From the age of fifteen to the age of twenty-five he worked his way up from cabin-boy to captain in the merchant craft of Nice. So the sea became the real school of Garibaldi; he sailed in the Levant during the Greek War of Independence among old historic tyrannies cruel as fate, and new-born hopes of liberty fresh and dear as the morning; among the sunburnt isles and promontories that roused Byron's jaded passions to splendour: in those waters Garibaldi caught the belief that it is better to die for freedom than to live a slave.It was in his voyages in the Levant that he first came across men with the passion for liberty, and it was beyond the sea that he first met Italian patriots, exiles who instructed him that he had a country and that she bled. He, too, like these Greeks, had a country for which to fight.In 1832 Garibaldi joined "Young Italy" the association founded in the previous year by Giuseppe Mazzini and calling for Italian unity. In 1834 Garibaldi had a role in a failed attempt to raise a rebellion against the autocratic government of King Charles Albert of Piedmont (official title: King of Sardinia). He escaped to Marseilles where he learnt that the Piedmontese Government had condemned him to death.