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.
CHAPTER XI
THROUGH THE CITY OF THIEVES
In a half-hearted, divided-responsibility sort of way, the Italian government, the steamship companies and the United States authorities endeavor to do at Naples, the world’s greatest port of emigrant embarkation, what should be done thoroughly a stage sooner, viz., to sort out those who are likely to be turned back at Ellis Island and to prevent them from sailing. How much easier, cheaper and more effective to have done it at home!
So far as this narrative of the experiences of my wife and myself and our family party is concerned, I would estimate that stage of the process which was reached at Naples as of equal or greater importance than the Ellis Island process proper.
Before we left our native land to begin the research in Italy, we were under the impression that emigration was merely a matter of so many hundreds of thousands of people traveling each season from their homes in Europe to the nearest ports, and taking third-class passage to New York, where they were landed at Ellis Island and examined. That is the American idea of it,—that and no more! That anything befell them, other than happens to traveling families in any place, before they reached Ellis Island, never occurred to us. The process of birth certificates, passports, declarations, and grouping by the numbers on the ship’s manifest was all unexpected; and here at Naples was yet more formality, and, looking back over the whole trip, the Naples stage seems really more interesting and surely as important as the Ellis Island one.
The morning (30th of September) that we arrived on the Reina Margherita from Messina, and debarked with our baggage at nine o’clock on the quay before the Capitaneria del Porto, with no shelter from the sun already beginning to send down rays of broiling heat and blinding whiteness, we were rallied into one crowd by agents of the North German Lloyd broker, Vincenzo di Luca fu Giacomo, who stood at the foot of the gangplank crying, “Germanese! Germanese!” and into another by agents of the La Veloce Line broker, who stood on the other side and called, “Veloce! Veloce!”
Across the quay, directly opposite where the Reina Margherita had docked, lay the beautiful long gray Citta di Napoli, ready to sail that day, and from the other side of the Capitaneria we could see emigrants who were going in her, pouring out of the examination-rooms in hundreds, and carrying their baggage aboard. All the third-class passengers among us who were going by the Veloce Line were quickly herded together, and rushed away and put through the process. As our steamer did not sail yet for two days, we were left to wait while all the Veloce baggage was passed through the custom-house, and then that of all the first class from the Reina Margherita, as there is a city customs duty in Naples in addition to the national revenue, and baggage is looked at very carefully for comestibles, or anything that can be eaten or converted into food-stuffs.
We had had no breakfast; we had had exceedingly little sleep; the air outside the bay had been chilling; and now we were left huddled in the dust under that pouring sun till it was somebody’s pleasure to remove us. A high iron fence topped with spear pickets prevented our getting out, and if we tried to go through the doorway into the Capitaneria there were policemen to push us back. Despite the strict rules of the Capitaneria concerning any Neapolitans being allowed in among third-class passengers not yet admitted to the port, or among those passed for embarkation, peddlers, water-sellers, beggars and mendicant friars began to filter through the Capitaneria and over the fence, until, even if we were oppressed with weariness, heat, dust and hunger, we at least had diversion, and were able to buy warm water with a dash of licorice in it. One buxom young woman who came in with an ollah and served all customers out of the same glass was of a fine cheery type, and when some of the people about us complained and asked whether this was what they were to expect in the way of treatment, she would laugh and say: