by Tom Reiss
An old Maltese sailor told them of a technique for securing the hull that Dumas and Dolomieu at first mistrusted but eventually agreed to let him try. The man charged money to perform it, even though it would ostensibly save his life as well as everyone else’s. It involved diving into the ship’s hold and finding the holes to fill them, continually, with bits of straw and debris. The sailor reported that the ship was leaking not just in one place but along many seams of the hull. Somehow his technique worked to get the water levels down and to slow the influx.
The leaking vessel sailed on stormy seas for over a week in that perilous condition. The men faced not only drowning but a dwindling supply of food and water. Dolomieu brooded about how their deaths would go unmarked and undiscovered. Reflecting late-eighteenth-century meteorological science, he later noted that “it had been a long time since the equinox had influenced the weather to such terrible effect.”
A meeting was held among “the French seamen and the foreigners,” and the captain convinced everyone that the only thing to do was head for the nearest port. And so the Belle Maltaise limped into the Gulf of Taranto, which separates the heel from the toe of Italy, and followed the ancient shipping lanes once plied by Greek and Roman galleys. The city of Taranto had once been the lone colonial outpost of the warrior state Sparta on the Italian peninsula. Even today, the ruins of the ancient Spartan temple of Poseidon are among its most picturesque sites, lying below a great gray fortress of more recent vintage.
“I dispatched the captain of the ship with a letter for the governor of the city, in which I explained the reasons that had forced me to approach their territory,” Dumas recounted. “I asked for help in our unfortunate situation and for hospitality until we could get repaired and continue on our way.”
Until two months earlier, the city of Taranto had belonged to the Kingdom of Naples, ruled by a king and queen: Marie-Caroline—“Maria Carolina”—Marie-Antoinette’s older sister, and her husband Ferdinand, who hated the French Revolution as fiercely as any other monarch. But they had then been driven out by a French-inspired revolt of liberal patriots, and a French-backed republic had been installed in their place. News of the event had reached Egypt by mid-February. Dumas and his men therefore felt sure of safe passage and expected a warm welcome.
“After a series of extremely violent gales, one after the other without respite,” as Dolomieu recalled it, “we were overtaken by flights of joy knowing that we had arrived home in Europe, believing we were out of all danger, and thinking that we would soon be seeing other Frenchmen, who we assumed were the masters in Taranto.”
The captain returned to Dumas with the news that the governor of the city would welcome them into the port but that they would first need to be quarantined. The request seemed benign; a plague epidemic had been decimating the French in Alexandria, and a passenger on the Belle Maltaise had just become its latest victim.
But even as the longboats brought the passengers of the Belle Maltaise ashore, the Frenchmen began to feel twinges of unease. It must have hit Dumas like a blow that he was not, after all, in friendly territory. “Instead of the tricolor flag,” Dolomieu recalled, “we saw Neapolitan banners on all the towers.” The flags in the harbor bore not only the symbols of the overthrown Kingdom of Naples but a new, hybrid symbol none of the Frenchmen could have seen before: the fleur-de-lis, the old device of the Bourbon kings, superimposed on a cross. It was an emblematic merger of the two powers the Revolution had overthrown: the Crown and the Church.
The travelers were subjected to a rough search, followed by questions from an endless tribunal of bureaucrats, factotums, attorneys, and men armed with pikes and assorted weapons, all acting under orders they would not reveal. “We were interrogated, searched, disarmed, and, to quarantine us,” wrote Dolomieu, “we were locked, 120 of us, in a big storage room.” The anti-French hostility was palpable. A student of Dolomieu’s who had accompanied him believed the quarantine saved their lives: “If the plague hadn’t claimed one of us,” he wrote to the librarian of the Institut d’Égypte, “we might have been massacred that very night.” (The men in charge struck him as “savages.”) So far, the travelers were allowed to keep their money.
Many, of course, had wounds and all were malnourished from their days at sea; they were packed so tightly together that no man could lie down without dislodging another. But the following day, their jailers took Dumas, Manscourt, and Dolomieu from the common holding room and gave them private cells. Like everything, this was effected by a cash payment. Dumas also explained to the officials that his remaining two horses needed food and care, and the officials agreed to do this if he provided more money. Bribes were the order of the hour, for everything. Dumas paid the guards in advance for his horses’ upkeep—though he would learn later that the animals had been seized and would never be returned to him. (Remarkably, even as the guards’ conduct became balder and more aggressive, removing all doubt as to whether they were jailers rather than hosts, they never simply confiscated all Dumas’s belongings and money outright. Perhaps the culture of bribery was simply too deeply ingrained for anyone to want to cut the cycle of requests and extortion short.)
“We had all been delighted by what we thought was a sincere welcome,” Dumas remembered, “but under the mask of humanity ran evil designs and crimes worthy of the Neapolitan government.” They were indeed being held by men with “evil designs,” yet unbeknownst to Dumas even later, these men did not represent the “Neapolitan government” at all, at least not in the usual sense of the term.
The Kingdom of Naples had a strange and violent history, and rarely had life in the kingdom been as strange or as violent as it was now, in the spring of 1799. In fact, of all the places in Europe for Dumas, Manscourt, and Dolomieu to have landed, they’d happened upon one of the most dangerous.
The Kingdom of Naples encompassed all of southern Italy, right up to the border of the Papal States (in 1799, the French-backed Republic of Rome). It was a fairly recent monarchy: Ferdinand had been its sovereign for most of its existence, preceded only by his father, Charles, who had come onto the throne in 1759. Before that, the area had been ruled since the fall of the Roman Empire as a colony or possession: first the Byzantines, then the Muslims, then the Normans, the Germans, the French, and finally the Spanish had all taken a turn at running southern Italy, or trying to. Since the sixteenth century it had been the Spanish, whose armies conquered southern Italy at the same time Cortés was conquering Mexico. Even today, many people, especially northern Italians, remark that the south reminds them more of a Latin American country than of any place in Europe, and though they often mean something insulting, the comparison is based on a very real shared history (symbolized by that South American novelty, the tomato, which so transformed southern Italian cuisine). From the 1500s to the early 1700s, the Spanish ruled Naples and Taranto much as they did Buenos Aires and Bogotá. Under them, the capital, Naples, briefly rivaled Paris as the largest city in Europe.
But at the beginning of the eighteenth century Madrid lost its southern Italian colonies, and then, at mid-century, came an obscure inheritance battle that gave a relative of the king of Spain a chance to trade up from a dukedom and turn the former southern Italian colonies into a new kingdom: the Kingdom of Naples. It was as if a junior Sun King had taken over a banana republic. Naples nevertheless became a center of the Italian Enlightenment; the scientific and cultural enthusiasm aroused by the nearby excavations of ancient Pompeii made Naples one of the high points of the European Grand Tour.
In 1759, the kingdom’s founder got bumped up the royal ladder to inherit the throne of Spain and left his little start-up kingdom to his eight-year-old son, Ferdinand, who took the keys to the kingdom and, at seventeen, married Marie-Antoinette’s sister. As politically savvy as her younger sister was frivolous, Queen Maria Carolina bore Naples some eighteen royal offspring while guiding its geopolitics in a radical direction. At the end of the 1770s she invited a British expat named Sir J
ohn Acton to be secretary of the navy of the Kingdom of Naples, with the understanding that, as an Englishman, he would know how to build a navy from scratch. Sir John also became Naples’s secretary of war, secretary of finance, and so on, until he was running many of the functions of the state.
At this point, Neapolitan banana-republic absolutism entered its disturbing second phase—the one Dumas haplessly sailed into. When Marie-Antoinette was guillotined in 1793, Queen Maria Carolina swore an eternal hatred of France and instructed Acton to devote the kingdom’s every resource to keeping out French ideas, French printed matter, and French people. But “French ideas” took root despite the censorship, especially in the educated upper class. Then, when the French army of Italy liberated the north in 1796–97, a wave of revolutionary sentiment swept down the Italian peninsula. The tree of liberty was planted in Rome’s notorious Jewish ghetto, and its residents were set free. Naples was ablaze with revolutionary speeches and calls to action. When, in the spring of 1798, Napoleon’s armada passed by Italy’s southern shores on its way to Malta, the French seemed to Ferdinand and Maria Carolina to be closing in on all sides.
But the Expédition d’Égypte provided Neapolitan royals with a real opportunity to strike at the French: along with Acton and the British ambassador Sir William Hamilton, the monarchs furiously arranged the kingdom’s affairs in opposition to French power. The linchpin in Anglo-Neapolitan relations was Hamilton’s young wife, Lady Emma Hamilton, whose torrid affair with Admiral Nelson—by then Lord Nelson of the Nile—kept the British navy close at hand.† With an alliance solidified not only by geopolitics but by Nelson’s constant need to visit his lover, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina felt invincible. That fall, while Dumas was tamping down unrest in Cairo, Naples attacked the French-sponsored Republic of Rome. However, when confronted by the crack battle-hardened troops of the French Army of Italy, the Neapolitan soldiers panicked, dropped their weapons, and ran before the French. (The rout did nothing for the reputation of Neapolitan troops. When his son had their uniforms changed, King Ferdinand disparaged the move, quipping, “My dear child, dress them in white or dress them in red, they will run just the same.”) The French army chased the Neapolitan troops home, enabling the creation of one more Italian republic and eradicating (for the moment) the peninsula’s last vestiges of monarchy. Ferdinand and Maria Carolina drained the royal treasury and, with Acton, fled to Sicily.
With King Ferdinand gone, strange days arrived in the former Kingdom of Naples. No one was clearly in charge. On the one hand, the forces of the French Revolution had arrived. When the French army entered Naples, the Neapolitan patriots emerged from hiding to proclaim their own French-sponsored Parthenopean Republic on January 21, 1799, less than two months before Dumas reached Taranto. Patriots planted trees of liberty and strung tricolor banners from all the buildings. (The local revolutionary color scheme was blue, yellow, and red.) In cities all across southern Italy, French-inspired patriots and freethinkers seized the reins of power. Taranto was no exception. Its local liberals also declared their city republican and free.
But at the same time, large, angry mobs took to the streets in towns and cities throughout the kingdom, seeking out nobles or rich merchants known to be sympathetic to equality, enlightenment, liberty, or any other “French idea.” They hauled “French” libraries into public squares for burning. Sometimes they didn’t stop at books but tied the books’ readers to stakes to be roasted alive. Such autos-da-fé—literally, “acts of faith”—had not been seen in Europe since the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. The population was “ignorant, highly superstitious, fanatically loyal to Ferdinand and hostile to the French,” wrote a member of the French occupying army. “Had they the opportunity and the means they would not let a single one escape.… [We] seem to have forgotten that we are in the land of the Sicilian Vespers.”‡
In the countryside, too, French troops found themselves engaged in fierce battles against groups of irregular antirevolutionary militias, who did not yet have a name or any real structure. The exiled Ferdinand sponsored this insurgency—an anti-French, anti-democratic amalgam of peasants, aristocrats, priests, and bandits. The man who led it was Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, a churchman from a prominent aristocratic Neapolitan family. Ferdinand deputized Ruffo his “vicar-general” and commanded him to do “whatever was necessary” to purge southern Italy of liberal, pro-French ideas.
The cardinal announced that the movement was to be called L’Esercito della Santa Fede—the Holy Faith Army—and it was he who designed the flag that symbolized Crown and Church. Under that flag—red and white—the Holy Faith troops would battle the nefarious French Revolution’s blue-white-and-red-clad armies.
As the Belle Maltaise careened toward Tarantine waters, the Holy Faith Army was consolidating its hold over Italy’s southernmost terrain. Republican Taranto had fallen. Now “infamous,” its tree of liberty was uprooted from the harbor square and burned. The tricolori were replaced with Cardinal Ruffo’s lily-crucifix standards.
The Holy Faith Army had been massacring liberals, Jews, republicans, and anyone accused of having the remotest tie to anything French. As Dumas and the others stood answering their questions, the ancient port city was still strewn with bodies, though none were visible in the harbor square. The very day the unlucky ship came into port, the Marquis de la Schiava, the Holy Faith’s local deputy, was appointed the new governor—“the Lord”—of the Taranto fortress.
The Marquis de la Schiava sent word to Cardinal Ruffo that he had captured two high-ranking French generals who had been shipwrecked, along with a French scientist of international renown. Then the marquis waited for orders from the cardinal about what to do with his captives. But since the Holy Faith Army had the irregular structure and rhythms of an insurgency, it was impossible to get a straight answer. The man they called vicar-general, in addition to supreme general, had previously served as the pope’s treasurer before managing King Ferdinand’s royal silk works. Though Ruffo was committed to rebuilding Church domination in the kingdom, the army he led attracted, according to one of its own officers, “assassins and robbers driven by the hope of plunder, vendetta and murder.” All sorts of people were coming out of the woodwork and claiming they had the authority of the Holy Faith Army or the cardinal.
So it was that—after days of seeing no one but underlings, despite his protests—Dumas suddenly received a visitor who introduced himself as “Crown Prince Francis, son of King Ferdinand of Naples.” Dumas tried to tell him about their mistreatment and their need to see the French ambassador, but the prince cut him off. “After he asked about the health of Generals Bonaparte and Berthier and the military situation of the Army of Egypt, he left abruptly,” Dumas recalled with puzzlement.
As later Italian accounts reveal, this man claiming to be Ferdinand’s son was actually a Corsican adventurer named Boccheciampe, who had been going from town to town in the Holy Faith zone, posing as the prince and giving orders. The false Prince Francis had dismissed magistrates, appointed governors, raised taxes, and spent money from the public purse. His managing to do all this without getting caught suggests that he was surely a good deal smarter than the real Prince Francis, who was known to be as cowardly a dilettante as his father. It also suggests the chaos that prevailed in the kingdom at the time.
The scoundrel may not have been the real crown prince, but it was he who occasioned the first direct communication Dumas received from Cardinal Ruffo.
One day not long after the impostor’s visit, the guards gave Dumas a letter from the cardinal. “He invited us, General Manscourt and me, to write to the Generals in Chief of the French Armies of Naples and Italy to exchange ourselves for Monsieur Boccheciampe, prisoner at Ancona, adding that the King of Naples [Ruffo’s master] had more concern for the case of Monsieur Boccheciampe alone than for all of the other generals in his employ who were prisoners of war in France.”
It seems that “Prince Francis,” just after his visit to Dumas’s cel
l, had made his way north and to the other side of the peninsula at the head of a bunch of Holy Faith troops, his intention being to fight and plunder his way up the coast. But he was then taken prisoner by the French, hence the possibility of the trade. (Despite his rogue behavior in Taranto, Boccheciampe had recently won the province of Apulia back for King Ferdinand from the French-allied republicans in a successful conspiracy with three other outlaw Corsicans, who also posed as royals.)
“I consequently addressed the necessary letters to the cardinal,” Dumas recorded, and his hopes rose that this peculiar prisoner exchange would free him. But then word came that the French had actually killed Boccheciampe, not taken him prisoner, and Cardinal Ruffo lost interest in using Dumas and Manscourt as bargaining chips.
Instead of liberation Dumas received an order declaring that, nearly seven weeks after they were first taken into custody, he and Manscourt were now official prisoners of war of the Holy Faith Army. The order applied only to them; the other passengers from the Belle Maltaise were to be held separately.
Confirming this description of events in Dumas’s report, I found an order dated May 4, 1799, that authorized “the departure of all French and Genoan prisoners, with the exception of the two generals, who shall remain in Taranto, under custody of a good guard.” The document stated that all the other prisoners were to be released after signing an oath that “they vow for two years not to take up arms against His Majesty, the King of Naples, God Bless Him, [or] against his allies, in omnibus.” Before being freed, however, they were first to be “relieved of every weapon … even small knives,” and the authorities also ordered the confiscation “of their money, if they possess any, excepting a small sum for use while traveling, and of jewelry or other items of value.” The confiscated jewels, watches, gold and silver coins, cups, knives, silk shawls, bits of fabric, and so forth were all then duly inventoried—the list running on for pages in detail only a pawnbroker or insurance adjuster could appreciate, but overall showing the seizure of the Belle Maltaise to have been quite a boon for the Holy Faith Army. The inventory concluded by reporting that “all the silver and golden coins were put inside a striped box … made stronger with a cord and sealed with Spanish wax.”
