottage, not now standing, about the opening rechristened “Keats’ Green” in honour of this sojourn, when, to tell the truth, he wrote of the Isle of Wight as “but so, so,” though he admired the coast from Shanklin to Bonchurch, as well he might. Longfellow, who wrote an inscription for a fountain near his hotel, called Shanklin “one of the quietest and loveliest places in the kingdom,” with which, indeed, his acquaintance had not been exhaustive.

Shanklin and Sandown, the most growing resorts of the Island of late years, love one another like Liverpool and Manchester, like Ramsgate and Margate, like St Paul’s and Minneapolis, and other pairs of too near rivals for popularity. Careful parents may prefer Sandown as a place where their youngsters will find nothing to fall off; but poetic and artistic souls will give their vote for Shanklin, which has chalybeate springs and elaborate baths as attraction, as well as beautiful surroundings. Its beauty spot _par excellence_ is, of course, the Chine above mentioned, which makes one of the shows of the Island. The Chines, so named here and on the opposite mainland coast--but in one part of Hampshire _Bunny_ is a less romantic title for them--are deep, irregular ravines carved out by streams of water upon cliffs of soft clay or sand, often sheltering a profusion of tangled vegetation, or again, as at Bournemouth, revealing the frame of naked nature. The Shanklin Chine, in the former variety, is by many judged the prettiest, as it is perhaps the best known to visitors. A description of it may be borrowed from Black’s _Guide to the Isle of Wight_.

This popular sight, like other wonders of nature on the Island, is
enclosed, a small charge being made for admission, and in more than
one respect rather suggests the tea-garden order of resort, but
nothing can spoil it. It is to be entered at either end, but
excursion coaches usually bring their passengers to the head of the
Chine. At the top will be found a ferruginous spring. Here the
chasm is at its narrowest, increasing till it has a breadth of
nearly 300 feet, while the steep sides are in parts almost 200 feet
high. Winding walks take one for some quarter of a mile down a deep
glen, which differs notably from Blackgang Chine in being choked up
with trees and a rich undergrowth of ferns, moss, and brushwood,
wherever any shade-loving plant can take root. Into the top pours a
little waterfall, rushing to the sea at the bottom of this
wilderness of greenery.

But even without its Chine, Shanklin would have a right to be proud of itself. It lies at the corner of the southern range of Downs that separate it from Ventnor and the Undercliff. Open and airy walks may be taken on these heights; or less arduous strolls by the leafy knolls and hollows on their flanks. One favourite ramble is to Cook’s Castle, an artificial ruin

upon a wooded brow commanding a fine view, whence it is a short mile to Wroxall, the next station on the railway as it bends inland, to find nothing for it but a tunnel through the heights that shelter Ventnor.

From the bottom of Shanklin Chine, when the tide is out, one can follow the coast round the fissured crags of Dunnose, on which a cliff-walk is always open. Thus is reached Luccombe Chine, a modestly retiring scene, not so easily found, since there is no charge for admission; but well worth finding. Beyond this one enters the tangled wilderness of the Landslip, through which winds a path for Bonchurch. But here we come within the purlieus of Ventnor, and round to the “Back of the Island.”

From the heights at this corner, one looks down upon the scene of one of the saddest of naval disasters in our day, recorded in churchyards that show the tombs of so many young lives. Off Dunnose was lost, in 1878, the training ship _Eurydice_, with her company of hearty and hopeful lads. I well remember how that Sunday afternoon the March wind blustered on the northern heights of London. But under the lee of the Undercliff, the homeward bound sailors hailed it as a favouring breeze; then with ports open and under all plain canvas, the _Eurydice_ spanked on round Dunnose, passing out of shelter of the Downs, to be taken aback by a snow squall, that threw her on her beam-ends before the men could shorten sail. Many of them must have been drowned as they rushed to struggle up on deck, from which others were swept away, blinded by the snow, or drawn down in the vortex of the sinking vessel. Three or four came to be picked up, an hour later, by a passing collier, and only two lived to tell the amazement of their sudden wreck, whose victims had much the same fate as those of the _Royal George_.

Gone in a moment! hurried headlong down
From light and hope to darkness and despair!
Plunged into utter night without renown,
Bereft of all--home, country, earth, and air--
Without a warning, yea, without a prayer!

THE UNDERCLIFF

The “Back of the Island” is a familiar name given locally to the south coast, its eastern end more widely famed as the Undercliff. All this side is marked by sterner features and sharper outlines than the shallow creeks and flats of the northern shore; and through its geological history the Undercliff makes a peculiar exhibition of picturesqueness, while by its winter climate it is one of England’s most favoured nooks.

Here a narrow strip of shore lies for miles walled in to the north by a steep bank several hundred feet high, sometimes presenting a rugged face of sandstone cliff, elsewhere rising in the turf swell of chalk downs. But the bastions of rock thus displayed rest upon a treacherous foundation of gault clay, expressively known as the “Blue slipper,” which, saturated with water, has given way so as to cause repeated landslides and falls of the super-incumbent strata, tumbling the lower slopes into a broken chaos of terraces and knolls, dotted with boulders of chalk and sandstone. This ruin of nature has long been overgrown by rich greenery, mantling its asperities, all the more since the charms and mildness of the situation go to making it a much trimmed wilderness, populated with villages and villas that turn the Undercliff into one great garden of choice and luxuriant vegetation.

The capital of the Undercliff is Ventnor, whose dependencies and outposts straggle almost all along this sheltered coast-strip. Now the most beautifully placed and the most widely admired town in the Island, it has risen to such note within the memory of men still living. A century ago Sir H. Englefield gives it a word as “a neat hamlet,” while guide-books of his day do not even name it between the older villages of St Lawrence and Bonchurch, that on either side wing its body of terraces and zigzag streets. Its history seems illustrated in the old “Crab and Lobster” Inn, from a modest haunt of fishermen developed into a spacious hotel, and still more plainly in the monuments of so many a young life close packed about its nineteenth century churches. It was Sir James Clarke, an esteemed physician of our great-grandfathers’ day, who dubbed Ventnor an English Madeira, and brought it into medical repute as a rival of Torquay, both of them disputing the honour of having the mildest winter climate in England, which probably belongs rather to the Cornish coast, or to other claimants still wanting a _vates sacer_, that is, a London doctor to give them bold advertisement.

The shift in medical opinion as to the cure of consumption by pure and dry air, however cold, must have somewhat blown upon Ventnor’s reputation; and it may in future come to depend upon its amenities as much as on the soft climate, now that Mentone itself seems rather shy of its old character as a rendezvous for consumptive germs. It has a summer as well as a winter season; but there is not much to be said for its bathing and boating, the shore here being rougher than on the east side, and exposed to dangerous currents. The beach before the esplanade has been tamed a little and brought under the yoke of bathing machines. Further along there are here and there tempting strips of sand; but swimmers may be cautioned as to launching forth too trustfully. The same hint applies to boating, this coast being best navigated with the help of someone who knows its reefs and eddies. Ventnor visitors are more ready to make jaunts on land than by sea; and in fine weather their favourite amusement is supplied by the coaches, brakes, and other vehicles which carry them to all parts of the Island. There are daily excursions in the season to Freshwater, Cowes, and other remote points; besides morning and afternoon trips to Blackgang, Shanklin, and such nearer goals; and the stranger will have much ado to deny the insinuating recruiters who at every corner of the High Street lie in wait to enlist him for their crew of pleasure-seekers.

The strong point of the town is its picturesque site, which, indeed, implies the defects of its qualities, having been termed “fit for kangaroos” by some short-winded critic. Nature never meant herself here to be laid out in streets, and eligible plots of building land have to be taken as they can be found on the steep slope. This fact, however favourable to scenic effect, proves a little trying to those feeble folk who make so large a part of the population. Communication with the different levels of the town, where the climate varies according to their degree of elevation and protection, has to be effected by steep stairs, winding ascents, and devious roads; and often one’s goal seems provokingly near, while it turns out to be tiresomely far by the only available access. One thoroughfare is so precipitous that a railing has been provided for the aid of those risking its descent. The twisting High Street debouches into a hollow, prettily laid out, about which are the most sheltered parts of the town. Here stands the pier with its shelters and pavilion; and a short esplanade curves round the little bay to a rocky point, from which other zigzags remount to the higher quarters. There has been a proposal to extend this esplanade along the Bonchurch side of the shore, where the gasworks certainly do not form a very pleasant or convenient obstruction; but on the whole it appears better to leave Ventnor as it is. Its great charm consists of being as unlike as possible to the general type of seaside resorts; and its irregular architecture, wilful roads, and provoking impasses are at least in harmony with each other.

Let us see how it strikes a stranger--Mr W. D. Howells, to wit--on a recent visit.

The lovely little town, which is like an English water-colour, for
the rich, soft blur of its greys and blues and greens, has a sea at
its feet of an almost Bermudian variety of rainbow tints, and a
milky horizon all its own, with the sails of fishing-boats drowning
in it like moths that had got into the milk. The streets rise in
amphitheatrical terraces from the shore, and where they cease to
have the liveliness of watering-place shops, they have the
domesticity of residential hotels and summer boarding-houses, and
private villas set in depths of myrtle and holly and oleander and
laurel: some of the better-looking houses were thatched, perhaps to
satisfy a sentiment for rusticity in the summer boarder or tenant.

But this appreciative stranger is a little at sea in freely dashing into his sketch a background of “seats and parks of nobility and gentry,” which seems somewhat of an American exaggeration for the villaed skirts of Ventnor. The most lordly “seat” about Ventnor is Steephill Castle, at the west end, from the tower of which flaunts his own Stars and Stripes to proclaim it the home of a compatriot who must have reason to chuckle, as he does in a volume of memoirs, that slow, simple, honest John Bull now wakes up to let himself be exploited by Transatlantic enterprise. This gentleman’s daughter was the late popular novelist “John Oliver Hobbes,” who latterly lived much here, or in the neighbourhood. The modern castle, that has housed an empress in its time, took the place of a cottage of gentility built by Hans Stanley, George III.’s Governor of the Island. It formerly belonged to the Hamborough family, whose heir met with his death in a painful way, that gave rise to what was known as the Ardlamont murder case.

The trustees of this family have lately been at loggerheads with the Ventnor people as to enclosing the links by the shore. Part of the cliff here, however, has been acquired as a prettily unconventional public park, laid out with playing greens beneath its leafy mazes and airy walks. At this end, opposite the west gate of the park, is the station of the mid-island line, distinguished as “Ventnor Town,” whereas “Ventnor” station of the older east coast rail stands so high above the sea that access to it suggests the “stations” of a pilgrimage. The last time I was in Ventnor, I had the pleasure of being able to assist some countrywomen of Mr Howell’s whom I found fluttering in breathless doubt between those two confusing goals, that ought to be joined by some kind of mountain railway.

One advantage of having attained the upper station, is that here one is half-way up the steep bank rising behind Ventnor to be the highest point of the Island, nearly 800 feet. This down bears the name of St Boniface, in honour of whom passing ships used to lower their topsails. The ridge is reached by chalky paths from a road near the station, and from other approaches at the top of the town; and however stuffy the air may be below, the perspiring climber will not fail to find invigoration on the open crest. For goal of the ascent, there is a wishing-well, as to which old tradition has it that, if you reach the spot, Orpheus-like, without casting a backward glance, the wish you may form while drinking of its welcome spring will speedily be fulfilled. Certainly no finer view could be wished for than one gains from the summit and along a wide stretch of rambles on either hand. Holding on round a horse-shoe hollow, one may turn down on the right to Shanklin; or, in the other direction, crossing the rail and road to Ryde at Wroxall, pass over to the heights of Appuldurcombe, where the Worsley monument makes a beacon. Hence another lofty sweep brings one back to Ventnor by Week Down and Rew Down, used as a golf ground, which must try the strength of elderly devotees on their preliminary ascent to the clubhouse, standing out like an Alpine chapel.

The stiff-kneed pilgrim who has not heart for such arduosities, may follow the road along the face of St Boniface Down, or the sea-walk below, to Bonchurch, that choice and lovely east-end of Ventnor, clustered round a pond, overhung by a rich bank of foliage. The mildness of the climate is attested by huge arbutus growths, recalling those of Killarney, by fuchsias like trees, with trunks as thick as a strong man’s wrist, and by scarlet geraniums of such exuberance that a single plant will cover several square yards of wall in front of a house. This one fact, more than any word-painting, gives an idea of the way in which Bonchurch, and indeed most parts of Ventnor, are embowered by foliage. In all sorts of odd nooks, either nestling against the steep wall of the Undercliff, or hiding away in its leafy hollows, perch the picturesque cottages and handsome villas that have attracted only too many neighbours. The road is much shut in between walls of private grounds, within which are enclosed some of the finest spots, such as the “Pulpit Rock,” a projecting mass of sandstone marked by a cross, and another known as the “Flagstaff Rock.”

Threading our way between these forbidden paradises, the road would take us up by the new Church with its sadly beautiful graveyard. A lane turns steeply downwards past the old church, now disused, one of the many smallest churches in England, that has the further note of being the sole wholly Norman structure in the Island. Here are buried the Rev. W. Adams, author of the _Shadow of the Cross_, and John Sterling, Carlyle’s friend, who came to die at Hillside, now a boarding-house near the upper station at Ventnor. Another literary celebrity who lived here was Elizabeth Sewell, whose _Amy Herbert_ and other edifying novels were so popular in her own generation; and in one of them, _Ursula_, she has described the scenery about her home.

The old church is said to be now in danger of slipping down towards the sea. Below it, one descends to Monks’ Bay, traditional landing-place of the French Benedictines who made themselves once so much at home on the Island, as their spiritual descendants are doing now. The sea-walk round

this bay leads into the Landslip, so called _par excellence_, as the rawest and wildest disturbance of the Undercliff, its last fall being not yet a century old. This wilderness of overgrown knolls and hillocks, tumbled from the crags above, is not to be equalled on our south coast unless by the similar chaos near Lyme Regis, whose broken and bosky charms have been stirred into fresh picturesqueness by slips of more recent date. Over daisied turf one here takes a twisting path that leads by banks of bracken and bramble into thickets of gnarled thorn and other blossoming shade, half-burying green mounds and grey boulders in a tangle where one would soon lose oneself but for occasional glimpses of the sea below, or for running upon the wall of a private enclosure behind, guide for the wanderer in his descent towards Luccombe Chine, who can also ascend to the cliff-walk for Shanklin. The scene is thus described by Thomas Webster, a geologist who visited it a century ago, while the first convulsion was still fresh, before the last slip of 1818 came to make confusion worse confounded.

A considerable portion of the cliff had fallen down, strewing the
whole of the ground between it and the sea with its ruins; huge
masses of solid rock started up amidst heaps of smaller fragments;
whilst immense quantities of loose marl, mixed with stones, and
even the soil above with the wheat still growing on it, filled up
the spaces between, and formed hills of rubbish which are scarcely
accessible. Nothing had resisted the force of the falling rocks.
Trees were levelled with the ground, and many lay half buried in
the ruins. The streams were choked up, and pools of water were
formed in many places. Whatever road or path formerly existed
through this place had been effaced; and with some difficulty I
passed over this avalanche, which extended many hundred yards.
Proceeding eastwards, the whole of the soil seemed to have been
moved, and was filled with chasms and bushes lying in every
direction. The intricate and rugged path became gradually less
distinct, and soon divided into mere sheep tracks, leading into an
almost impenetrable thicket. I perceived, however, on my left hand,
the lofty wall of rock which belonged to the same stratum as the
Undercliff, softened in its rugged character by the foliage which
grew in its fissures, and still preserving some remains of its
former picturesque beauty. Neglect, and the unfortunate accident
which had lately happened, had now altered the features of this
once delightful spot; and I was soon bewildered among rocks,
streams of water, tangling thorns, and briars.

The labyrinth between Luccombe and Bonchurch was not the only landslip in modern times; and though there is believed to be little fear of any further serious disturbance, occasional falls of rock are a warning how this gracious ruin of nature might be renewed. _The_ Landslip here[3] makes to my mind the _bouquet_ of the whole Undercliff, whose similar features, on an ampler scale, of older wrinkles, and usually more veiled by the work of man, stretch for miles westward along a rugged platform varying up to half a mile in width. Words but feebly paint the charms of a miniature Riviera, its broken land-waves foaming into groves, gardens, and tangles of shrubbery. Between the wall of downs and cliff-buttresses shutting it in to the north, and the sea dashing at its foot, the foliage runs as rank as in a giant’s greenhouse, beautifully

displayed by the accidents of the irregularly sloping ground.

Crags, knolls, and mounds confusedly hurl’d,
The fragments of an earlier world.

This line of cliffs may indeed remind us of the Trossachs, with one side opened out to the sun and a richer vegetation at its base. Hawthorns, elders, and other bushes grow here to a huge height, dappling the green of the woods with their blossoms. Myrtle and other semi-tropical plants flourish hardily; everywhere there are flowers prodigal as weeds, notably the red Valerian flourishing on walls and broken edges. Huge boulders are half hidden in ivy, heaps of old ruins are buried in almost impassable thickets. It is hard to say when the huge bank of greenery is most beautiful--whether in spring with all its blossoms and tender buds; or in summer wearing its full glory of leafage; or again in autumn brilliant with changing tints and spangled by bright berries: even in winter there are evergreens enough to make us forget the cold winds banished from this cosy nook. The one blot on such a paradise seems the many notices to trespassers, warning that its most tempting nooks are “private,” or the still more ominous placards of “valuable building land to let on lease.”

The Bonchurch Landslip must be traversed on foot. On the other side of Ventnor, a good road winds up and down beneath the inland heights, from the edge of which one better sees how many houses and gardens are hidden away here in their own greenery. Other aspects are presented from a path rising and falling along the broken cliffs of the shore. The road, in fine weather, will be astir with coaches, brakes, and other wheels making for Blackgang Chine, that renowned goal of excursions from all over the Island. Beyond Steephill Castle, it leads through St Lawrence, the western, as Bonchurch is the eastern wing of Ventnor.

St Lawrence, known to guide-books that used to pass Ventnor Cove without a word, has another of the smallest churches in England, now replaced by a new one. The old church, till slightly enlarged by Lord Yarborough, measured twenty feet by twelve under a roof which must have obliged a tall knight to doff his helmet. Its saint, like St Boniface, gave his name to a well now enclosed under a Gothic arch. But the great institution of the parish, standing in a long terrace by the roadside, is the Hospital for Consumption, which Ventnor people insist on as being at St Lawrence, just as Woking pushes off the honour of the Brookwood Cemetery. There was a time when this model hospital made an advertisement for Ventnor; now new notions as to germ-infection tend to scare away more profitable guests than its patients, who might be expected to fall off under new theories of treatment for consumption, but the building has had a recent addition in memory of Prince Henry of Battenberg.

We are now among mansions and cottages of thick-set gentility, the nucleus of which was a villa built by Sir R. Worsley, who made the hardly successful experiment of planting a vineyard here. The oldest structure seems to be a little ivy-clad ruin at Woolverton on the shore, as to the character of which antiquaries for once have differed like doctors, while its antiquity, like that of the old church, offers hopeful promise for the permanence of modern buildings on these oft-torn slopes. But we must not stop to speak of every house on this road, nor of every private pleasance like that known to Swinburne--

The shadowed lawns, the shadowing pines, the ways
That wind and wander through a world of flowers,
The radiant orchard where the glad sun’s gaze
Dwells, and makes most of all his happiest hours;
The field that laughs beneath the cliff that towers,
The splendour of the slumber that enthralls
With sunbright peace the world within their walls,
Are symbols yet of years that love recalls.

On one hand, ascents like the “Cripple Path” would lead us to fine prospects from the cliff-brow, while below, we might seek out Puckaster Cove, or the Buddle Inn near a good stretch of sand, such as is rather exceptional hereabouts, where fragments of the destruction above are found trailing out into the sea to form dangerous reefs. One theory makes Puckaster the Roman tin-shipping port; and it certainly proved a haven of refuge for Charles II. in a storm, as recorded in a neighbouring parish-register. Along the broken slope, the high-road takes us as described by William Black, who has caught the characteristic features of so many English scenes.

There was a great quiet prevailing along these southern shores.
They drove by underneath the tall and crumbling precipices, with
wood-pigeons suddenly shooting out from the clefts, and jackdaws
wheeling about far up in the blue. They passed by sheltered woods,
bestarred with anemones and primroses, and showing here and there
the purple of the as yet half-opened hyacinth; they passed by lush
meadows, all ablaze with the golden yellow of the celandine and the
purple of the ground-ivy; they passed by the broken, picturesque
banks where the tender blue of the speedwell was visible from time
to time, with the white glimmer of the star-wort. And then all this
time they had on their left a gleaming and wind-driven sea, full of
motion, and light, and colour, and showing the hurrying shadows of
the flying clouds.

The goal of Black’s party was the Sandrock Hotel, prettily situated by the roadside at Undercliff Niton, which has a chalybeate spring, and near it some local worthy thought desirable to erect a small shrine to the memory of Shakespeare, anticipating the more pretentious monument by which he is now to be glorified in London. From this seaside outpost turns off the way to the inland village of Niton, lying behind in a break of the chalk heights. It has been distinguished from Knighton by the sobriquet of Crab Niton, “a distinction which the inhabitants do not much relish, and therefore it will be impolitic to employ it,” as a venerable guide-book very prudently suggests; and Knighton being nowadays little more than a name, strangers will find no inconvenience in taking that hint. The place boasts at least one sojourner of note, as we learn from the

tomb of Edward Edwards, leader of the Free Public Library movement that has now so many monuments all over the country.

The parish of Niton is a large one, containing the head springs of the Medina and of the eastern Yar, which the well-greaved adventurer might hence try to track across the Island to their not very distant mouths. More otiose travellers will find a road passing under St Catherine’s Down for Newport and the central parts. From the sturdy church tower with its low spire, a lane leads up to the top of the Down, whence we could take a wide view of our wanderings, backwards and forwards. And here, since we are almost at the end of the Undercliff, let us break off to survey the longer but less famed stretch of this coast, westwards, under its more comprehensive title.

THE BACK OF THE ISLAND

Our Pisgah for this stage is St Catherine’s Down, once held the highest point of the Island, but now dethroned, like Ben Macdhui, in favour of the Ben Nevis of St Boniface. It appears that in Georgian days Week Down was charged with hiding Shanklin Down from the view of St Catherine’s, as is no longer the case, the moral being that one or other of these heights has been raised or depressed, as may well have happened to superstructures upon so slippery foundation. In such a question of measurements, at all events, “the self-styled science of the so-called nineteenth century” with its more elaborate observations, gives a surer title to eminence. But St Catherine’s is only a few feet lower than the ridge above Ventnor; and from it, too, a fine prospect may be had, ranging over the Isle of Wight to the heights of the mainland, and across the Channel to the French coast in clear weather.

This broad and steep block of down is well provided with landmarks. On the inland side a tall pillar was erected by a Russian merchant, in honour of the Czar Alexander’s visit to England after the fall of Napoleon; which monument a later generation very inappropriately adorned with a memorial of our soldiers fallen in the Crimean War. On the top are the restored remains of a chapel, where in old days a hermit-priest made himself truly useful by keeping a light burning to warn mariners off this stormy coast, and chanting prayers for their safety. A less pious legend attributes the building of the old beacon here to a layman amerced in such a penalty for having stored his cellars with wine sold him by shipwrecked sailors, a class not very scrupulous as to owner’s rights--

Full many a draught of wine had he y-draw
From Bourdeaux-ward, while that the chapmen sleep:
Of nicé conscience took he no keep.

Hard by is a later ruin to show how a lighthouse was designed in the eighteenth century, but a practical age gave up the attempt to rear a pharos on this cloudy height. Experience since then has gone to show that a lighthouse serves its end better at the water’s edge than on commanding cliffs like Beachy Head and Portland Point, from both of which the old beacons have lately been moved to a lower level.

St Catherine’s Lighthouse stands on the point of that ilk, the most southerly projection of the Island, where it has Lloyd’s signal station for neighbour. Its recently intensified electric light is said to be the most powerful in the world, every few seconds flashing over the sea a beam of concentrated glare equal to millions of candles. It is also equipped with a fog-horn, whose hoarse note of warning resounds for miles, not altogether to the satisfaction of neighbours safe on land. Yet they may take comfort to think how this screech is more fearsomely disquieting when heard at sea. I once had such a note ringing in my ears for two days together running through a chill fog off Newfoundland, with icebergs about us that could be felt but not seen. Our boat was one of the few that have crushed into an iceberg and crawled to land with the tale; then to keep us cheerful we had on board a survivor of that adventure, the perils whereof it pleased him to depict as looming through a somewhat befogged imagination.

Another of our fellow-passengers was an American gentleman, who in Europe had been qualifying himself to come out as an opera tenor. He was coy of giving us a specimen of his talent, till one night we persuaded him to begin _Ah, che la morte!_ But at once the officer of the watch stepped up to silence him, explaining that his singing might drown the sound of fog-horns. The vocalist was much offended at his organ being coupled with a fog-horn; and I fear I gave him fresh offence by suggesting “Signor Fogorno” as a suitable _nom de guerre_, when he consulted me as to Italianising his rather commonplace patronymic. But that careful officer was right, if the story be true that a German liner ran ashore on the back of the Island because her own brass band deafened her to the warning note that surely should have drowned all sweeter sounds. And if our insulted tenor had known it, this artificial organ has a very old theatrical connection, for _persona_ seems the earliest form of such a sounding contrivance, originally a megaphonic mouthpiece fitted to a mask which, as one of the classical stage properties, came to denote the personage thus represented; and in time the name gained respectability as the person or parson of a parish, who more or less loudly warned his convoy of souls from the rocks and shoals of ill-doing.

A different kind of signal would be keenly watched for in days when the storm of Napoleon’s invasion was expected to burst upon our shores; and on all prominent points beacons were kept ready to spread the alarm of the enemy’s approach. The Isle of Wight was fully on the alert, remembering how often it had been a vulnerable point in mail-clad wars with France, though one would think that the bugbear, Boney, knew his business too well to seek a difficult landing in an island, beyond which he would be brought up by a dangerous channel, a strong arsenal, and a naval rendezvous. It is said that the signalman at St Catherine’s, probably having drunk the king’s health too freely in smuggled spirits, mistook some fishing-boats for a French fleet, and lighted his beacon to set men mustering in arms and women and children flying for refuge to Newport. Sir Walter Scott tells us how the same sort of blunder stirred a great part of Scotland. But on one side of the Island the scare did not spread far, since the watcher at Freshwater very sensibly reasoned that the wind then blowing would keep this coast clear of hostile ships, and forbore to pass on the alarm.

Before the building of St Catherine’s lighthouse in 1840, shipwrecks were terribly common on the Island. A famous one was that of the _Clarendon_ West India-man, in 1836. Fourteen vessels in one night are said to have gone ashore on Chale Bay. This is no coast for amateur mariners. One is warned also against bathing as dangerous hereabouts, yet I, unconscious, have swum below Blackgang in my hot youth; while in cooler age I echo the caution. The hero of _Maud_, whose haunts we are now approaching, would sometimes have been all the better and wiser for a morning dip to cool his fevered brow; but he was not so much out of conceit with life as to venture a bathe--

Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung, shipwrecking roar,
Now to the scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave.

--a sound which, Tennyson states, can sometimes be heard nine miles inland.

Chale Bay, in which is Blackgang Chine, opens on the west side of St Catherine’s Point, where, at Rocken End, the Undercliff seems tumbling into the sea in a chaos of blocks of chalk and sandstone stormed upon by the waves with freshly ruinous fury. Above, on the side of St Catherine’s Down, the scenery alters from nests of Riviera greenery to bare

slopes broken by huge boulders and scars, that expose the geological structure of the Downs to a spectacled eye. Here a slip of 100 acres happened at the end of the eighteenth century; and the masterful south-west blasts keep the ruin still somewhat raw, not skinned over as in more sheltered nooks. The road, passing out of shade, makes a Switzerlandish turn under the cliffs, as it descends to Blackgang Chine, the final goal of lion-hunters on this route.

Entrance to the so much sought sight is through a sort of museum or bazaar, where one must either buy something or frankly pay sixpence. This reminds me of a visit to Pompeii more than forty years ago--_eheu!_--when the soldier who conducted me seemed strangely officious in repeatedly declaring that he was not entitled to any tip; but, he added, “I have some photographs to sell.” There are those who hint darkly at illicit entrances by which the unprincipled or impecunious can smuggle themselves into Blackgang Chine without paying or buying anything; but considerate visitors will not grudge a toll for use of the walks and steps that open up the recesses of this great chasm, through which echoes the boom of waves breaking on the beach below. It differs from the Shanklin Chine in being not overgrown with greenery, but showing through its nakedness the various _viscera_ of greenish-grey sand and dark ferruginous clay that charm the geologist. Description may not prove “up-to-date,” as the weather-worn sides crumble away from year to year; yet Sir Henry Englefield’s account is still to be quoted after more than a century.

No vegetation clothes any part of this rude hollow, whose flanks
are in a state of continual decay. They are mostly composed of very
dark blue clay, through which at intervals run horizontal strata of
bright yellow sandstone, about 12 or 15 feet thick, which naturally
divide into square blocks, and have exactly the appearance of vast
courses of masonry built at different heights to sustain the
mouldering hill. What has been hitherto described may be called the
upper part of the chine, for on descending to the seashore we find
that the stratum of ironstone already mentioned, forms a cornice
from whose edge the rill falls perpendicularly 74 feet. As the
substratum is of a softer material than the ironstone, being a
black indurated clay, the action of the fall has worn it into a
hollow, shining with a dusky polish from damp, and stained with the
deep greens of aquatic lichens, or the ferruginous tinge of
chalybeate exudations. The silver thread of water which falls
through the air in the front of this singular cove is, when the
wind blows fresh, twisted into most fantastic and waving curves;
and not seldom caught by the eddy and carried up unbroken to a
height greater than that from whence it fell, and at last
dissipated into mist. When a south-west wind creates a heavy swell
on the shore, the echo of the sound of the waves in this gloomy
recess is truly astonishing, and has exactly the effect of a deep
subterraneous roar issuing from the bottom of the cave. When sudden
heavy rains or the melting of snows increase the quantity of water
in the fall, the scenery of this spot must be more striking than
most in England.

Half a mile behind Blackgang Chine lies the village of Chale, whose grey church tower stands among the grass-grown graves of many a drowned mariner, that seem an imitation in miniature of the half-buried rocks and mounds of the Undercliff. Chale is a resort on its small scale, with some good old houses and fine scenes to attract visitors, not to speak of a chalybeate well on the strength of which the place once aspired to become a spa; and Dr Dabbs’ opinion is emphatic that its bracing air deserves a success Chale has not yet commanded in rivalry to Shanklin or Ventnor. Its patients may at least make sure of having their fill of the south-west wind, that gives such a leeward lurch to hardier trees now that they are out of shelter in the Undercliff’s sun-trap.

Westward, the shore has openings known as Walpen Chine, Ladder Chine, and Whale Chine, which are as notable as Blackgang in their way, but not so famous; and several others yawn more obscurely on the coast line to Freshwater. Some couple of miles beyond Chale, a name of grim notoriety is Atherfield Point, where many vessels have been lost on its dangerous ledge, like the German Lloyd _Eider_, in 1892, that grounded in a fog, all hands being saved, and the steamer remaining stuck fast for weeks, so as to give this neighbourhood the excitement without the horror of a great shipwreck. In bad old days the people of Chale had an evil name as wreckers, luring poor seamen to destruction by deceptive lights, and not sticking at murder as a prelude to robbery, since the law held the death of the survivors to extinguish their title in what goods might be salved.

From Chale, the seaboard opens out for a stretch of some ten miles along the Back of the Island, a part not so well known to strangers, unless as hurrying by on their way to Freshwater. But the path along the rough shore edge is full of points of interest, especially to the geologist, who, from exposures of the green-sand formation passes on to mottled earthy cliffs of the Wealden age, then again finds sand pressed down by masses of chalk. Behind, runs a silent military road made to link the Island defences, which is not altogether passable for wheels; indeed the Freshwater end of it has tumbled into the sea. The usual driving-road turns inland to pass through the villages below the Downs, which now draw back a mile or two from the beach. Let us, then, follow Edmund Peel, the poet of this _Fair Isle_.

Back from the brink and rest the stagger’d eye
On the green mound, whose western slope reveals
A landscape tranquil as the deep blue sky,
Of hill and dale a rich variety,
Down over down, vale winding into vale,
Where peaceful villages imbosom’d lie,
And halls manorial, from green-swarded Chale,
To Brixton’s fruitful glebe and Brooke’s delicious dale.

Behind Chale, by the outlying Chale Green near the head of the Medina, is reached the tiny village of Kingston with its tiny and picturesquely perched Church, some half-dozen miles south of Newport. The road to Freshwater turns west, soon reaching Shorwell, in its setting of unusually rich woods, from which rises the spire of the Church, notable for very curious and striking features, as for its show of Leigh monuments, a once obliterated wall-painting, and other relics. Its vestry preserves the Gun Chamber,

in which several of these Island churches once kept a cannon for defence of the coast. This village is said to have won Queen Victoria’s special admiration, as well it might.

Two miles on, comes another pretty place, Brixton _alias_ Brighstone, very unlike its metropolitan namesake, with a goodly Church that counts among former parsons Bishops Ken, Samuel Wilberforce, and Moberley. In the beautiful garden of the parsonage, Ken is said to have composed his far-sung Morning and Evening Hymns; and a tree is shown here under which Wilberforce wrote his _Agathos_. Hence one can descend to the shore by Grange Chine, which the military road crosses by a lofty viaduct; or over the Downs goes the road to Calbourne, the nearest station on the Freshwater line.

The next village on the road is Mottistone, from whose too much restored Church, a steep, shady lane leads up to the Mote Stone, or Long Stone, a block of ferruginous sandstone 13 feet high, with a smaller one fallen beside it, seeming to have both made part of an ancient cromlech; but this is said to have served as a mote or public meeting-place, while a natural legend sees here the stones of a diabolic and angelic putting-match on St Catherine’s Down. These high downs were a favourite prehistoric burying place; and several barrows hereabouts have been excavated by a generation whose _tumuli_ have shrunk to the tees of golf. The Tudor manor-house, beside Mottistone Church, is one of the best of the picturesque old structures of that period, which in this corner of the Island have not been so much shouldered off by spick-and-span villas.

Leaving the road, beyond the hamlet of Hulverston one can pass down to the shore by Brook, which has a chine to show, and a fossil forest on the west side of Brook Point, explained by the geologist Mantell as having “originated in a raft composed of a prostrate pine-forest, transported from a distance by the river which flowed through the country whence the Wealden deposits were derived, and became submerged in the sand and mud of the delta, burying with it the bones of reptiles, mussel-shells, and other extraneous bodies it had gathered in its course.... Many of the stems are concealed and protected by the fuci, corallines, and zoophytes which here thrive luxuriantly, and occupy the place of the lichens and other parasitical plants with which the now petrified trees were doubtlessly invested when flourishing in their native forests, and affording shelter to the Iguanodon and other gigantic reptiles.” The beach yields pretty pebbles; and huge fossils have been found in the cliffs hereabouts.

Hence the military road skirts Compton Bay, upon which the Downs close in again with a steep slope of chalk that makes no safe play-place for children, especially when the turf is slippery after long drought, a caution enforced by the monument to a poor boy who fell here sixty years ago. Beyond Afton Down, at the west end of Compton Bay, the little esplanade of Freshwater marks a new division of the Island, which, indeed, but for this much strained isthmus, would have made two islands.

FRESHWATER AND THE NEEDLES

At the south-western corner of the Island comes a cleft in the Central Downs, through which the little Yar flows across the narrowed end from Freshwater Gate, or Gap, whose name seems to denote the peculiar fact of a river having its source by the seashore, so near that in rough weather salt water is said to be washed into the stream. Through that hollow the spray of the waves can from north and south meet across the three miles of land; and unless something be done to protect such a weak spot, it appears that before long this promontory may be cut off from the Island, as itself was from the mainland by rushing Solent tides. The War Office, as one of the chief occupiers, is understood to have been more than indifferent about the sea getting its way in making the nest of forts here a miniature of the whole kingdom--

Fortress, built by nature for herself
Against infection or the hand of war.

In Charles I’s. reign it was indeed proposed to insulate this corner artificially as a citadel of defence. Private owners and tenants, for their part, are inclined to plans for forming some kind of breakwater, where the tiny esplanade of Freshwater is battered by every gale. Local authorities have been calling on the Hercules aid of a Royal Commission; and as a beginning of defence, the Board of Trade has forbidden Freshwater Bay being used by reckless neighbours for a quarry of shingle.