Ultimately bold Sir Robert settled down in 1667 to a shore life as Governor of the Wight, which office he held until his death in 1692.
Even his monument enshrines an adventure, as characteristic, one would imagine, as any in which he was ever engaged. Underneath the whole affair, at any rate, lurks a spice of the Irish wit which is said to have distinguished him, and to have made him an agreeable opponent and even victor. Holmes upon capturing a French vessel, found on board of it, so the story goes, an unfinished statue in marble, intended to be completed as one of Louis XIV of France, and to be then placed in the palace at Versailles. The sculptor who was engaged to carry out the work happened to be on board the ship, and it occurred to the ingenious Sir Robert that here was an excellent chance of obtaining a monument of himself at a low cost. So he compelled the artist to complete the figure as a portrait statue of himself, and then had it placed in the church of the town for which, notwithstanding his overbearing ways and erratic methods, he had done so much.
If the likeness is a good one—and there seems reason to believe it is—it is not difficult to understand the character of the man it represents. In the strong featured, hard, and masterful face one easily traces evidence of the qualities which made him a terror to the Dutch, and one of the most successful of the legalised sea-rovers of the last half of the seventeenth century. In the life story of Sir Robert Holmes there is, indeed, enough of romance and adventure to make a shelf of novels of the type of Westward Ho! were there but a new Kingsley to use the material.
And as one stands out of the little harbour, on one’s way further west, long after the pleasant little town, low-lying but picturesque, has faded out of sight astern, it is the memory of this old sea dog, truculent no doubt, but an Englishman to the backbone, that remains in the mind, “routing the King’s enemies, and carrying fire and sword instead of merchandise, along the coasts of Holland and through the Channel, and across the wide Atlantic to the New World.”
Chapter IV
Southampton—Beaulieu River—Lymington
To enter the generally placid stretch of sea known as Southampton Water, in the early morning of a summer’s day or at sunset, past the crooked nose of land on which Calshot Castle stands, whether it be aboard a Castle liner or a forty-footer, is an experience of great charm. We know of few wide stretches of sea water which are so beautiful and so interesting, or where the effects of morning mists and the rose and gold of sunset skies are seen with greater charm. And as one advances up the Channel past the mouth of the pretty Hamble River, and Netley towards Hythe, where so many bring up (though with small craft it is possible to sail on past Millbrook to Redbridge and enter the Test), glimpses are seen of the edge of the distant New Forest and the green-grey trimming to the Hythe shore.
Nowadays Southampton Water is, indeed, a busy, though silent, highway, for along it pass all kinds of craft from the wherry to the stately Atlantic liner; from the white-sailed racing cutters to the barges with red-brown canvas and a look of the Thames and Rochester about them, with dingy colliers and rust-red “tramps” as a foil to pleasure craft. Different nowadays, indeed, is the Water from what it was when frigates and seventy-fours spread their wide expanse of snowy canvas to catch the light north and north-westerly airs which came down from the Hampshire highlands, and when trading brigs and East Indiamen crept up with the flood.
Hythe, but for an excess of mud which is the bugbear of most tidal estuaries, is as good a place off which to bring up as any seafarer could wish. In its sleepy narrow streets, quaint houses, and picturesque gardens lies a charm which is very grateful after a week or two on salt water. The townlet, which clings, as it were, to the outskirts of the New Forest, with its feet all the while in the water, is rightly enough beloved of artists, who, in the quaint old-time roofs and walls of its houses and cottages and its amphibious inhabitants, find types and inspiration. Here, in the flesh and in a garb which generally contains tacit concessions to the joint needs of shore life and sea life, one meets characters which might have stepped out of the pages of W. W. Jacobs’s Sunwich Port. Descendants of the men who half a century or so ago, at the darkling of the moon, made their way up the silent stretch of water, with boats loaded to the gunwales with contraband spirits, tea, and silks (after surreptitious visits to French luggers in the offing off Eaglehurst), and who, upon safe landing at dead of night, melted away with their packhorse trains into the solitudes and thickets of the New Forest.