Destiny was preparing strange things.
III
The younger son, having decided to throw in his lot with the poet’s, remained in Pisa. He liked the group and the environment, though the bookish intellectualism of the Shelleys swept him often enough beyond his depth. Byron, also living in exile, was a familiar figure, and there were rides together out into the country and pauses by the roadside to indulge in the noisy sport of pistol practice.
Shelley read, and hidden away in a little pine wood, wrote poetry; Byron lurked in his huge palace guarded by a growling English bulldog and a squad of chattering retainers captained by a giant Venetian gondolier.
The poets liked the younger son. He was a rebel too, in his way, his piratic career made him interesting, he had good stories to tell, and above all, he was a man of action who could be trusted to do practical things for the impractical. A boat is to be built, Tre will attend to it; a boat is to be sailed, Tre will do that; household goods are to be moved, we must talk with Tre. Affection forms quickly in such an isolated group, and there seems to have been a certain affection for piratic Tre, perhaps the first the man had ever known.
As the weather grew hot, Tre advised the Shelleys to go north, and found them a house at Lerici on the Gulf of Shezzia. The place was but a shabby barrack, but it was on the sea, and Shelley rejoiced. In the evenings, the whole population of men, women and children took to the water like ducks, and their shouts of joy filled the house. Shelley and Tre joined in the frolic, but Mary Shelley looked grave, and said it was “improper.” “Hush, Mary,” said the poet, “that insidious word has never been echoed by these woods and rocks; don’t teach it to them.”
The late spring ripened into summer, and with July came the historic tragedy.
Early in the spring a kind of yachtsman’s fever had descended upon the little group. Byron had arranged for the building of a yacht, and Williams had designed a boat for Shelley and the friends at Lerici. In designing the hull, Williams had probably attempted an imitation of the fast American vessels he had seen along the coast; it was a model he did not understand. One Captain Roberts, a sometime British naval officer then living in Italy, had the boat built under his eye at Genoa; she was twenty-four feet long and eight in the beam; she drew four feet of water and was schooner rigged with gaff topsails. Not a boat, this, to fire a sailor’s heart, for the rig needs a crew to run it, and is difficult to handle quickly, especially in a small space. Two English sailors and a ship’s boy had sailed the vessel from Genoa to Lerici. When asked how she sailed, the tars had replied that she was a “ticklish boat to manage,” and that they had “cautioned the gents accordingly.”
Originally christened the “Don Juan,” the fateful vessel was now re-christened the “Ariel.” To give her more stability, Williams filled her with ballast,—a dangerous business, for the vessel was undecked. The designer would hear no criticism of his craft.