TO NAPLES IN THE STEERAGE OF THE _LAHN_
When midsummer came it was of course still too hot in southern Italy for
us to go there with safety, let alone comfort, and it was becoming every
day more onerous to live in the quarter. New Yorkers who dwell up-town
and have entire houses, floors or apartments to themselves complain
bitterly of the heat in summer, and, if possible, escape from the city.
I have passed a whole summer in New York up-town, but, permit me to say
that it is life at a seaside resort compared to what the people endure
in the down-town tenement districts.
I think that we could have supported the heat, but the conglomerate of
smells increased until it was overpowering, and each night the entire
quarter was in tumult until well towards dawn. We learned then what we
came to know so well thereafter, that when the Italian cannot sleep he
fain would sing and play _lotto_, seven and a half, or _mora_. At last,
in June, my wife became quite sick one day, and two days later we were
off on a trip by steamer to Newfoundland, Labrador and Nova Scotia,
returning early in August in time to sail on the _Lahn_ of the North
German Lloyd line.
The morning of our departure was a beautiful one, and as we crossed by
the Hoboken ferry we could see the great German ships lying at the
Hamburg-American and North German Lloyd docks. One of them had smoke
pouring from her funnels, and a “blue peter” fluttered at her peak,—the
signal that she was about to sail.
We were dressed in the plainest and cheapest of clothes, bought and worn
previously in the quarter, and everything we owned we had stored except
what could be got into a little $1.10 imitation-leather dressing-case,
with a shoulder-strap clipped into screw-eyes in the end to make easy
porterage. Over half of its contents were photographic and stationery
supplies. Instead of a shirt I wore the usual dark jersey such as many
Italians in this country wear. Around my waist was a plain leather belt
cleverly made of two strips between which reposed several thousand
_lire_, easily put in or taken out through a neatly concealed aperture.
Once thereafter a man handled that belt and threw it down as not worth
taking, when it had in it a sum that would have gladdened his heart. I
bore the one piece of baggage, while my wife carried, slung over her
shoulder, the five-by-seven cartridge kodak which was our most jealous
ward, our one essential treasure.
We had bought tickets at the Greenwich Street office of the North German
Lloyd Company, where the steerage traffic is handled, under the names of
Berto and Luiga Brandi and when doing so were asked our ages, places of
birth, occupation, etc. On inquiry I found that the Italian law requires
this of the ship’s company, and that these sheets are used to keep track
of returned emigrants and facilitate apprehension of any men who have
avoided military duty.
As we pushed our way through the crowd on the dock, where freight and
steerage baggage was being rushed out of the way of the
“first-cabiners,” who had not yet begun to arrive, we were startled to
find what an enormous number of fellow passengers we were to have
compared to the steerage capacity of the ship and the agent’s forecast
of the load. He had conjectured 350 four days before. We sailed with
more than 750 and certainly had a full house.
As we came up the gangway we were checked off by a short, heavy-set
official in a black-lustre coat and dirty piqué cap; and a white-aproned
stewardess of massive frame gave us two little red cards which read
“Good for One Ration,” while a steerage steward thrust into our hands a
piece of horse-blanket goods of very poor material and very scant in
dimensions, wrapped around a tin spoon, tin fork and tin cup, as well as
a little pan about the pork-and-bean size. As we passed on into the
crowd and into an unoccupied corner of the deck, and my wife unrolled
her blanket and saw what was inside, a certain startled, stricken look
came into her eyes. I knew that for the first time realization of a part
of what was before her had come to her. I had often told her as nearly
as I could, speaking from my own experiences as a sailor when studying
seafaring life, of how steerage passengers lived on emigrant ships; but
now any sort of “camping-out glamour” that had hung about it for her was
dispelled, and she had a glimpse to the fore where misery, dirt and
discomfort lay spread. If she was sorry she had come, she did not say
so. I will confess that we had long since made a private bargain about
the enterprise, and the consideration was well worth the while, so she
showed no sign of wavering from her agreement.
The deck forward was the scene of the wildest commotion. Many people who
were returning had been accompanied to the dock by their friends, and
these, standing on shore, shouted vainly to their compatriots aboard.
The noise was too great for speech except at close range. On every hand
was piled baggage of all shapes and sizes; but I remembered it
afterwards with envy when I saw the terrible mass of nondescript luggage
which smothered the steerage on the return trip. The immigrant comes
here with a huge pile of bundles, wooden boxes and flimsy bags; he goes
home with good steel-framed valises and good trunks.
The chatter that prevailed about was mostly Italian, and I found that
some of the dialects spoken I could not understand at all. I had not
even encountered them in the quarter. Then, too, there were aboard,
Greeks, Spaniards, Swiss, Germans, Macedonians, Montenegrians,
Hungarians, Jews of several sorts, Syrians, etc. All spoke English in
stages varying from a complete command down to the ability to swear.
American “cuss words” are among the first things picked up and the last
forgot. Strange, isn’t it?
We had been promised that we might secure places,—after we were on
board, in a closed compartment with four other people, a sort of
superior steerage accommodation to be had at the expense of $10 added to
the $35 for passage, which we had paid, and, leaving my wife seated in a
clean spot on a hatch, I scoured the ship within the limits of the
steerage to find those compartments, but all I got was a series of round
cursings from the petty officers for bothering them while they were
busy. I nosed about every corner of the ship forward, and if there were
those compartments for three married couples, which are popularly
supposed to exist in the emigrant quarters and had been referred to in
serious editorials in notable publications within the past three months
as being “all that the ship’s people could be expected to give the third
class in the way of comfort and privacy,” I was unable to find them, nor
did I see them or hear of them at any time later on the _Lahn_ or any
other ship I have inspected.
[Illustration: Life on the Steerage-passengers’ Deck on the _Lahn_]
When I came on deck a stocky Italian, well dressed in American clothes,
was holding an umbrella over my wife, for the sun was beating down on
the ship’s deck, and it was terrifically hot on board, moored as she was
to the south side of the pier. They were chatting in English, and when I
came up the stranger introduced himself as John Tury, of Lancaster, Pa.,
a peanut and fruit seller, who had been in this country five years and
was now going home to Terra Nova, his native village in Sicily, for a
brief visit. He had with him three cousins, younger men. His English was
good though not perfect, and he refused to use Italian either with us or
any one else on shipboard except when necessary. We sat talking for an
hour or more, and became quite good friends, while waiting for the ship
to sail and for a semblance of order to come about.
As yet we had no sleeping quarters. There seemed to be nothing to do but
find places in the men’s and women’s compartments, and they were already
so well filled when we went aboard that there was not a desirable bed
left. I went below, where between decks the long, closely set double
tiers of iron bunks were ranged, and looked in vain for a bunk that was
not occupied by women and children or a piece of baggage left to signify
that it had been pre-empted. There were some empty beds in the men’s
compartments, but they were badly located for light and air. There
seemed to be nothing to gain by being in a hurry, and it was a long time
till evening and bedtime. I knew there was more room on the ship, and I
meant to have some of it even if I had to leave the steerage quarters;
for our only interest in voyaging _to_ Italy in the steerage was to seek
information by association, whereas when _coming back_ to the States it
would be to be constantly with the family with which we expected to
return.
When I returned to the deck, the big liner had slid out of the slip and
was just forging her way down stream. Back on the pier was a black group
of people waving handkerchiefs, parasols and hats. One large group of
Italians I observed, watching the serrated profile of Manhattan with
great interest, and I heard them talking of it as if they had never seen
it before. So I said to one of them:
“Have you been in America and have not seen New York?”
“No, we came to Boston and by railroad to Scranton.”
“Have you been at work in the mines?”
“Yes, they are just sending forty of us back home, and one hundred more
will go next month.”
I knew at once that the group was one of contract laborers who were
being returned to their country, and by questioning him further I
learned that they had been employed in the Lackawanna mines and had got
employment through an Italian “banker” in Scranton who had sent two men
to Italy in October of the year before, and during the winter they had
hired in the vicinity of Potenza nearly three hundred men and despatched
them in small parties on successive steamers to Boston in the months of
March, April and May. Those who were now returning were those who had
been hurt, were sick, or were dissatisfied. Ten of them had had
accidents and four had lung trouble; one poor fellow, he told me, being
even then in the ship’s hospital for steerage passengers dying with
consumption, the result of his two years’ work under ground.
The steerage passengers are supposed to form themselves into groups of
six, and one man of the six is the one to receive the food as it is
ladled out of huge tanks on deck by the steerage stewards; but not
having had time to get properly assorted, dinner was now served to the
steerage on a basis of “every man look out for his own.”
I took our two tin pans and the tin cups, and plunged into the crush
waiting to pass in line down the alley which was made by the tanks and
baskets of food, ranged on the deck forward, and emerged in half an hour
with two messes of macaroni and meat, two tin cups of highly acid and
alcoholic wine and a cap full of hot potatoes.
As my wife looked the fare over when I brought it to her as she squatted
in a nook sheltered from the sun, her lips trembled and she looked away
towards Staten Island, then dropping into dim distance, as if wishing
that she could by some magic word transport herself back to home-land
soil once more. But in an instant her courage forced a smile, and we
closed our eyes and ate and drank. It did not taste so bad, after all,
but it was the look of it! And the way the women and children about us
spilled it around on the deck and on themselves!
After we had eaten what little we might, we ensconced ourselves in a bit
of shade and watched the crowd about. Every moment that passed, every
bit of conversation we caught, every small incident that occurred,
showed us that for months we had been moving on a false plane, that just
at that time when we thought ourselves in the genuine atmosphere of the
life of the Italian immigrant in the New World, we were merely in that
false temporizing atmosphere which he creates for himself and fellows,
and from which he emerges only when he has become Americanized. In a few
minutes we understood that the greater portion of the conditions, habits
and operations which we had observed grew out of a feeling among them
that they were merely temporizing here; that they had come to America to
make a few hundred dollars to send or take back to Italy; and that it
did not make much difference what they ate, wore or did, just so long as
they got the money and got back. We could see plainly why it was that
they had not risen above that state until they had been attracted and
drawn into the real American life about them and had decided to remain.
Here were hundreds of Italians just such as those who had been our
household neighbors, but they were now a different people. They spoke
freely, they bore themselves differently. There was a new certainty and
boldness in their manner, for they were free and cut off from all things
American, and, without imperilling a single interest, could return to
everything that was Italian. Separated from its opportunities for
betterment, their state in this country is inferior to that at home.
This I can say conscientiously after long and careful observation.
We became acquainted with a woman who sat near us and who had a very
pretty little girl. This woman said she came from Pittsburg, having been
born of Italian parents in this country when the first Italians came
from the north of Italy about twenty-five years ago. She had married an
Italian who had emigrated more recently, and now they were going home
for a visit. She expressed intense disgust at the manner in which about
one third of the women conducted themselves and allowed their children
to behave. These women were the ones who made the noise, who scattered
the filth, who sprawled about on deck and whose children, though on
board but a few hours as yet, were sights to behold from being allowed
to play in the scuppers where the refuse from dinner had collected in
heaps purpled with the wasted wine.
From her we learned that her husband had been commissioned by a
contractor in Pittsburg to go into the Italian provinces of Austria,—by
which is meant the Austrian possession immediately around the head of
the Adriatic, where the stock is Italian,—and engage two hundred good
stonemasons, two hundred good carpenters, and an indefinite number of
unskilled laborers. These people were to be put in touch with sub-agents
of lines sailing from Hamburg, Fiume and Bremen, and these agents were
to be accountable for these contract laborers being got safely into the
United States. This woman informed us that many of her neighbors in
Pittsburg had come into the United States as contract laborers, and held
the law in great contempt, as it was merely a matter of being
sufficiently instructed and prepared, and no official at Boston or Ellis
Island could tell the difference.
We had been seated there a little while when there came by a sailor whom
I had known in Hamburg some years before, and when I stepped aside to
talk with him he was greatly surprised but remembered me, and we talked
of many things which do not pertain to this consideration, save that
just before he left I told him that we were on the lookout for the best
sleeping and eating accommodations we could get in the steerage, and he
answered, laughingly, that it was easy enough to get a good place and
good things to eat—if I had money. I signified that I had.
He said he would send me a man who would be the person with whom to
dicker. When he was gone, I sat down to wait. In about an hour I saw a
tall, well-built man in ship’s working rig, neither a sailor nor a
steward, though moving about the steerage apparently looking for some
one; so I moved his way, and when he saw me he sidled up cautiously,
glancing up at the bridge, the forward end of the boat and the hurricane
deck to see who might be observing. I spoke to him in German; but he
replied in English and said we had better talk English, as it was the
language that was safe from eavesdroppers.
He said he would sell us good beds for $10 each, and we could buy food
as we wished it. The food would be furnished by the first-cabin cook and
would be savings from the galley. I demanded to see the beds first, and
he led the way below. He took us to the entrance to the steerage
compartments nearest amidships, where they opened into a little
alleyway, at one end of which was one of the public bars for the sale of
beer to those Italians, Jews, etc., who have learned to drink beer
instead of wine. Beside the companion-way which led down to the
compartments for third-class passengers was a narrow one marked
“Hospital.” It led down past the steerage dispensary and to the two
rooms apportioned for female sick. A narrow alleyway passed transversely
to the other side of the ship, where there were two rooms for the male
sick. My conductor was the hospital steward, and his offer to us was a
bunk each in the hospital wards, to which we could come at night as if
we were patients. I could not see how it was safe to pay the money in
advance, and then be ousted by the ship’s doctor the first time he made
his rounds. So this hospital steward, who was called Otho, surprised me
by _summoning the ship’s doctor_, a young German with a fringe of flaxen
beard and bulging eyes, and allowing him to reassure me. It was all
right. He got his share of the money from the rental of the bunks. All
of them expressed a great fear and dread of the Italian doctor, the
naval surgeon put on each emigrant ship by the Italian government.
In brief, as the beds were clean, the situation interesting and the
hospital wards not very crowded, we accepted, and whenever the food on
deck was not to our liking we could get an abundance from the hospital.
It was rather wearisome, the last few days, though. Duck and chicken for
every meal!
In my room there were two others who were paying rent for beds. One was
a quaint old fellow from Tuckahoe, where he kept a saloon. He was on his
way home for the fourth time. He wore a knit worsted green and yellow
skull-cap day and night. It had a long yellow tassel on it, and some
nights the tassel would get in his mouth and interfere with his
slumbers—and mine. The second room had but one patient in it, one of the
contract laborers from Scranton who was dying with consumption and
prayed all day long for a sufficient lease of life to see the Bay of
Naples, when he felt sure he would begin to get well at once. In three
years he had saved and sent home $820, which made his wife and family
comparatively independent. He told me one day that even if he died as
the result of his voluntary slavery in the mines he felt sufficiently
repaid. I am glad to say that at least he reached home alive.
Late that afternoon we ran rapidly into murky weather and before long
encountered a stiff gale, for August. It lasted all night and all the
next day. I have been on ships steadier than the _Lahn_, and this gale
took her nearly on the beam. The seasickness in the steerage was nothing
short of frightful. Fortunately the people had had very little to
eat—few of them much breakfast on sailing-day and very few any supper—so
the most undesirable feature of a seasick crowd was limited. Also many
of the third-class passengers had profited by the experiences of former
voyages, and were able to take care of themselves and make less bother
for their neighbors. Nevertheless, the compartments, in which the people
were compelled to stay by reason of the deck weather, were in a state in
describing which no good purpose is served. The steerage stewards were
constantly busy with hose, sand buckets, brooms, etc.
Not only were we seeking general information, but we were hoping to get
trace of some southern Italian family about to emigrate, in order to
make them, as planned, the central feature of our analytical study of
particular experiences; so, as the days went by, I inquired of each new
person with whom I fell into conversation if he knew of such a family.
Nearly every other man was either going over to get a wife for himself
or already had a family in Italy and expected to return in October, or,
if not then, in the following May. In a short time we had twenty
families under consideration, but none of them seemed to be exactly
typical; they were all too small, too large, too rich or from provinces
that sent few emigrants.
There was a group of eight Greeks aboard who had been denied admission
to the United States and were part of twenty-two men, women and children
of mixed races who had arrived in New York on the _Lahn_ and other North
German Lloyd ships and were being returned by the company. The leader of
the group was a huge fellow with very curly hair and beard who rejoiced
in the name of Garareikophalous, and the third day I had a long chat
with him with the aid of an interpreter from among our fellow
passengers.
He said that all Greece was stirred up over the matter of emigration,
and that in five years’ time the number of Greeks coming to the United
States would have increased a thousand per cent. The military duties in
the kingdom were too onerous to be borne, and the Greeks already in the
United States were prospering to such an extent that every remittance
they made home fired the zeal of the people to follow after them. In
nearly every village the candy-makers’ shops were educating twice the
usual number of apprentices, because the first emigrants had been
candy-makers and they had established a foothold in the confectionery
business and then sent for their candy-making relatives, which had
caused a shortage in confectioners in Greece and in turn had created the
impression that to get on best in America a Greek should be a
candy-maker. Therefore every father who desired that his sons should go
to America and send him enough money home to make him a rich man among
his neighbors, apprenticed them to candy-making and after two years
shipped them to New York. Some of the venturesome ones had branched out
in the dried-fruit and olive-oil business, and he had heard they were
doing very well. The result would be that as the various natural
industries of Greece were taken up in America, and opportunities for
labor and business offered, the emigration would swell to comparatively
huge proportions.
A feature which he mentioned and on which I questioned him exhaustively
was the advertising done by the steamship companies. He had some of the
advertisements in his pockets, and some others he got from the members
of his party. These he translated to the interpreter, who gave me a
rough idea of what they were. I found they were not issued by the
steamship companies but by sub-agents in Vienna, Bremen, Hamburg,
Berlin, Naples, etc., and were of a very alluring sort. Two of them were
poems expatiating on the beauties and wealth of America, and one was a
clipping from a Greek paper supposed to be printed in New York, which
related how a poor boy from Thessaly had gone to Cincinnati and opened a
little candy store. He had broadened his business to a factory, and now
had headquarters of four factories in New York, and had property to the
extent of a million and a half drachmæ, or about $200,000, to show for
eight years’ work.
Garareikophalous was very proud of the fact that he and his party had
not been deceived by the sub-agents into going to America by the
northern route. He averred that every effort is made by the sub-agents
all through his country to get the emigrants to go overland to the
German or French ports and take ship there instead of shipping at Naples
or other Mediterranean ports.
[Illustration: Preparing to Serve a Meal on the _Lahn_ from the
Food-tanks and Bread-baskets]
I was unable to understand this action of the sub-agents until I had the
light of later investigation upon it, when I found that it is a rule of
the agents at the ports of embarkation never to allow an emigrant who
has been denied admission to the United States to return to his native
village if business is anything less than rushing from that section, for
the reason that one emigrant who has failed to enter the United States
can keep three hundred more from trying it. If the emigrant were
returned to a southern port, the chances of his reaching home would be
greatly increased. Emigrants returned to German and French ports are
often reshipped to South Africa, South America and Mexico. Furthermore,
when they are of the sort that needs coaching and schooling, in order
that they shall not make the wrong answers at Ellis Island, the journey
across the continent is used as an educational process in which they are
carefully taught to dissemble. If there are members of the family who
are physically unfit to be sent to Ellis Island, the sub-agents persuade
the family to separate at the port of embarkation, and the diseased and
deformed ones are sent across the channel into England and dumped in the
charitable institutions. Sometimes they are sent from England, perhaps
even from the port of embarkation, to Canada. The Hamburg-American line
carries a notoriously bad lot of emigrants into Halifax. This feature I
had investigated to my complete satisfaction in July.
More information that was decidedly to the point, I received from two
Jews who were returning to assemble a large party of former neighbors
and bring them to America, to sell off a quantity of property and in
general readjust matters in a town not far from Odessa, in behalf of a
coterie of relatives whom they had brought to America previously. Both
had lived in Hungary and had traveled all through the districts from
which comes the poor Jew of the South. They were going to Naples, by
rail to Brindisi, then to Alexandria and Smyrna, and would go north from
Constantinople. I will confess that it was not easy to elicit
information from them, and very indirect processes were necessary; but
here are some of the things learned.
Among Russians as well as Jews in Russia the limitations of the American
immigration laws are very well known indeed by the priests,
school-teachers, officials and others; and when a family desires to
emigrate it begins by paying a weekly stipend to some person in this
class, who puts them through a course of instruction as to how to carry
money, answer questions, conceal diseases, etc. When the family starts
it is met at all important stations by a Jewish committee and passed on.
An ignorant Jew possessed of some wealth is almost certain to lose much
of it at the hands of unscrupulous Jews who infest principal stations,
border towns, etc. There have been cases where poor families even lost
their little all to these harpies, ending by becoming charitable charges
in England or Belgium. In many cases the family is part of a large group
under the direct charge of a runner from some sub-agent’s office, but
this is usually the case when the people are very poor and obviously
diseased. Groups like this are not delivered to the steamship agents at
German and French ports, but are sent to a place called the Shelter for
Poor Jews which has been established in London, and they are kept there
many weeks if necessary, and then sent either to New York, Boston,
Halifax or Montreal. Cases of trachoma are treated in this shelter, in
great numbers, until the emigrant is ready to pass inspection. Those
cases which are regarded as hopeless are sent to Canadian towns in care
of Jewish societies and are smuggled across the border gradually.
These men had a quantity of letters and credentials signed by various
steamship representatives, and I was exceedingly sorry that I could not
know whether they were bound on a mission that was much more extensive
and nefarious than the plans which they avowed to me.
One fine morning we sighted the Azores and passed close by the shore of
St. Michaels, and the second day thereafter we arrived at Gibraltar.
Third-class passengers were not encouraged to go ashore, but I made a
little arrangement with the man at the plank; and my wife, John Tury,
the Lancaster peanut-seller, and I went ashore in the dusk of the
evening. The steamer would not leave till after midnight. As we walked
along the streets, Tury said to me:
“I suppose if we were going to be here for a day, we might take the
train over to London?”
“To London! Why, what do you mean?” I exclaimed.
“Why, I have heard England is a very small place, and it cannot be far
from here to London.”
Then I realized that he thought Gibraltar was the southern end of
England, and I was surprised to learn later how many Italians who have
voyaged by Gibraltar more than once are of the same impression. I have
heard some argue for it stoutly.
Just the day before we reached Naples, when there was great happiness
and rejoicing on every hand, I observed a well-built young Italian with
heavy black hair and moustache, a handsome fellow of twenty-five, come
up from below with his mandolin. With him was an older man with a
guitar. In a few minutes there was a little band of four musicians
gathered on the shady side of the ship at the foot of the companion-way
to the hurricane deck. They were playing an American two-step, and had a
well-pleased crowd about them. On the lapel of the mandolin-player I
observed a button of the Foresters. They had begun on the second number
of their impromptu concert, when the second officer piped from the
bridge, a deck hand went up and came down in a minute with this mandate:
“You must stop playing; the captain wants to sleep.”
Jeers and shouts of scorn and anger rose on every hand, and I observed
that the leaders in this expression were those men whom I knew to be
American citizens or Italians, Jews or Greeks of some length of
residence in the United States.
As the young mandolin-player walked away, I stopped him and spoke to him
in English, asking him if he was a Forester. He told me he was and that
he belonged to a lodge in Stonington, Conn., and, having been in America
five years, was now going home “for the women folks.”
In brief, I found in him and his family the ideal group for which we had
been looking. He was sufficiently Americanized to appreciate the object
of our investigations, and we speedily became good friends.
His name is Antonio Squadrito, and he had with him his father, Giovanni.
Five years before, he had left his native Sicilian village,
Gualtieri-Sicamino, as one of the first to depart for America from all
that country. He had done so because he had his choice between going
into the Carabineers, or rural police, and taking up a trade. He had
told his father that if he would help him borrow the money he would go
to America. This was done, though the neighbors all prophesied disaster
and misfortune “in that strange wild land.”
He landed at the Battery from the _Kaiser Friedrich_, being
“recommended” to a distant relative from a northern province who was
already in New York; and the first work he got was in the quarries of
Westerly, R. I., where he worked for three months at $1.10 per day. He
played the mandolin even then with fair skill, and made friends with an
Italian who had a barber shop in Stonington. Antonio went there to work,
and as he saved his money he sent back, little by little, enough to pay
off his debt at home, and the remainder his boss “borrowed” from him.
Some domestic relations of the boss caused him to desire to sell out,
and one day he came to Antonio and told him he must buy his barber shop
or he would not get back the borrowed money. Antonio protested that he
could not speak enough English to run the business, but the boss
insisted, and in the end Antonio found himself possessed of the shop and
a new debt of $100 which he had got as a loan from a man who had taken
an interest in him.
The shop prospered. Antonio sent over for his brother Giuseppe to come
over and help him. Giuseppe is older and had married a year before, and
his wife Camela had presented him with a pretty little girl baby whom
they had named Caterina after her grandmother Squadrito. The next year
the shop was doing so well that Carlino, the brother next younger than
Antonio, was sent for; and the next year Tommasso, a still younger
brother, and Giovanni the father were brought over. The father worked at
carpentering and coopering in Stonington, making as much as $1.80 per
day; but he could not learn the language, and when I met him his English
was limited to “All right!” “Fine day!” “Yes, sir!” and “cuss words.”
In the last year before our meeting Antonio had married the widow of a
whaling-captain of the town, who had been left property by her husband
estimated roundly at $60,000. By this time Antonio had made in his
barber shop and cigar store and by furnishing music for dances, etc.,
$8,000, and had sent home five or ten dollars each month. A nice little
acre or two of garden land had been bought east of the village, and of
this Antonio was very proud, as in his country none but the fairly
well-to-do owns land.
Now he was going home to get a party of the family, of cousins and
neighbors, and he expected to return in two or three months. That suited
the limits of our time, and the location of the family in one of the
hotbeds of emigration was most pleasing; so we were delighted when he
cordially invited us to go home with him. We explained that we wished to
make a sort of general study of the country as it related to the
immigration question, before we took up the subject in particular, and
he confided that his principal reason for wishing to have us visit him
in Gualtieri was to show the people there that all the wonderful stories
they had been hearing about him were true in the main. He carried no
proof except banking papers, and he was anxious about “what the home
folks might think.” I often think of how much of the strenuous endeavor
in all lines in this world is to “impress the home folks.” How many men
and women have been disappointed when they went out into the world and
did something that was absolutely beyond the comprehension—even belief,
perhaps—of the simple-minded “folks at home.”
The next day, late in the morning, signs began to show in the east that
we were nearing the shores of Italy, and late that afternoon the _Lahn_
forged into a berth close to the naval sea wall before the beautiful
city of Naples.
As we were leaving the ship we saw Carabineers at the gangways arresting
several men who had been in the steerage with us. I made inquiry, and
was informed that the men arrested had left Italy to avoid military
duty, and they had been kept track of. When they sailed home, the
Italian authorities in New York had notified the _questor_, or chief of
police, at Naples.
As the tender which took us ashore steamed away from the _Lahn_, we got
a fine view of the ship and its surroundings. It was encompassed on
every hand by bumboat-men selling the sweet fruits of Italy, for which
her sons and daughters had hungered and thirsted so long. Just outside
of the ring of bumboat-men were the twoscore or more boats of the
runners for emigrant lodging-houses. These men would get the eye of a
returned emigrant on board and would bargain with him for a room, then
take him off with his baggage. A police official in plain clothes who
was aboard the tender told me that among the curses of the city are the
practices in these lodging-houses, where every sort of evil element
congregates to prey on the simple-minded countryman who has been to
America for two or three years, toiled hard for the few hundred dollars
he is bringing back, and yet has not wit enough to keep the thieves of
Naples from getting all or a portion of it. However, the returned
emigrants are not to be condemned for their witlessness. I flatter
myself that I know a thing or two, and yet I found myself on the
constant _qui vive_ to keep from being “done” in Naples, and even my
great vigilance did not save me once or twice. Dishonesty is part of the
air in Naples, just as is the smell that is famous.