FROM SICILY TO NAPLES
It was not long before we wound down to the little station, and day
began to break in the east, turning the cloud of vapor over Stromboli
into the semblance of a huge pink rose growing up out of the island
volcano. Many of the people from the country about were gathered to see
their own friends off, for there was quite a party by this time. Soon
the train crept around the coast from Milazzo and brought up with a jerk
and a blast of the conductor’s horn. Here farewells were brief. I heard
one of the Socosa boys’ father cursing the train because it was the
agent of the separation from his son, and then out of the hurly-burly
came a slamming of compartment doors, cries of “_Pronte! Pronte!_”
another blast of the horn, and we were hurried away to Messina.
It was at the station that Antonio’s first wrestling-match with the
mountain of the party’s baggage occurred. At Santa Lucia there had been
abundant willing hands to pile it on the train, and no other baggage
with which to confuse it. Also, nothing had been said about excess
charges. At Messina it was ripped open by the city customs officials,
then hustled from place to place till at last it was dispatched to the
North German Lloyd office, and Antonio emerged from the encounter a
dripping wreck of his former immaculate self. When we next saw it, it
was piled into a barge, and standing guard over it was a uniformed
government official who begged piteously before he departed for enough
money to buy his dinner, and was well enough satisfied with thirty
_centesimi_ (about six cents).
I have previously described the operations of the _questura_ of Messina.
Passports in hand, the entire party joined the great mass of people from
all parts of eastern Sicily crowded into the steamship broker’s office.
Here each person was compelled to make a declaration, which declaration
answers the twenty-two questions that are propounded regularly at Ellis
Island. When the Socosa boys, in answer to the question as to whether
they had work promised or not, said that they had, _the agent advised
them to answer this question in the negative_. When Giunta and Curro
said they expected no one to meet them, they were advised to get some
one, and so on through the group. The steamship broker’s agent, in
filling out the blanks of this declaration, thus fortified the emigrant
in the weak places of his case for admission, and if the emigrant is
turned back he has no claim for damages against the brokers. Numbers of
suits were formerly brought and won, but under the present system none
have been successful, and in cases where the returned emigrant is able
to pay for the passage on his deportation the broker can force him to do
so.
It will be noticed that I have used the term broker instead of steamship
agent. The explanation will be a revelation to most people in the United
States, for I found not long since that officials high in the Bureau of
Immigration were not aware of the following facts, which is another bit
of proof of how weak our system of dealing with immigration from this
side of the water is. The steamship company does not book the
third-class passengers. Emigration is promoted by sub-agents in the
villages, such as Carmelo Merlino in Gualtieri, who operate under
district agents such as Colajanni in Messina, _who are selected,
appointed and bonded by the Italian government and not by the steamship
company_. They are responsible to the government and not to the
steamship company. They deliver their passengers at so much per head to
the steamship company at the foot of the plank, and a percentage of
their receipts finds its way to the government treasury. They are
required to have their offices in what is called a judicial town, where
there is a _questura_ and the operations of the ticket brokerage system
and the police passports dovetail nicely.
The process of clearing all papers, baggage receipts, tickets to the
steamer to Naples, tickets to America from Naples, was passed through by
our party, and then, it being but little after noon and the hour for
going aboard being four o’clock, they scattered. Many went to homes of
relatives in Messina for a final visit. Several of the boys spent
unwarrantable sums of their precious money in buying ugly looking knives
with which to face the dangers that they had read so much about in the
papers, cheap, worthless watches, and clothes that would only be thrown
away; and everywhere a group passed some of those parasites of the port
who prey upon emigrants and make an effort to wheedle or swindle them
out of a bit of silver.
[Illustration: DEPARTURE FROM GUALTIERI
“Declaring” in the Messina Office—Party’s Baggage on Lighter—Friends,
Neighbors and Relatives]
On my first visit to Messina I had the pleasure of intimate knowledge of
the discovery of a bold fraud, and the arrest and punishment of the
thief. He was a man of fair appearance, who had for three years made a
practice of stopping emigrants just before they were about to go aboard
the steamer by means of the small boats in the harbor, and demanding if
they had had their tickets stamped “by the American doctor.” The
frightened emigrant, knowing that somewhere in the process he would
encounter “the American doctor,” to him an object of dread, would reply
that he had not. The party would then be taken to a small office in an
alleyway opening off the water front and a stamp put on the ticket for
which the victims would be charged three francs sixty, about seventy
cents each. Mr. Charles M. Caughy, the American consul at Messina,
caught this fellow and saw to it that he was soundly punished. Our party
escaped with a few minor mishaps, thanks to the vigilance of Antonio and
myself. One of the boys fell a victim to a fake street dentist who had a
carriage, a set of tools and a professional air. He related the
sufferings with toothache experienced by emigrants on the Atlantic, and
advised the extraction of all bad teeth. One old woman from Catania had
three taken out at a franc each. While I was trying to get a photograph
of the fakir one of our boys got into the carriage, and the dentist was
so eager to have me get a good, full view of his face that he yanked out
one of the boy’s perfectly good teeth. I am glad the film got torn.
We lunched in a little restaurant off the Via Umberto, entertained by
really good music from a beggar violinist who was accompanied by a woman
and little girl, both of them cursed by trachoma.
We were disappointed in meeting the Papalia family from
Montforte-Spadafora, in fact they came on the next steamer, and for some
reason Giuseppe Cardillo’s father had decided that Giuseppe and his
party should wait; thus we lost at the outset some interesting members
from our group as planned.
I improved the opportunity to complete some investigations in Messina
concerning the smuggling of trachomatic emigrants, and will state what I
learned in a later chapter, where the information is collected.
The fine Navigazione Generale steamer _Reina Margherita_ was the one on
which we were to travel to Naples. She went first to Reggio di Calabrie
to get the crowd there gathered from Greece, Syria, Turkey, Apulia and
Calabria. There were not many of the Orientals, and a large part of them
expected to sail on the _Citta di Napoli_, of the La Veloce Line,
leaving Naples before we did on the _Prinzessin Irene_. I went over and
saw them come aboard, as some of our friends would be there.
Some gay parties came down to the dock in _carretas_ and on foot,
singing and beating tambourines, and one of these brought Gaetano
Disalvo, a boy from Scilla going to join his uncle in Buffalo.
One of the boys with Di Salvo was a lithe lad of nineteen who had been a
sword-fisherman, a very dangerous occupation pursued in the midsummer
months off Scilla. With old Francesco Palmi was his daughter Paolina, a
true Calabrese type, and one of the prettiest girls of her class we saw
while in Italy. She had been a flower-worker, and was going to New York
to marry a man whom she had not seen since she was a little girl, but
who had secured “a very fine employment for her paying twenty-eight lire
($5.60) per week.”
When the steamer put back across the Straits to Messina, there was a
grand rush to get the emigrants and their baggage aboard. The boatmen
who took our party out, though they had been paid by the steamship
broker, all such things being included in the 200–lire ticket, demanded
and succeeded in getting two lire for their ferrying. We were in the
first rapids of the systematic extortion through which the poor emigrant
passes on his way from home to Ellis island, where it stops so suddenly
that he is mystified.
It was a striking scene as our last boat put off from the quay, leaving
little Antonio Nastasia’s father, Nicola Squadrito, Giunta’s friends and
a few more who had come from Gualtieri, standing in a weeping group in
the midst of the many hundreds, waving hats and shouting, “_Bon viaggio,
bon viaggio_!”
It was a rough-and-tumble fight to get aboard with the baggage, and the
difficulties were increased by the unnecessary and purposeless brutality
of the ship’s stewards. Here began the blows, the jerkings about and the
hustlings, which never ceased throughout the whole process till the
poor, ignorant people, driven and herded like cattle, were in the
shelter of Ellis Island.
There was a brigadier of police aboard, and when the women had gone
below into their compartment and we were trying to secure beds in the
men’s quarters, he followed the women and offered them insults which
make my blood boil as I think of it. When I learned of it he had left
the ship.
At last we were settled into our places on the lumpy jute mattresses
covered with coarse, dirty bagging, which served as the bedding in the
double-tiered iron bunks arranged in blocks eight or nine wide in the
middle of the ship, with supplementary rows along the sides.
No attempt was made to feed us, and, anticipating such a condition, we
had fortunately brought food with us. Despite all their discomforts, the
wilting heat and the foul smells, I do not remember ever having seen a
happier crowd of people. On every hand musical instruments were out, and
groups were singing or chattering like magpies.
In the dusk the beautiful steamer glided out of the harbor by the scores
of little groups on the quay at its mouth, and headed up the Straits of
Messina for the Bay of Naples, twelve hours away.
While we were on the forecastle head, I noticed little Disalvo come up
from below with a long, twisted-up, slender, newspaper in his hands. For
a long time he stood by the rail intently watching the shore. When we
were off Scilla he lit a match in the shelter of a ventilator and
lighted his improvised torch, and I realized that he was going to try to
signal his friends on shore. I looked to the land and saw a light moving
up and down near a cottage south of the town where I knew he lived. But
his answer was a failure and nearly a catastrophe. The strong wind
caught the first blaze of the paper and literally rent the burning torch
apart, sweeping the burning fragments aft the length of the ship. Fires
were narrowly avoided in two places, and the first officer came down
from the bridge and read the horror-smitten boy a terrific lecture.
Far into the night we lay on deck, dreading to go below into the reeking
atmosphere there. When we did at last, the tumult of crying babies, of
people who could not sleep and so essayed to play harmonicas and sing,
was almost unbearable. The rule of men and women being separated had not
been enforced, and so Antonio and I stayed near the women of our party
for their protection,—not from the other passengers, but from the ship’s
people. At last dawn came, and the haggard look on my wife’s face told
me what she had passed through.
When we went on deck we were within sight of Capri, and two hours later
we slid under the shadow of Vesuvius into the beautiful bay of Naples,
and when we had snuggled in beside the Palermo steamer at the municipal
quay, unloading its throng of emigrants before the custom-house, we,
too, were dumped off in the hot sun and left for hours in a broiling
heat to await our turn to be conducted to the first steps of that
wonderful and interesting process the emigrant goes through in Naples.