Italian Yesterdays, vol. 2

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

The embassy was to embark at Genoa, and it was there, while waiting for the final preparations to be made, that its members received the sad news of the death of Pius VII. This caused delay, and it was only after the election of Leo XII and his confirmation of Archbishop Muzi’s powers that the mission finally sailed from Genoa, on the 5th of October, 1823. Ninety years ago! The world has shrunk since then; the voyage that I made in 1885 in three weeks took Monsignor Muzi and his companions three months to accomplish. The “good barque Eloïse,” manned by “thirty experienced seamen,” had been chartered for the expedition, but one’s heart aches to think of what those three good ecclesiastics must have suffered in one way and another on board of her. Very few Italians of their class are good sailors and all the horrors of seasickness were certainly theirs, combined with the unsavoury and unwholesome food that was all people had to depend upon during sea-journeys before the discovery of steam and cold storage. Storm after storm broke over the little vessel; she was nearly wrecked off Teneriffe; one dreadful night, the 5th of November, she was waylaid by pirates, who overhauled her from stem to stern seeking for plunder, and only abandoned her—in furious disgust—when Father Mastai had shown them that there was not a single article of value on board. Then came a sad encounter with a Brazilian slave trader, packed with unfortunate negroes, a sight most grievous and terrible to the kind-hearted priests; and then, after two long months’ sailing, a fearful storm which lasted eight days, during which the Eloïse was so beaten about that no one hoped to escape alive. It was all a searching dispensation for quiet, stay-at-home Italian gentlemen who had followed their pious way hitherto along the most familiar lines!

They reached Monte-Video on New Year’s Day, 1824, stopped a few days for repairs, and made Buenos Ayres soon after, their joy at finding themselves on terra firma much tempered by the extremely rude reception accorded to them by the civil authorities. But Buenos Ayres was merely the starting-point for the most difficult part of the journey, the crossing of the Andes. Had the good Countess Mastai-Ferretti had the slightest idea of what her cherished son was to encounter there, I believe she would have died of anxiety before his return! I only met one or two Europeans, when I was in Chile, who had accomplished the feat, and they told me that nothing would induce them to attempt it again. I have described some of the terrors of the passes in former works,[5] and will not enlarge upon them here. Suffice it to say that for two whole months Monsignor Muzi and Fathers Sallusti and Mastai rode through those appalling solitudes, over the bridle-paths cut in the face of the rock that towers thousands of feet above and sinks sheer down thousands of feet below, paths where one false step means death, and so narrow in some places that, if two parties meet, it is usual for them—if they are not the fighting sort—to decide on the spin of a coin which shall dismount, pitch its mules over the precipice, and crawl past the winners as best they can—to continue the journey on foot!

The resting-places are even now the haunts of outlaws and robbers. The members of the Roman Embassy of 1824 only escaped being murdered en masse, because, through some unforeseen occurrence, they changed the time of their departure from a hamlet called Desmochadas. Had they waited till the hour first fixed upon, they would have shared the fate of a party of merchants who, on that day, were massacred, to a man, by a band of robbers. It was Father Mastai who discovered—and stayed behind to take care of—a sick English officer, named Miller, forsaken in a wayside inn; and it was Father Mastai, the others said, who had during the whole journey sustained their courage by his unfailing fun and good-humour. It seems to me that this is not the least glorious note in all his wonderful record, and because few, even of those who most loved and venerated him in his later years, have ever heard of it I have written it here. The whole thing, somehow, is so absolutely Pius IX!

Very sore and weary, the travellers reached Santiago on the 17th of March, only to encounter every kind of obstacle and annoyance in the attempt to carry out the object of their mission. The government had changed, and the party in power had no desire to come to an understanding with the Holy See. The people, indeed, received the envoys most enthusiastically, but Chile in 1824 was apparently much what I found it in 1885—a country of ardent believers ruled by atheists. Let some expert explain the problem, I cannot! For seven months Monsignor Muzi remained in Santiago, perseveringly trying to clear matters up and reach some modus vivendi between Church and State. But his efforts were nullified by the hostility of the President and his supporters, and at last he had to acknowledge his defeat and withdraw from the conflict.

The Eloïse meanwhile had successfully rounded Cape Horn and reached Valparaiso, and on the 19th of October the Archbishop and his party embarked once more on the gallant little vessel and started for home. Of course no sailing vessel can pass through the twisting narrows and rocks of the Straits of Magellan, so for three weeks—surely the most miserable of their lives—those poor priests, children of Italy and the sun, shivered in the awful cold of those frozen regions, where the sea is the colour of cold steel, and the sailors, as they have often told me, come down from the deck at night with their garments frozen stiff, and have to work their way into them, still frozen stiff as boards, in the morning. My own travelling in that part of the world did not include the rounding of Cape Horn, but even the passage of the Straits, in a big liner, with the water smooth as glass, was such a freezingly wretched experience that, having made it once, the prospect of its repetition took something away from my eagerness to go home. But outside the Horn, with the Antarctic Ocean, unbroken from the South Pole, flinging its icy rollers against a little sailing vessel that took three weeks to beat up on the other side—that, the skippers have told me, furnishes merchant seamen with their best nightmares to their dying day! Most of the coal supply for the West Coast is carried by this route, and by the time it has reached the Horn the coal, loaded under the damp English skies, has ignited and the remainder of the trip is made with hatches battened down and the pleasing knowledge that a puff of air finding its way into the hold will send the whole mass into a blaze!

Yet, there is a little English colony that lives and flourishes in these cold seas some two hundred and fifty miles to the east of the Horn, and we, in England, wear its wool and eat its mutton quite habitually. I never could learn my geography properly until I began to travel round the world. From that time maps became a special recreation of mine, and I had, when travelling through the Straits of Magellan, thought with both curiosity and pity of the handful of islands so much more exposed than even we were in those comfortless days. I was told the place was a purgatory—that it was just possible to carry on life, and that no one stayed there who could help it. Some time afterwards, when we were established in Santiago, a card was brought up and I gazed at it for a moment in some bewilderment—“The Governor of the Falkland Islands!” Then it was true! Our indomitable fellow-countrymen had really added another mesh to the net of Empire which Great Britain has cast over the world. My reflections were interrupted by the entrance of a big, handsome man, who looked as if he had just come out of Yorkshire. His clear blue eyes, ruddy cheeks, and joyful bearing belied the sad tales I had heard, and when, in the course of conversation, I asked some timid questions about his frozen place of exile, he laughed in a way that was good to hear. Frozen? Exile? Why, he would not live anywhere else for the world! A grand climate, pleasant society, and better pasturage for sheep than could be found anywhere else! “Pasturage!” I exclaimed. “Do you mean to say that anything will grow in that latitude?” “Grow? I should think so!” he replied. “We get the back wash of the Gulf Stream down there, and our sheep can graze all winter in the open. Why, I have three trees, real trees, on Stanley Island! I wish you and Mr. Fraser would come and pay me a visit there. My wife and daughters would be so delighted to see you.” Then, turning to my husband, he continued: “Our flocks are getting too big for their feeding grounds, so I have come to ask the Chilean Government to rent us five hundred thousand acres in Patagonia for a supplementary run. The pasturage is not as good as that in the Falklands, but it will be better than nothing.”

Of course we instantly invited our visitor to dine. An English face was always a joy to look at where one saw so few, and this man brought the very atmosphere of the North Country with him. He told us many interesting details about his little domain, the management of which he took very seriously and evidently accomplished with much success. “Of course I could do more,” he said regretfully, “if it were not for the blind hostility of the Opposition.” “Does it reach so far?” I asked politely. “I should have thought there was quite enough to keep it busy at home.”

“Oh, I don’t mean the little crowd at Westminster,” he replied indignantly. “Please understand, Mrs. Fraser, that I have an opposition of my own!”

“I do congratulate you,” I said; “that is certainly a triumph! What Britisher could ask more?”

There is a little plant of which every Englishman carries the seeds about with him. It is called Love-of-the-soil. Give him a bit of land anywhere—the best or the worst, a vast fertile tract or a few miles of desert island; tell him it is his very own to do as he likes with, and, before you can turn round, every grain of its dust is sprouting with Love-of-the-soil. He sees, knows, loves only that spot. He will fight for it, work for it, cheat for it if need be, perhaps even slay; for to him it has taken on the sacred character of the mother country, it is his piece of England and woe to any one who tries to take it away from him! That is why English colonies succeed. And it is the lack of this passion for the land which makes bad colonists of men of other nationalities. The Americans are simply brutal about their possessions. Out here in the Northwest one is horrified at the general callousness. I have watched people making what we should call a home, breaking new land, building a charming house, working hard to make everything within and without as perfect as they know how. A cloud of dust shows up on the road, a motor-car full of “land grabbers” kicks and coughs and stinks at the gate; the next minute the hard-eyed hucksters are being shown into all the sacred arena of airy rooms, and flowering garden, are fingering, valuing, depreciating; there follows an hour or two of hard bargaining, and then your neighbour’s wife flies across lots to tell you, with shining eyes, “We’ve sold the place!” “Sold the place?” I cry. “Why, I thought it was to be your home!” “What does that matter?” she retorts, huffed, “I got my price! We can easily build another house that we shall like just as much.”