On the fate of Donna Emilia and her daughter Rosa.
Donna Emilia died in misery shortly after the outbreak of the troubles (in May, 1887). Her daughter, Rosa Piranha, though proscribed in the September massacre, was saved from death by the devotion of her old nurse. The house which Hi saw burning, as he walked to the Mole, was not the Piranhas’ home; that was spared though sacked. Rosa returned to it when the troubles were over.
In May, 1888, she entered a community of enclosed nuns, to whom she made over all her earthly possessions. In this sisterhood she has lived ever since.
On the fate of Hi, after he went on board the Solita.
As the aliens in the ships were not allowed to land again in Santa Barbara during the troubles, Hi, with his fellow refugees, went in the Solita to New York, where he landed.
As his parents felt that he had better stay there, he remained in the United States, where he underwent the adventures and hardships usual to youth. After some months there, it happened, that he met Don Manuel.
As he felt that his life was linked to Don Manuel by ties not easily broken, he joined the band of White refugees sworn to destroy Don Lopez and his faction. With these outcasts he wandered and suffered for some months, till that campaign began which led to the killing of Lopez and the establishment of Don Manuel as Dictator in his stead.
For some years after this, Hi remained in the Western provinces, in Don Manuel’s employment, at work upon the problem dear to him, of perfecting steamboats for river traffic of different kinds. In 1891, when Don Manuel began his great scheme of controlling the San Jacinto River, some of his ideas were put in practice. For the next seven years, he was busily employed on the San Jacinto, in partial or complete charge of the boat service by which the workers on the dam were supplied. The following letter from him, written in early May, 1898, to his mother in England, will fill in some of the blanks in this history:
“On the 15th we had our great day with the opening of the dam. His Excellency, with his staff and a lot of senators and Congressmen, came to the pier at Curucucu, where they took our boats for the last ten miles up to the dam. After the formal opening, there was a banquet, at which H. E. made a very nice speech. He said he did not think the work would ever have been done but for my boats, which perhaps was partly true.
“About a week after the opening they finished the last stretch of the railway so that now the waters are linked with both coasts and my seven years’ job is at an end.