WRECK AND RUIN.
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FROM HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
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In October, 1848, I went over to the Island of Capri, some twenty miles from Naples, to enjoy a rustic festival. Our party consisted of some Englishmen and some Italians; the latter, being in the service of the government, had a fixed limit to their leave of absence. When the morning arrived that was appointed for the departure of our Italian friends, we accompanied them to the shore, where they made their arrangements for the passage back to the main-land. There was a strong west-and-by-south wind roaring round the island, and the sea looked dangerous; but, in Naples, where there is no career for a young man out of government employ, an official must not trifle with his post. The preparations, therefore, for the launching of the boat went on.
It was one of those wide-bottomed boats, commonly used in the port of Naples, upon which the stranger starts out for a moonlight row to Posilippo, or betakes himself with his portmanteau and his carpet-bag, or with his wife and her pill-box full of a few things to the steamer. Such boats are not made for riding on a stormy sea. The men preparing to put out that morning were our two friends the officials, and two boatmen. One of the passengers was hailed by the captain of a good strong bark, upon the point of starting. “Come with us, Raffaelluccio; it will be madness to sail out in that cockle-shell, through such a sea!” Raffaelluccio, a delicate youth, replied that he was no coward. He had come in the boat, and might go back in the boat, with the Madonna’s blessing. The other passenger was a stout, black-bearded man, and the two boatmen were a youth and a weather-beaten sailor from the port of Naples.
The little harbor at Capri is so sheltered from certain winds, that there is often a deceptive smoothness in its waters. It was only by looking out to sea that one detected, on that wild October morning, how the waters writhed under the torture of the wind. Far as the eye could reach the sea was covered with those smaller storm waves, called, in the phrase of the country, pecore; these, as the day advanced, swelled into great billows, cavalloni, which came rolling on upon our little island, and dashed violently against the coast of Massa and Sorrento.
The boat had been shoved off, and had returned for some article, left accidentally behind. A group of weather-wise old sailors thronged about the foolhardy crew, in vain urging them to wait for fairer weather. They put out to sea again, and made straight for the cape under the summer palace of Tiberius. This is a well-known point, which boatmen often seek when they desire to catch a direct wind for their passage to the main-land. The gale that had been blowing round the island appeared to pour out from this point its undivided force, and beat the sea with a strength almost irresistible. We saw the mast of the little boat snapped the moment it had reached the cape, and the crew put back, not to await calmer weather, but to seek another temporary mast, and start again. No threat or persuasion could detain the Italians, who feared to exceed their term of leave. A rude mast was set up, and again the boat started, leaping across wave after wave. We saw no more of it.
“I watched it for some distance,” said the captain of the barque, which had started at the same time. “Their mast bent as though it would break with every puff of wind, and the little sail fluttered like a handkerchief upon the waves. In a moment it disappeared, and we knew that our foreboding had proved true.” The rest of the tale I had from the lips of the black-bearded official, the sole survivor; and a wilder tale of human passion does not often fall within the bounds of sober truth.
The old mariner, at starting, had been placed at the helm as the most competent man of the party; but there was an alarming difference between the eddies, currents, and billows at the cape, and the smooth waters of the Bay of Naples. A monstrous cavallone appeared in the distance; leaping, roaring, foaming, it was close upon their quarter; its crest overhung them; in an instant, said my informant, they were swallowed up. The boat was overturned; but the crew—struggling desperately for life—rose with it once more to the surface, clinging to its bottom. In their last agony they glared upon each other, face to face, among the beating waves, and the loud execrations of his companions were poured passionately on the ancient mariner, whose want of skill was cursed as the fatal cause of their despair. The hold of the poor old fellow, weak with age and faint with emotion, had not strength to bear him up amid the tossing of the waters, and as his grasp relaxed, the others watched his weakness with a fiendish satisfaction. “It is some consolation,” exclaimed one, “to see you die first, fool as you are!” He did not hear the latest maledictions, but went down in the deep sea. The next who died was Raffaelluccio, upon whose daily work the daily bread of a mother and three sisters depended. “I am stiff with cold, and can hang on no longer,” he said to his companion. “Get on my shoulders,” was the answer of the stronger man. And so he did, and so he died: the living man with the dead weight upon him grappling still for life, and drifting before the storm. The young boatman, the other survivor, trembling himself upon the brink of eternity, crept round to the dead body, and having robbed it of a watch and chain and other valuables, pushed it from the shoulders of his friend into the sea. So there remained these two men, clinging to the boat, and gazing on each other anxiously.