In Australia.
To transportation Australia certainly owed its earliest Gypsies. In 1880, a few months before his death, Tom Taylor wrote to me:—‘The only Gypsy I ever knew who had travelled among “the people” was one Jones, who used to drive a knife-grinding wheel at Cambridge. Having “left his country for his country’s good” in the old transportation days, he had made his escape from Australia, and, the ship aboard which he had stowed himself putting into a Spanish port, had landed, met with some of the Zincali, and travelled with them for some time. He was looked on as a master of “deep Rommany” among the Gypsies round Cambridge.’ Mr. MacRitchie has a letter containing a longish list of wealthy Australian Gypsies, whose grandsires were bitchadé párdel (‘sent over’); yet, according to the Orange Guardian of May 1866:—‘The first Gypsies seen in Australia passed through [[xviii]]Orange the other day en route for Mudgee. Although they can scarcely be reckoned new arrivals, as they have been nearly two years in the colony, they bear about them all the marks of the Gypsy. The women stick to the old dress, and are still as anxious as ever to tell fortunes; but they say that this game does not pay in Australia, as the people are not so credulous here as they are at home. Old “Brown Joe” is a native of Northumberland, and has made a good deal of money even during his short sojourn here. They do not offer themselves generally as fortune-tellers, but, if required and paid, they will at once “read your palm.” At present they obtain a livelihood by tinkering and making sealing-wax. Their time during the last week has been principally taken up in hunting out bees’ nests, which are very profitable, as they not only sell the honey, but, after purifying and refining the wax, manufacture it into beautiful toys, so rich in colour and transparency that it would be almost impossible to guess the material’ (quoted in Notes and Queries, 28th July 1866, p. 65).
Transportation.
Banishment and transportation have been important factors in the dispersion of the Gypsies. They were banished from Germany in 1497, Spain in 1499, France in 1504, England in 1531, Denmark in 1536, Moravia in 1538, Scotland in 1541, Poland in 1557, Venetia in 1549, 1558, and 1588, etc.; to such banishment is probably due the fact that in 1564 we find in the Netherlands a Gypsy woman, Katarine Mosroesse, who had been born in Scotland. Besides the transportation, already noticed, of Scottish Gypsies to Jamaica, Barbadoes, and Virginia, of Portuguese Gypsies to Africa and Brazil, of Basque Gypsies to Africa, and of English Gypsies to Botany Bay, we know that some time prior to 1800 Gitanos were transported from Spain to Louisiana; whilst in 1544 we find one large band of Egyptians being sentenced at Huntingdon to be taken to Calais, the nearest English port on the Continent, and another being shipped at Boston in Lincolnshire and landed somewhere in Norway.
In Crete.
From the preceding it may be safely deduced that, with our present knowledge, or rather lack of knowledge, we can seldom, if ever, fix the precise date when the Gypsies first set foot in any country. Till 1849 it was almost universally accepted that 1417, the year of their appearance at the Hanse cities of the Baltic, was also the date of their first arrival in Europe. But since then Bataillard, Hopf, and Miklosich have collected a number of passages which prove incontestably that long before then there must have been Gypsies in south-eastern Europe. Symon Simeonis, a Minorite friar, who made pilgrimage from [[xix]]Ireland to the Holy Land, tells in his Itinerarium (Camb. 1778, p. 17), how in 1322 near Candia in Crete: ‘There also we saw a race outside the city, following the Greeks’ rite, and asserting themselves to be of the family of Chaym [Ham]. They rarely or never stop in one place beyond thirty days, but always wandering and fugitive, as though accursed by God, after the thirtieth day remove from field to field with their oblong tents, black and low, like the Arabs’, and from cave to cave. For after that period any place in which they have dwelt becomes full of worms and other nastinesses, with which it is impossible to dwell.’[4]