Onward from Quarr along the coast to Cowes one passes Fishbourne, and wood-shaded Wootton Creek. One must only linger to point out the pretty village of Wootton Bridge at the head of the creek, with its feet almost in the water, and the fine sweep of Arreton Down as a background. Formerly this was a busy spot, and in the good old smuggling days many a cargo, which had escaped capture in the open Channel or in Christchurch Bay and the Solent, was silently landed on the well-wooded shores of Wootton.
Cowes has not inaptly been called “the Mecca of yachtsmen,” and in the season at one time or another, to use a common phrase, “everybody who is anybody” will generally be found in its streets, or on the yachts in Cowes Roads. Along from Wootton Creek the shore is picturesque, and as one passes Norris Castle (with the twin towers of Osborne in the background) and rounds Old Castle Point pretty West Cowes and the ivy-mantled Royal Yacht Squadron Club House come suddenly into view.
Cowes is a distinctly picturesque and interesting-looking place from the water; has a much greater air of antiquity than its more bustling rival Ryde; and with the Medina cutting the town in half has the real air of a port.
The water, too, seems along this little piece of island coast to melt into the land, so frequently is the shore shaded and beautiful with leafy dells, and giant trees waving their branches skyward in the ambient air of summer. Across the Solent, though distant, there is the not less lovely prospect of the Hampshire highlands, and the many tinted stretches of green and grey-green woodlands which mark the New Forest on the horizon.
It is not easy to get a snug berth at any time during the summer months at Cowes. During “the week” late comers will have to put up with what they can get, or go elsewhere; or anchor far outside the charmed circle of beautiful craft, which makes Cowes Roads during Regatta week a unique water pageant, and a thing to be remembered.
If one is going to spend a week at Cowes it is delightful to do so in the river somewhere off the Folly Inn on the Eastern side of the Medina; or a little further up off Roche’s or the old Mill. One is out of the way of harm (and there is plenty of that going round in the river when the tide makes out like a mill race) and one is yet not too far out of the way. Roche’s Mills have not always been as peaceful as to-day. Here, as at Porchester and elsewhere, were confined numerous French prisoners of war, though how the buildings were adapted for the purpose of a gaol it is a puzzle to imagine.
Cowes, notwithstanding its appearance of, shall we say, possible antiquity, is not an “old, ancient place,” such as many of the more western and more eastern seaports along the coast. It may be said to date its origin as a town from the year 1540, when Henry VIII erected, out of the materials of Beaulieu Abbey across the water on the skirts of the forest, one of the numerous protective castles which he dotted along the south coast. The growth of the place, however, must have been slow, as more than a century later, in the reign of Charles I, we are told that the town consisted of but some half score of small houses. The usefulness and possibilities of its harbour were (if we may accept the evidence of another authority) long before this discovered, so that in the early years of the seventeenth century “sometimes as many as two or three hundred vessels of all kinds and sizes were to be seen at anchor off it at one and the same time.”
Cowes was destined to become a shipbuilding port of some consequence in the days just prior to and during the Napoleonic Wars. From the Cowes yards, amongst other ships too numerous to mention, were launched the Repulse and Veteran, each carrying sixty-four guns, Nelson’s old ship, the Vanguard, the Cerberus, thirty-two guns; the Hero, and many another. In the year of Waterloo the first building yards of any great consequence for pleasure craft were started by Messrs White, who have, since those far off days, sent many a swift and successful yacht afloat. The necessity for such a dock as the Medina, made in 1845, measuring some 330 feet in length and 60 feet in width, will give an idea of the importance of the shipbuilding industry of Cowes in the past as well as the present.
But though, with the rise of yachting into popularity, Cowes may be said to have rapidly come to the front as “a resort of fashion and frivolity,” long ere this, about the middle of the eighteenth century, it was attracting attention as a sea-bathing station, almost rivalling Weymouth. A poet of sorts ventured to affirm—
No more to foreign baths shall Britons roam,
But plunge at Cowes, and find rich health at home.