“The chief of police,” he said,—and I laughed in his face.
However, many were caught in the scheme, among them a boy I had taken an interest in, a lad named Salvatore Biajo, bound for St. Louis. He had 100 lire in gold and eight in silver, and bought a draft. The draft was all right, being on the Bank of Naples, but the man who sold it to him, instead of making it for 108 lire minus a few centesimi for discount, put it in dollars, writing in only $19 when it should have been about $21.35 according to Post & Flagg’s Ellis Island rate. The gang of draft-sellers made two dollars off young Biajo, and if they made as much off the hundreds of others who bought, they did a fine day’s business.
At last we were ready to move on, and, still accompanied by our thieving friend, who evidently wanted to see me safe where he thought I could do him no harm, and where I might pay him a little more for valuable information, we entered the great north pen in the Capitaneria, where emigrants in hundreds were standing, with their passports out, in a solid mass held back by police, who peeled off the front row from right to left, then back again; and we filed across the room to a door in the corner where was the American staff, the port doctor, the surgeons on duty for the United States Marine Hospital Corps, the ship’s surgeon, and some others.
We were examined; our eyelids were turned up for trachoma; our heads rubbed over for favus; any defective-looking parts of the body touched for hidden disease; and every now and then a man, woman, or child would be told to stand aside for further examination, and a wail would go up from the group to which that one belonged. It was as if a touch of death had come among them.
I saw one old man who had taken his wife and widowed daughter with her two children, sold all his little property, and was starting for America to open up a little business of some sort, pulled out of the line, examined for some spinal trouble, and turned down. The family could not go without him, so they were all turned back. There were two or three other cases like that, which happened there before my eyes. Last year we turned back over 20,000, including dependent relatives, at our ports and borders. They should never have been allowed to leave home. That is where our system is wrong. The emigrant should not be selected at the port of arrival, nor at the port of embarkation, but by a small visiting itinerant board that should come to him in his home community. We would thus get none of the bad and lose none of the good, and a hundred outrages would be avoided. The fuller argument I hope to give with the light of facts yet to be told.
When we appeared at the bar of the police official who inspects all passports, I made our presence known to Mr. St. Ledger, and after a word from him to the official we were passed, went by the place where the police were taking weapons from suspected bad men, and out into the enclosure where our baggage was. Against the fence I saw the face of the capo of the gang of thieves and counterfeiters.
Under a pretext I got the party halted, re-entered the building, followed by the perplexed St. Ledger, and, when inside, where the thieves’ sentinels could not see, I unfolded the plot I had discovered.
In a word, before the ship sailed I had the pleasure of seeing the capo and two others in the hands of detectives, and the others would have been captured had not the port doctor, the instant he was informed of it, rushed up to me in full view outside in the baggage enclosure, followed by half a dozen officers, and at the sight the thieves flew like birds.
The port doctor refused to allow our baggage to go aboard, as it was fraudulently passed; but in the end I got it into his dull head that if he did as he threatened, kept us there to testify, and held our baggage for evidence, he would not get any testimony from us; and when sufficient consular pressure had been brought to bear to show him that we had been parties to the fraud in order to catch the counterfeiters and make the case, he relinquished his hold on us and our belongings. We found sixty-eight other pieces of baggage, with the fraudulent labels on, in the enclosure. They could be told by a slight imperfection in the red labels. The yellow counterfeits of the United States seals were perfect.
At last we were free to go aboard.