Recollections of Europe | Page 9

us, and, as the land rose to a ridge behind
them, we had a distinct view of a fair expanse of nearly houseless fields.
We had left America verdant and smiling, but we found England brown
and parched, there having been a long continuance of dry easterly
winds.
The cliffs terminated suddenly, a little way ahead of the ship, and the
land retired inward, with a wide sweep, forming a large, though not a
very deep bay, that was bounded by rather low shores. It was under
these very cliffs, on which we were looking with so much pleasure and
security, and at so short a distance, that the well-known and terrible
wreck of an Indiaman occurred, when the master, with his two
daughters, and hundreds of other lives, were lost. The pilot pointed out
the precise spot where that ill-fated vessel went to pieces. But the sea in
its anger, and the sea at rest, are very different powers. The place had
no terrors for us.
Ahead of us, near twenty miles distant, lay a high hazy bluff, that was
just visible. This was the western extremity of the Isle of Wight, and
the end of our passage in the Hudson. A sloop of war was pointing her
head in towards this bluff, and all the vessels in sight now began to take

new forms, varying and increasing the picturesque character of the
view. We soon got a light air ourselves, and succeeded in laying the
ship's head off shore, towards which we had been gradually drifting
nearer than was desirable. The wind came fresh and fair about ten,
when we directed our course towards the distant bluff. Everything was
again in motion. The cliffs behind us gradually sunk, as those before us
rose, and lost their indistinctness; the blue of the latter soon became
grey, and, ere long, white as chalk, this being the material of which
they are, in truth, composed.
We saw a small whale (it might have been a large grampus)
floundering ahead of us, and acting as an extra pilot, for he appeared to
be steering, like ourselves, for the Needles. These Needles are
fragments of the chalk cliffs, that have been pointed and rendered
picturesque by the action of the weather, and our course lay directly
past them. They form a line from the extremity of the Isle of Wight,
and are awkwardly placed for vessels that come this way in thick
weather, or in the dark. The sloop of war got round them first, and we
were not far behind her. When fairly within the Needles the ship was
embayed, our course now lying between Hampshire and the Isle of
Wight, through a channel of no great width. The country was not
particularly beautiful, and still looked parched; though we got a distant
view of one pretty town, Lymington, in Hampshire. This place, in the
distance, appeared not unlike a large New England village, though
there was less glare to the houses. The cliffs, however, were very fine,
without being of any extraordinary elevation. Though much inferior to
the shores of the Mediterranean, they as much surpass anything I
remember to have seen on our own coast, between Cape Anne and
Cape Florida; which, for its extent, a part of India, perhaps, excepted, is,
I take it, just the flattest, and tamest, and least interesting coast in the
entire world.
The master pointed out a mass of dark herbage on a distant height,
which resembled a copse of wood that had been studiously clipped into
square forms at its different angles. It was visible only for a few
moments, through a vista in the hills. This was Carisbrooke Castle,
buried in ivy.

There was another little castle, on a low point of land, which was
erected by Henry VIII. as a part of a system of marine defence. It
would scarcely serve to scale the guns of a modern
twenty-four-pounder frigate, judging of its means of resistance and
annoyance by the eye. These things are by-gones for England, a
country that has little need of marine batteries.
About three, we reached a broad basin, the land retiring on each side of
us. The estuary to the northward is called Southampton Water, the town
of that name being seated on its margin. The opening in the Isle of
Wight is little more than a very wide mouth to a very diminutive river
or creek, and Cowes, divided into East and West, lines its shores. The
anchorage in the arm of the sea off this little haven was well filled with
vessels, chiefly the yachts of amateur seamen, and the port itself
contained little more than pilot-boats and crafts of a smaller size. The
Hudson brought up among the former. Hauling up the forecourse of a