On parting with Mazzini in 1833, Garibaldi, then captain of a sailing vessel, went to Genoa and enrolled himself as a common sailor in the Royal Piedmontese Navy.  The step, strange in appearance, was certainly taken on Mazzini’s advice, and the immediate purpose was doubtless to make converts for ‘Young Italy’ among the marines.  Had Garibaldi been caught when the ruthless persecution of all connected with ’Young Italy’ set in, he would have been shot offhand, as were all those who were found dabbling with politics in the army and navy.  He escaped just in time, and sailed for South America.

The Gazzetta Piemontese of the 17th of June 1834 published the sentence of death passed upon him, with the rider which declared him exposed to public vengeance ’as an enemy of the State, and liable to all the penalties of a brigand of the first category.’  He saw the paper; and it was the first time that he or anyone else had seen the name of Giuseppe Garibaldi in print; a name of which Victor Emmanuel would one day say that ‘it filled the furthest ends of the earth.’

Profitable to Italy, over nearly every page of whose recent history might be written ‘out of evil cometh forth good,’ was the banishment which threw Garibaldi into his romantic career of the next twelve years between the Amazon and the Plata.  Soldier of fortune who did not seek to enrich himself; soldier of freedom who never aimed at power, he always meant to turn to account for his own country the experience gained in the art of war in that distant land, where he rapidly became the centre of a legend, almost the origin of a myth.  Antique in simplicity, singleness, superabundance of life, and in a sort of naturalism which is not of to-day; unselfconscious, trustful in others, forgiving, incapable of fear, abounding in compassion, Garibaldi’s true place is not in the aggregation of facts which we call history, but in the apotheosis of character which we call the Iliad, the Mahabharata, the Edda, the cycles of Arthur and of Roland, and the Romancero del Cid.

In childhood he rescued a drowning washerwoman; in youth he nursed men dying of cholera; as a veteran soldier he passed the night among the rocks of Caprera hunting for a lamb that was lost.  No amount of habit could remove the repugnance he felt at uttering the word ‘fire.’  Yet this gentle warrior, when his career was closed and he lay chained to his bed of pain, endorsed his memoirs with the Spanish motto:  ’La guerra es la verdadera vida del hombre.’  War was the veritable life of Garibaldi; war, not conspiracy; war, not politics; war, not, alas! model farming, for which the old chief fancied in his later years that he had discovered in himself a vocation.