Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

MAZZINI AND GARIBALDI

19

Swiss border, Mazzini in a few days was back in Switzerland; while Garibaldi, disguised as a peasant, escaped from Genoa and stole across the mountains to Nice, and thence safely into France. The first time he ever read his name in print was when, on reaching Marseilles, he saw in the papers that the Piedmontese Government had condemned him to death, a proceeding which it is difficult to blame if we consider that he was known to the authorities only as a sailor who had entered the Royal service in order to betray it. When we think that if a few turns of the dice had gone differently, the father of Victor Emmanuel would have succeeded in snuffing out the lives of Mazzini and Garibaldi at this point, we may see that history is something far more wonderful than a process of evolution which science can estimate or predict.

When, in 1864, Garibaldi came to our island to receive, as the redeemer of Italy and the chosen hero of England, an ovation so tremendous that it frightened Europe and even Palmerston himself, on one of those festal occasions he 'looked through all the roaring and the wreaths' where sat a certain patient, neglected figure, come among the rest to honour him, and his heart went back thirty years to the days when, as a young merchant captain, he had first seen Mazzini at Marseilles. Since then bitter quarrels had divided them; but the sight of his old friend overwhelmed all meaner thoughts of him.

'I rise,' said Garibaldi to the assembled company, to make a declaration which I ought to have made long since. There is a man here amongst us who has rendered the greatest services to our country and to the cause of freedom. When I was a youth and had only aspirations towards good, I sought for one able to act as the guide and counsellor of my youthful years. I sought such a guide as one who is athirst seeks the water-spring. I found this man. He alone watched when all around slept, he alone kept and fed the sacred flame. ... This man is Joseph Mazzini: he is my friend and teacher.' 1

Mario, Supplement, 372. During the same visit of 1864, they met in the Isle of Wight. 'As soon as Garibaldi saw Mazzini he greeted him in the

Having made the ports of Europe too hot to hold him, Garibaldi disappeared from the Old World for twelve years (1836-48), to reappear famous when next his country had need of him. Shortly after the fiasco at Genoa, he found it best to carry his fortunes to South America, whither, then, as now, Italians, discontented with their prospects at home, often betook themselves. The Pilgrim Fathers of that epoch, who showed modern Italy the way to her New World, were not numerous, but they were choice. Many were political exiles. As the friend and hero of these, Garibaldi there learned war and leadership:

Having first within his ken

What a man might do with men.

Scarcely had he landed in South America (1836) when he formed one of the great friendships of his youth with the Genoese exile Rossetti. They became like David and Jonathan. Having set up together in Rio Janeiro as merchants, for nine months they traded in a little vessel along the eastern coasts of the Continent. But Garibaldi was already discontented with the inglorious arts of peace.' 'We are destined for greater things,' he wrote to Cuneo, in December 1836. At length, on the invitation of another Italian exile, he took service under the infant Republic of Rio Grande do Sul, which was then beginning a struggle for independence against the Brazilian Empire. As the Republicans had not yet got a ship at sea, the appeal touched Garibaldi's sympathies to the quick, and so in his thirtieth year, for the first time in his life, he turned his hand to war, as a buccaneer with letters of marque from the rebel government. He and his friend Rossetti armed a

old patois of the lagoons of Genoa. It affected Mazzini, to whom it brought back scenes of their early career, when the inspiration of Italian freedom first began.'-Holyoake, i. 239. Guerzoni, ii. 352, 360.

1 Cunco, 18; Epistolario, 3.

2A strong Spanish element existed in that province (Rio Grande), and it was not disposed to settle down quietly under Portuguese Imperialism, when their co-patriots a few miles farther south (in Uruguay) were enjoying Republican institutions.'-Winnington-Ingram, 93. Brazil conquered, after a long and exhausting struggle.

[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][merged small]

BUCCANEER AND GUERILLA

21

fishing boat, and therein set out with a dozen companions to wage war alone against the giant Empire of Brazil, 'the first to unfurl on those southern coasts the Republican banner of Rio Grande, a banner of freedom.' Well was the little boat called Mazzini. But they soon changed it for a larger ship which they had captured, and continued the struggle with ever-increasing success.

Gradually Garibaldi's warfare became amphibious, and before long, celebrated as he was for his exploits at sea, he was yet more celebrated as a guerilla chief, leading bodies of a few hundred, sometimes a few thousand men, across the vast upland plains and forests and river gorges of the Continent, that lay between the Atlantic and the Parana River. The cavalry, who were often the more numerous arm, were natives of the wilderness, horsemen born and bred, and magnificently mounted; hardy and resourceful as the Boers, they had more dash, and liked close quarters. Their favourite weapon was the lance; though many used the sabre, together with the lasso or the bolas, hunting the enemy and casting at him, as they had learnt to do in pursuit of the swift-footed ostrich. Otherwise the warfare must in many respects have resembled the warfare on the veldt. It was necessary to traverse enormous distances across country, far from the haunts of man; to need no food but the cattle which the troops drove with them and slaughtered at meal time, roasting the flesh Homerically on green spits; yet always to know the whereabouts and strength of the enemy, to fall on him when he was weaker, and when he was stronger to vanish into space over the prairie or hide in the dense tropical forests. Garibaldi, after he had faced the French and Austrian armies, declared that no civilised troops were such skilled horsemen, so Spartan in their endurance of a 1 Mem. 16.

More properly called the Rhea Americana; for an account of the bird and this method of hunting it, see The Naturalist in La Plata, W. H. Hudson, 26, 27. See also note, p. 23 below, on ostrich hunting and the bolas.

* Garibaldi in 1849 declared that he had lived on flesh and water for five years' in America.-Roman MSS. Batt. Univ.

« AnteriorContinuar »