The Corsican Vendetta.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 878, 28 December 1888, Page 11

The Corsican Vendetta.

Morning Advertiser. The ways of the statistician are wonderful. The useless is to him as the useful-—only mere so. Fox*, as a rule, he prefers the curious to the practical, and delights to exercise his faculty in reckoning the sands upon the sea shore or the number of motives to a murder

or the quantity of sunbeam in a cucumber. To the statistician, as to tbe sapper, nothing is sacred. He will not even respect the vendetta. Here, for instance, is Dr. Cathilenau, of Bastia, himself a Corsican, exulting in the fact that the gx-and old principle of ‘cent pour cent, dent pour dent,’ as applied to the blood-feuds of the island, is going out of fashion, and the wild justice of revenge, as a local custom, shows a steady if slow decline where it was supposed to be most rooted and most honoured in observance. It is dying hard, however. According to the unsympathetic statement of Dr. Cathilenau, the total number of vendettas, including,. besides the blood-feud pro. per, such minor forms as the hereditary quarrel between villages or families now in active and operative existence throughout Corsica, cannot be much above 2,500 whereas in 1860, it was, probably a hundred more, and in 1870 perhaps not far short of 3,000. These are. wide computations with loose and ample margins, but this is easily accounted for if it be borne in mind that, in order to get at exact results, the statistician would necessarily have topoke his nose into private affairs, and to undertake the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties apt to shape themselves into a shot from a gun or a stab from a dagger. Assuming the Bastian doctor’s figures to bo approximately correct, it is evident that to anybody ‘ blue mouldy ’ for a real squabble, with a genuine chance of giving or getting it ‘ hot,’ the birthplace of Bonaparte offers, as the advertisment column has it, a splendid field of enterprise. The unattached enthusiast has only to ‘ chip in ’ and take sides after the off-hand manner of the miners of Leadville or the cowboys of Kansas City in order to qualify as a receiver or distributor of such bloodshed as may be going. It seems not a little remarkable, by the Way, that those afflicted with a morbid craving for desperate adventure—those reckless spirits who value what they term sport or other effort solely in proportion to the ext.6nt to which it im T perils their life—have never thought of gratifying their unhealthy appetite in some land where the vendetta is practised. They have quite a choice, for the unwritten law of retaliation is not unknown in Sicily, in Calabria, and even in Sardinia. The Montenegrins and the Albanians employ it, and that at least a section of the Spanish people resort to it is suggested by the disagreeable experience of the English physician who was obliged to pistol in self-defence a murderous gipsy guide in a tower in Seville, and has, it appears, been followed to this country and dogged ever since by avenging members of the tribe. But it is clear that with 2,500 broils to pick and choose from, Corsica alone offers a sufficient variety of open* ings to an energetic stranger, determined, like Mrs Battle, on the rigour of the game. Dr Cathilenau anticipates the extinction of the immemorial usage within the time which he vaguely measures' by the succession of a few more generations. Some time ago a brilliant Frenchman said th at Corsica is a French department, but that Corsica is riot France. According to the doctor they are changing all that. The spirit of the outside world has at least begun to infect the islanders in idea and custom ; they are no longer content to ‘ stand in the antique ways ;’ they have not only come to feel that they are primitive, but they are ashamed of it. If this be so, then we may already consider old times changed and old manners gone. In this case, ‘ civilisation’s spade ’ will, indeed, have ‘ground horribly in dead men’s.bones,’ for the change will consist in the discontinuance of mutual slaughter of the sorb illustrated by the career ofthe brigand Rocchini, executed this week, whose history falls in very apt coincidence with the allegations of the doctor. The vendetta in which Rocchini was engaged was a typical one. He himself originated it by one day killing a dog belonging to a neighbouring family named Taffani. This act was a perfectly sufficient casus belli. Soon after a Taffani avenged the dead dog by killing a Rocchini, a performance which another Rocchini acknowledged by killing a Taffani. This method of alternate extermination was conducted, no doubt, according to tbe rules which prohibit tbe sacrifice of a second life before retaliation, effective or attempted, bad been tried for the first, until the two families were reduced to a solitary representative each. Rocchini was one of these, and, favoured by the fortune of war, he ‘ got the chop ’ on his foe, and finally extinguished the rival race. An American humorist narrates the lamentable fate of a Western desperado who had ‘wiped out’ all his antagonists, and

found, to his horror, that his crowning victory had left him a blighted 1 being without a further purpose in life. Having nobody- else to shoot, he shot himself. It is likely that Rocchini owed his fate to the fact that, having killed the last of his adversaries, his mind, distracted from its master passion, became idly bent upon the poor young girl whom he murdered. The commission of this atrocity was necessary to make him a criminal in the eye of bis Corsican compatriots, who would no more dream of holding him a lawbreaker because he took human life in the blood-feud than an Irish peasant would in the case of the patriotic moonlighter who had put a bullet in a landlord or murdered a tenant who had taken an evicted farm. Neither must it be supposed that the term ‘ brigand,’ as applied to Rocchini, bears , the accepted meaning of the word. The actors in a vendetta, finding, the lowlands too ‘warm’ for safety, often fly to the mountains, whence they occasionally levy toll and blackmail on the chance citizen, but where they are more frequently supplied with food and other necessaries by their friends.