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.