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Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi. It certainly is necessary that some one should take the part of the vanquished.
The guards made little resistance, and Pisacane opened the prisons, inviting who would to follow him. The first plan had been to make a descent on San Stefano, the island where Settembrini was imprisoned, but that good citizen had refused to admit the liberation of the non-political prisoners, which was an unavoidable feature in the scheme.
The other was the Cagliari affair: the Cagliari, a Sardinian merchant ship, which carried the ill-fated expedition of Pisacane to Sapri, was captured by the Neapolitan Government, and the crew, two of whom were English, were taken in chains to Salerno.
Pisacane watched the growing ascendency of Piedmont with sorrow; he was one of the few, if not the only one of his party to say that he would as soon have the dominion of Austria as that of the House of Savoy. But if he was an extremist in politics, none the less he was a patriot, who took his life in his hands and offered it up to his country in the spirit of the noblest devotion.
With the addition of about three hundred men, Pisacane left Ponza for the mainland and disembarked near the village of Sapri, in the province of Salerno. From information received, he imagined that a revolutionary movement was on the point of breaking out in that district. Nothing could be further from the fact.
Disaster attended Baron Bentivegna's attempt at a rising at Taormina in 1856, and Carlo Pisacane's landing at Sapri in the summer of the following year had no better result. Pisacane, a son of the Duke Gennaro di San Giovanni of Naples, had fought in the defence of Rome and was a firm adherent of Mazzini, in conjunction with whom he planned his unlucky venture.
It is superb; it has a prodigious 14th of July, which delivers the globe; it forces all nations to take the oath of tennis; its night of the 4th of August dissolves in three hours a thousand years of feudalism; it makes of its logic the muscle of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of the sublime; it fills with its light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar, Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi; it is everywhere where the future is being lighted up, at Boston in 1779, at the Isle de Leon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty, in the ear of the American abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper's Ferry, and in the ear of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the shadow, to the Archi before the Gozzi inn on the seashore; it creates Canaris; it creates Quiroga; it creates Pisacane; it irradiates the great on earth; it was while proceeding whither its breath urge them, that Byron perished at Missolonghi, and that Mazet died at Barcelona; it is the tribune under the feet of Mirabeau, and a crater under the feet of Robespierre; its books, its theatre, its art, its science, its literature, its philosophy, are the manuals of the human race; it has Pascal, Regnier, Corneille, Descartes, Jean-Jacques: Voltaire for all moments, Moliere for all centuries; it makes its language to be talked by the universal mouth, and that language becomes the word; it constructs in all minds the idea of progress, the liberating dogmas which it forges are for the generations trusty friends, and it is with the soul of its thinkers and its poets that all heroes of all nations have been made since 1789; this does not prevent vagabondism, and that enormous genius which is called Paris, while transfiguring the world by its light, sketches in charcoal Bouginier's nose on the wall of the temple of Theseus and writes Credeville the thief on the Pyramids.
Carlo Pisacane educated in the military college of the Nunziatella, who had served as captain in the foreign legion in Algiers, destined later to become the pioneer of Garibaldi and his "Thousand" and to lose his life in the attempt while recognizing Garibaldi's prowess and talents as a guerilla chief, in his military history of 1849, severely criticises his tactics, and blames his sending up "a handful of boys against masses of the enemy" and censures, unhesitatingly, "his indiscipline at Velletri."
The country people did all the harm they could to the band, which, after making a brave stand against the local militia, was cut to pieces by the royal troops. Pisacane fell fighting; those who were not killed were taken, and amongst these was Nicotera, who was kept in prison till set free by Garibaldi. The Cagliari was captured and detained with its crew.
With the young Baron Nicotera and twenty-three others, Pisacane embarked on the Cagliari, a steamer belonging to a Sardinian mercantile line, which was bound for Tunis. When at sea, the captain was frightened into obedience, and the ship's course was directed to the isle of Ponza, where several hundred prisoners, mostly political, were undergoing their sentences.
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