The third of the Genoese colonies in Corsica, St. Florent, we shall pass over without further mention. The fourth, Bastia, was at one time the capital, and is still the chief commercial town of the island. In its earlier days, when it was only an unimportant fishing village, it was known by another name. But in 1380 a strong fort was built here, and from the word “bastille,” which means a “fort,” the name of Bastia was obtained. Under the Genoese Bastia became a very important place, and contained the residence of the Governor. Although it was strongly fortified, yet it was captured and recaptured more than once. Like Calvi, it is associated with some of the deeds of Nelson. Nelson was very anxious to take Bastia from its French possessors, and he tried hard for a long time to get the commander of the English soldiers to lend him some assistance. But the military leader was timid, and very slow in making up his mind. Nelson, lying off Bastia at the time, wrote to his wife: “If I had carried with me 500 troops, to a certainty I should have stormed the town, and I believe it might have been carried. Armies go so slow that seamen think they never mean to go forward.” At last, however, he had his way, and troops and seamen were landed to attack the fort. After a short but fierce bombardment, the French flag was hauled down and the British colours were run aloft. Nelson says it was “the most glorious sight that an Englishman could experience, and which I believe none but an Englishman could bring about. Four thousand five hundred men laying down their arms to less than 1,000 British soldiers who were serving as marines.” During this attack Nelson was wounded in the back.

In Bastia we can see many excellent examples of the Corsican method of building houses. The houses are very tall, and consist of a huge number of flats, with one or more families in every flat. When a Corsican builds a house, he never thinks of occupying the whole of it himself. He lives on the third or fourth floor, and lets the rest of the building out to other tenants. On the ground-floor there is probably a shop. On the top-floor there will be a washerwoman or a gardener. The higher you live, the less rent you have to pay, so that many different classes of society are often gathered together under the same roof. Sometimes the various stories are not let for rent, but are sold outright, and in that case there may be as many landlords as there are flats. In Bastia some of these tall, dirty houses contain over 500 people. They are rarely less than five to six stories high, and from six to nine windows broad. It is just the same in Calvi, Bonifacio, and the other Corsican towns. Even in the villages a man rarely has a whole house to himself. Every room in every flat is about as dirty as it can well manage to be, owing to the lack of a proper water-supply. The only clean thing in the houses, and to the credit of the peasant let it be mentioned, is the bed-linen; that is always as spotless as the visitor could desire. In the rooms there is but little furniture of any kind; in the poorest houses there is often an insufficient supply of beds, and the men-folk sleep on the floor in the clothes they have worn all day long. The kitchen contains small stoves, which are used for cooking; when the cooking is finished, the fire is allowed to go out. Only very rarely are fires used for warmth; the houses are therefore cold and uncomfortable, and as each room has a number of doors that never fit, they are very draughty. The floors are usually of tiles, or even of the bare earth; wooden floors are not common; the chimneys generally smoke. To get from one story to the next, stone staircases are employed. The only light they obtain comes from openings pierced in the outer walls. As the stairs belong to everybody in general, and therefore to nobody in particular, they are rarely repaired, and are rather dangerous to those who are not used to them. A description of a house in Ajaccio, written by a lady who has travelled much in Corsica, will serve to give an idea of many of the dwellings occupied by the poor: “The house consisted of two tiny chambers, the inner one a mere cupboard some 8 by 10 feet, which only received light from the outer room by the communicating door; this acted as bedroom and kitchen combined. On the narrow bed lay four loaves; a small kitchen range and a table crammed with cooking-pots left scarcely space to turn round. In the bigger room stood two beds, on one of which lay what at first sight we took for a crumpled patchwork quilt, but which turned out to be a sick grandmother swathed in rags. The table was occupied by some artichokes and a basket of small fish. A couple of chairs stood on the uncarpeted plank floor, and the only other articles in the room were the lamps, some vases of paper flowers, and the inevitable family photographs upon the mantel-piece.... In this unlovely home live an old woman, her daughter and granddaughter, with the occasional additional presence of the grandson, a young fisherman, who occupied the kitchen during his brief home-comings, his mother and sister then sharing a bed in the next room.”A

Most of these high houses surround a central court. The system of drainage is bad. All the refuse is got rid of by the simple plan of pouring it into a number of earthenware pipes which are so arranged that the open ends of the pipes are under the several windows of the house. When the occupants are in a hurry, they throw all the rubbish into the courtyard below, and leave it there to rot. The odours are indescribable, and one wonders how the people find it possible to live amongst them.

The chief things noticeable in all places, large or small, where the Corsican lives are always dirt and smells. The shutters of the houses are broken, the paint on the woodwork is blistered, the plaster is peeling off the walls, and ugly stains disfigure the ancient whitewash. The family washing is hung on lines between the different houses, and there is usually so much of it that the visitor is left bewildered as to why a people who are so uncleanly as regards their bodies and their houses should take the trouble to wash their clothes.

In Bastia there are two towns, an old and a new. The new is certainly at the present time a little cleaner than the old, but given sufficient time, it will surely become equally unpleasant to the nose. In the new town stands a statue of Napoleon, looking dreamily away across the harbour to that little island of Elba, where he spent a period of short exile from France. As someone has remarked, the stone figure seems to be saying, “How could you expect that little island to hold me?”

It is to the new town that the ships come that carry the produce of the island to other lands. The quays are always busy and crowded, and people have to pick their way amongst piles of cork, stacks of wine-bottles, casks of olive-oil, and loads of charcoal.