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.