Charles Boothby.
I cannot tell what the affairs of the continent tend to. We get no news, as the French detain the good, and the Neapolitans the bad. It was verging towards winter before Sir James Craig’s expedition actually embarked. I had permission to dine and sleep ashore the day of embarkation. In the night I was seized with cholera—often in that country so fatal. No assistance and no remedy of any kind was to hand. It took its course, and in the morning I felt weak and languid, but, thanks to youth and great strength of constitution, I was well.
At daylight I went on board with a feeling of exhaustion, but no remains of disease.
In a few hours afterwards the fleet set sail, and the weather became almost immediately murky and unpropitious. We made our course round the western point of the island of Sicily without any precise knowledge of our destination. For three weeks in that Cerulean sea did we struggle with weather as moist and murky and with an atmosphere as thick as ever shrouded the chops of the British Channel. But at length the wind moderated and inclined abaft the beam, the sky and sea resumed their blue, and the classic shores of Italy beautified by degrees the farthest horizon. Soon, as evening fell, we were gliding between the fairy isles of Ischia and Capri with a smooth and steady course into the Bay of Naples.
How we watched, how we strained our eyes and wearied our arms with poising the telescope to pry into the beauteous recesses of those approaching shores! But now the night had fallen, and a dark and spangled curtain threw its veil over the beauties we were gazing at, and when we came to an anchor it was too profoundly dark for even the imagination to take hints from surrounding forms. So we went to bed and wished for day—for a day without clouds.
The next morning our dreams were realised. Vesuvius stood close before us, solemnly breathing upwards his pillar of smoke.
Woods, with young plantations and viny hillocks, spread widely round him. To the right a fair town stood on the brink of the sea, while immediately behind it the steep mountains pushed their wooded peaks into the sky. Far to the left, and out of sight, or indistinctly discerned, lay Naples.
Soon a great number of Neapolitan boats came to the fleet to sell such things as they who have been cooped up at sea buy greedily—bread, fruit, game, and fish. Perhaps the parley thus obtained with these interesting foreigners, and the opportunity to take small flights in our grammar Italian, and to observe their dress, language, and grotesque extravagance of sound and gesticulation, were more acceptable to our curiosity than those dainties to our animal appetites.
We saw distinctly some parts of the great road to Naples, and it was quite a natural pantomime to witness a conversation between parties on the shore, perhaps discussing the object of our appearance and the probability of our movements—far too distant to overhear any sound, or see any minor hints of countenance or gesture. English folks, so seen at a distance, might have hardly been distinguished from statues or from trees. But the Italian’s body is a telegraph to the distant observer while his tongue and countenance are reasoning with his neighbour; now the orator, approaching his friend closely, with face and hands concentering towards his breast, seizes his collar or buttons, and shakes his arguments into his ears and mind with a gentle tremulation, as one coaxes gooseberries into a bottle, and again, all of a sudden, retrogrades from him, with head and hands and arms thrown back to mark the irreconcilable extremity of his contradiction.
The day following, one of my brother officers repaired to our chief’s ship, and they went on shore together.