HORRIBLE BUTCHERIES BY BRIGANDS IN SOUTHERN ITALY.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume XIII, Issue 541, 9 January 1868, Page 3

HORRIBLE BUTCHERIES BY BRIGANDS IN SOUTHERN ITALY.

(From the Pall Mall Gazette.) We commend to the notice of those who are so persistently eloquent on the subject of the peculiar thirst of the African for blood, as illustrated by the massacre of some twenty individuals during the riots in Jamaica, an account given in yesterday’s Times of certain acts recently perpetrated by the inhabitants of Ardore, a small town in Calabria, about 7 miles from Gerace. We defy the oft-invoked history of Hayti to produce anything more horrible than what the Times records. The Italian Government had deemed it advisable to send a small detachment of bersaglieri to Ardore to maintain s order, which had been shaken by a cholera panic, at the same time endeavoring to appease the peoples hunger ' by supplies of flour and grain A butcher of Ardore visiting the neighboring hamlet of St. Niccole was seized and hewn to to pieces as a poisoner in, the very presence of the village authorities. The inhabitants of Ardore, hearing of this act of blood, forthwith attacked the shop of their own apothecary and killed the man and the whole of his family, as well as a lieutenant of the National Guard, named Gazzone, who attempted to protect him. They then turned their attention to the forty bersaglieri stationed in the town, killed their Captain Loschiavo. wounded several privates, and then set fire to their barracks. The bersaglieri, seeing that their case was desperate, made a sally, and succeeded in cutting their way out, and in carrying off their wounded comrades. The writer in the Times then says:— “The crowd, not caring to pursue them, rushed into the burning barracks, dragged out the breathing body of the fallen captain, tore him to pieces, and with his still quivering limbs on the points of their bayonets, went to his house, laid hold of his mother and of two of his infant children, of his sister, with two of her children, also of tender age, and a butchery ensued, enhanced by that refinement of barbarism by those mutilations and outrages upon the bodies of the victims, with which the long domestication of bri gandage in almost every village has but too generally familiarised the South Italian people. Of Captain Lorchiavo’s family his wife alone had the good fortune to escape. Four other houses, with their inmates, were equally visited with fire and slaughter, and when on the morrow a reinforcement of troops, under Captain Perona, made its unresisted way into Ardore they found the place almost deserted ; 2000 souls, or nearly half its population—all but the women and children—had fled to the hills, leaning the charred and mangled limbs of more than a score of corpses, over which they had held their orgies for part of two days and a night, till the bugles of the bersaglieri apprised them of the avenger’s approach.”

We venture to ask whether the inhabitants of Ardore would have shown more vigour had they been all reared in Stony Gap or imported from Hayti, and whether it is still possible to maintain that ignorant whitemen, when excited, cannot on a pinch, be just as ferocious as ignorant and excited negroes.