Not far beyond the Consulate, on a side street near the Piazza Vittoria (now a large camp, filled with tarpaulin shacks), we saw the ruined house of Mr. Joseph Peirce, who had been our vice-consul until six days before the earthquake. A few soldiers were working in the heap; and several of the former occupants of the building were standing by, each waiting for some relative to be disinterred. One of the bystanders had been two days buried under the house, but had worked himself near enough to the surface to make himself heard, and had thus been rescued. All had known Mr. Peirce; two said they had seen him on the second day after the earthquake, his body buried and terribly crushed, his head alone appearing out of the wreckage. They told us that his brother had come to save him, but had not been able to remove the heavy pile of masonry and beams. When all efforts proved unavailing the brother had said goodbye to Mr. Peirce and stood there till he died. The body was gone now, evidently the brother had removed it later.
When we had returned to the Marina, near the point where we had first landed, we found our baggage heaped in the middle of the road. To my servant, Antonio Alegiani, who sat upon the pile, an old man was talking voluble English without noticing that he was not understood. The stranger introduced himself as John B. Agresta, a naturalized American, a pensioner of the Civil War and a very important person at the consulate. He had been guide and interpreter. He had done much work for Dr. Cheney. He would show us everything, the part of the house where the Cheneys slept, the office, the safe; especially the safe. In it we should find two thousand lire belonging to him (Agresta). Why did we not come at once instead of wasting time talking to people who knew nothing? Dr. Cheney was dead, of course, and Mrs. Cheney. And Mr. Lupton? Yes, he was dead, too, and there was no doubt of it. Agresta had seen him the night before the earthquake, and had since seen his hotel, not a stone of it in place. Poor Mr. Lupton was certainly dead.
Just at this moment a young man with a pipe in his mouth came round the corner. “Why, hello, Agresta,” he said, “glad to see you alive.” It was Lupton himself, our vice-consul. We thought he must have stepped out of a ruin, or been dug out; in our greeting, no doubt, was something of the awe with which one would salute a visitor from the other world. Lupton soon explained that he had never left the earth, nor even its surface. Half of his hotel had been spared; he had walked down the stairs into the black street, and waded about in water up to his knees till morning dawned. The story has been published in his own words; I wish I could insert the anecdotes and reproduce the turns of the phrases with which he made us see, as in a flash, that prodigious morning of December 28th. We told him we had come to help him, and put ourselves under his orders; he seemed glad to see us; we were soon friends. Together we set out to inspect Mr. Heynes’ house and garden.
It was a solid two-story building, one of an uninjured block; the very house, as a tablet reminded us, in which Garibaldi had lived at the time of his triumphant entrance into Messina at the head of the Thousand. Over the door we set up the American shield, and hung out the flag from a corner window. A week later the British flag flew beside it. Mr. Heynes had been appointed acting vice-consul of his nation. Meanwhile we turned the entrance hall below into a consular office, and set up our beds in the large garden behind, under a tent, so soon as we were able to obtain that coveted article. Sleeping upstairs was unsafe, so long as we continued to have four or five shocks a day, some of them severe enough to bring down a number of buildings.
Once settled, three problems confronted us; to excavate the old consulate, to ascertain the fate of such Americans as had been in Sicily at the time of the earthquake, and to bring relief to the suffering population of Messina.
The first task fell almost entirely to Major Landis, our Military Attachè at the Embassy in Rome. On the night of our arrival a squad of thirty Italian soldiers, under a lieutenant, was put at his disposition for the excavation of the consulate, and there he spent the work hours of the next fortnight. Towards the end the Italian soldiers were replaced by sailors from our own warships; it was the crew of the Illinois who finally discovered the remains of Dr. and Mrs. Cheney. They were found at the very bottom of the pile, only four feet above the street level, though their bedroom had been on the second floor. They had been killed at once and apparently without suffering; it was reasonable to hope that no return of consciousness had broken the slumber from which they passed into eternal rest.
Ruins of the House of Mr. Joseph Peirce, Former American Vice-Consul.