Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 2.djvu/246

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390 SOLDIERS AND SAILORS the town to join it ; but the attack upon the barracks miscarried, and he, not daring to go back to his ship, saw himself irreparably compromised, fled to Nice, and thence crossed the Var and found himself an exile at Marseilles. Here he betook himself again to his sea life, sailed for the Black Sea and for Tunis, and at last on board the Nageur, of Nantes, for Rio de Janeiro. In the commentaries before alluded to Garibaldi gives the fullest particulars of the exploits by which he rose to distinction beyond the Atlantic during the twelve years elapsing from his leaving Europe in 1836 to his return to Italy in 1848. It is the romance of his career, and will some day be wrought into an epic blending the charms of the Odyssey with those of the Iliad a battle and a march being the theme of the eventful tale almost from beginning to end. Garibaldi took service with the Republic of Rio Grande do Sul, a vast terri- tory belonging to Brazil, then in open rebellion and war against that empire. He took the command of a privateer's boat with a crew of twelve men, to which he. gave the name of Mazzini, and by the aid of which he soon helped himself to a larger and better-armed vessel, a prize taken from the enemy. In his many en- counters with the Imperial or Brazilian party the hero bought experience both of wonderfully propitious and terribly adverse fortune, and had every imaginable variety of romantic adventure and hair-breadth escapes. He was severely wounded, taken prisoner, and in one instance at Gualeguay, in the Argentine territory, he found himself in the power of one Leonardo Millan, a type of Spanish South American brutality, by whom he was savagely 'struck in the face with a horse- whip, submitted to several hours' rack and torture, and thrown into a dungeon in which his sufferings were soothed by the ministration of that " angel of charity," a woman, by name Madame AUeman. Escaping from his tormentor by the intervention of the Governor of Guale- guay, Paolo Echague, Garibaldi crossed from the territories of the Plate into those of the Rio Grande, and faithful to the cause of that republic, he fought with better success, winning battles, storming fortresses, standing his ground with a handful of men, or even single-handed, against incredible odds, beating strong squadrons with a few small vessels, giving through all proofs of the rarest disin- terestedness, humanity, and generosity, disobeying orders to sack and ravage vanquished cities, and exercising that mixture of authority and glamour over his followers which almost enabled him to dispense with the ties of stern rule and discipline. At last, after losing a flotilla in a hurricane on the coast of Santa Caterina, where he landed wrecked and forlorn, having seen his bravest and most cherished Italian friends shot down or drowned, he fell in with his Anita not, apparently, the first fair one for whom he had a passing fancy with whom he united his destinies, for better for worse, in life and till death, in some off"-hand manner, about which he is reticent and mysterious. Anita turned out almost as great and daring and long-enduring a being as her heroic mate, and was by his side in all fights by lanS and sea, till the fortunes of the Republic of Rio Grande declined, when, after giving birth to her first-born, Menotti Garibaldi, Septem- ber 16, 1840, she went with that infant and his father through unheard of hard'