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Abraham Borg,
Garibaldi’s Maltese Corsairs 1837
Midsea Books, 2015, pp 153

The destinies of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Malta and the Italian Risorgimento intertwined inextricably. The Italian general who more than anyone else helped forge a free and united Italy is known to have visited Malta only once, and briefly, in 1863, in transit from Italy to London. But Malta remained nonetheless central to much of his activity.

His friends and supporters were exiled here and later his enemies too. His ideals spread in Italy and the world from Malta, his funding flowed through Malta and so did his armaments. His bold defiance of the major despots in South America and in Italy, his armed attack on Papal Rome and his woundings in battle, turned him into the pop idol of the British public.

British Malta was near and friendly enough to become a major player in the Risorgimento. Garibaldi’s Malta visit confirmed how controversial his persona was for the Maltese inhabitants and the British residents. Still recovering from another battle wound, he was cheered and jeered in Malta by those who saw in him the hero of the two worlds or an incarnation of Satan.

Several Maltese had in Italy risked their life in battle for the Garibaldi-Mazzini-Cavour ideals. Lt General Giuseppe Xuereb, Giorgio Balbi, Colonel Giuseppe Camenzuli, Benedetto Pisani Mompalao, the engraver Luigi Calamatta, among others, had offered themselves for the cause of Italian unity. Apart from their names, so very little else has been recorded about them. They surely deserve a book on their own.

Borg’s new work adds two unknown names to the register. While the ones I listed all came from the bourgeois classes, the two discovered by Borg were lowly seafarers who only make a fleeting appearance in history as patriotic corsairs who fought bravely side by side with Garibaldi in South America.

These two Maltese mariners, unlike the others, were not heroes by election but by circumstance. They earned their daily bread, perilously and back-breakingly, on the high seas, thousands of miles from home. In 1837 they formed part of the crew of a corsairing vessel, appropriately called the Mazzini, fitted out by Garibaldi to fight for the freedoms of Brazil. Their names stand out in a bloody naval encounter in which they actively distinguished themselves for valour.

These two Maltese mariners were not heroes by election, but by circumstance

Borg has followed their trail and has discovered and reproduced the official documentation of that action. Sadly, except for this flash in the night, total darkness engulfs the before and after of the Maltese mariners. In their written testimonies they only give away “Juan Bautista Caruana, natural de Malta profecion Marino” and “Luis Calía, natural de Malta y profecion Marinero”. Then, substantial details of the naval encounter.

The documents of the crew’s interrogations in Gauleguay, Argentina, transcribed by Borg, record the names of the two natural de Malta. Borg believes the second surname to be Galea. Maybe, Calleja would be closer in phonetic transcription. The two Maltese seamen played a major role in defending Garibaldi during the violent naval assault of June 15, 1837, when his ship was attacked by two Uruguayan cutters. With the helmsman shot dead early on in the skirmish, Garibaldi rushed forward to take his place. In his memoirs, Garibaldi described the outcome of the encounter – a bullet ripped through his neck.

“For half an hour I remained flat on the deck like a dead corpse and although I revived gradually, I could not move, I remained useless and was considered finished.”

He singled out the bravery of the due Maltesi and of the Italian crew. An unnamed Venetian sailor and the black slaves on board, on the other hand, cravenly fled to hide in the hold. Caruana and Calía must have had family ties in Malta and village friends. The former was a 30-year-old, who had already served on warships for seven years, while the latter, four years younger, had only reached Rio a few days before enlisting on Garibaldi’s corsair ship. They surely must have left other traces in some unsuspected archive.

So far, their profile is too nebulous to allow a researcher to home in closer to their real being, but in some serendipitous future more information may turn up to flesh out these two forgotten Maltese heroes.

That participation of Malta and the Maltese in the struggle for the liberation of Italy and of the Risorgimento has not been neglected by scholars though, no doubt, a lot remains to be unearthed and publicised.

So far, most of the research has concentrated on the ideological support Malta gifted to the Risorgimento: Malta as a hotbed of revolutionary idealism, as a refuge and asylum to the persecuted. The other aspects have only been skimmed over – the military contribution, the financial and banking operations snaking through Malta and the arms and weaponry that reached the Italian patriots thorough Maltese subterfuge. Borg’s research in untapped primary sources, which he transcribes and reproduces in facsimile, is a most welcome and valid step in this new direction.