On the mainland the Italians were received at Šibenik with some suspicion. They announced, however, that they came as representatives of the Allies, and begged for a pilot who would take them into Šibenik's land-locked harbour, through the mine-field. The Yugoslavs consented, and after the Italians had installed themselves they requisitioned sixty Austrian merchant vessels which were lying in that harbour. (They left, as a matter of fact, to the Yugoslavs out of all the ex-Austrian mercantile fleet exactly four old boats--_Sebenico_, _Lussin_, _Mossor_ and _Dinara_--with a total displacement of 390 tons.) On the other hand, at Zadar, they were received in a very friendly fashion. In this town, as it had been the seat of government, with numerous officials and their families, the Autonomist anti-Croat party had been, under Austria, more powerful than in any other town in Dalmatia. With converts coming in from the country, which is entirely Slav, the Autonomists in Zadar had become well over half the population,[11] which is about 14,000, that of the surrounding district being about 23,000. Zadar was thus a place apart from the rest of Dalmatia, and although the Dalmatian Autonomists were unable to claim any of the eleven deputies who went to Vienna, they managed to be represented in the provincial Chamber--the Landtag--by six out of the forty-one members. The Landtag was not elected on the basis of universal suffrage; four out of these six members were chosen by large landowners, one (Dr. Ziliotto, the mayor) by the town of Zadar and one by the Zadar chamber of commerce. Out of the eighty-six communes of Dalmatia, Zadar was the solitary one that was Autonomist. Some very few Autonomists were wont to say that they aspired to union with Italy, but it was generally thought that most of them agreed with Dr. Ziliotto when he said in the Landtag in 1906: "We, separated from Italy by the whole Adriatic--we a few thousand men, scattered, with no territorial links, among a population not of hundreds of thousands but of millions of Slavs, how could we think of union with Italy?" And Dr. Ziliotto was one of those who always regarded himself as an Italian. But whether the Zadar Autonomists were sincere or not when Austria ruled over them, the large majority of them hung out Italian colours after the War, and in this they were undoubtedly sincere, although the motives varied; in some it was the love of Italy, in some it was ambition and in some a thirst for vengeance.