The Sultan's Admiral (14 page)

Moving northwards the galleots now initiated a series of raids on the islands as well as in the Gulf of Valencia. Although they were operating in the home waters of Catholic Spain, the richest and most powerful country of Europe, there was no naval opposition. The western Mediterranean, like the eastern, was in the course of being almost entirely taken over by Moslem Turks. An “abundance of Christians,” we learn, were captured during this expedition, and no doubt most of them were sent back straightway in the captured ships to the slave market in Algiers.

The procedure adopted in the slave markets of North Africa, and particularly in Algiers, has been described by Father Dan, a seventeenth-century French priest who wrote a
History of Barbary and the Corsairs
. Although he was writing a century or more after Barbarossa, and although he was engaged in a deliberate work of propaganda designed to arouse the conscience of Christian Europe, there can be little doubt that things had not greatly changed. Indeed, they merely followed the pattern of slave markets that had been in operation in the Mediterranean since the Roman Empire. Lane-Poole paraphrases him: “When they were landed they were driven to the Besistan or slave-market, where they were put up to auction like the cattle which were also sold there; walked up and down by the auctioneer to show off their paces; and beaten if they were lazy or weary or seemed to sham. The purchasers were often speculators who intended to sell again, ‘bought for the rise’, in fact; and ‘Christians are cheap today’ was a business quotation, just as though they had been stocks and shares. The prettiest women were generally shipped to Constantinople for the Sultan’s choice; the rest were heavily chained and cast into vile dungeons till their work was allotted them, or in the large prisons or bagnios … Every rank and quality of both sexes might be seen in these wretched dens, gentle and simple, priest and laic, merchant and artisan, lady and peasant girl, some hopeful of ransom, others despairing ever to be free again.”

It was always, of course, more profitable to secure a good ransom from those whose families could afford it, since ransoms were fixed at a price very far in excess of the slave’s market value. But for the majority of captives—sailors, soldiers, working men and women on passage between one country and another—there was no hope of ever seeing their homes again. Miguel de Cervantes, author of
Don Quixote
, who was captured in 1575 when returning from Naples to Spain, spent five years in captivity before he was finally ransomed. The rich and powerful might expect to be set free within a few months: provided of course that their relatives were eager to see them again, which was not always the case. Men like Cervantes whose families had a little money might eventually go free, but for the majority it would be work in the fields, in the stone quarries, or in the galleys, until death released them. The prices of slaves fluctuated, of course, like any other market commodity. One seventeenth-century account states that, at that time, a good healthy slave was fetching five hundred pounds. But when there was a glut—as after Aydin’s successful sortie—fifty pounds or even less would be a standard price. Even so, the treatment of slaves was not quite as bad as propagandists like Father Dan tended to suggest; unless, that is, they were recalcitrant or rebellious. After all, a slave, like a horse, represented a considerable capital investment.

Having sent back his captured ships under the control of skeleton crews of Turks, Aydin Rais led his galleots on a further sweep through the Gulf of Valencia, hoping no doubt to pick up some traffic between Barcelona and southern Spain. It was while he was in this area that he learned of a number of Morisco families who were vassals on the estate of the Count de Oliva, an important Valencian nobleman. They begged to be taken over to North Africa “to live undisturbed in the Religion of their ancestors,” saying that they were perfectly prepared to pay for their transport. Aydin Rais accordingly gathered them in from the nearby country and had them distributed throughout his ships. Being now somewhat overloaded (for a galleot had little enough space even for her own crew), he withdrew the squadron to the small rocky island of Formentera lying due south of Ibiza.

Formentera, smallest and southernmost of the Balearic Islands, was a favourite hideout for the Algerian raiders when working the western Mediterranean. On its southern side a great curving bay, backed by sand dunes and pine trees, provided excellent shelter if ever the mistral blew from the Gulf of Lions. There was adequate water for the ships, and from the main peak of the island it was easy to keep watch over traffic passing through the strait between Ibiza and Mallorca. On this occasion it would seem that the Turks had only recently arrived and had not had time to set up lookout posts, for they were very nearly trapped. Eight large Spanish galleys, returning from convoying Charles V to Genoa, were on their way between Barcelona and Valencia when the indignant Count de Oliva sent a message to them saying that his Moriscos had been taken away by the Turks. He also informed General Portundo, the officer commanding the galleys, that sighting reports had indicated the enemy had made for Formentera.

Apparently Aydin and his men had also carried off a great quantity of cash and jewels from the Count’s estate, as well as the Moriscos. It was this above all that induced the Count to promise Portundo a personal gift of ten thousand ducats if he would restore his escaped Moriscos and his valuables. Nothing loath, the General turned his ships aside and bore away eastwards towards Formentera. Here was an excellent opportunity of making some money for himself, inflicting a sound thrashing on these insolent Barbary corsairs, and gaining considerable favour with his sovereign.

The four leading galleys of Portundo’s squadron were rapidly closing Formentera before they were sighted by the Turks. Aydin was in an awkward position. His galleots, no doubt, were either beached or lying with anchors out ahead and their sterns secured to the shore, as is the normal custom in the Mediterranean. True, he had fourteen galleots, but these were—in theory at any rate—no match for eight large galleys, manned by trained gunners and soldiers and having cannon that could far outrange the light bow chasers of a galleot. Two things he did not know, and could not indeed find out until the action was over. One was that most of the soldiers who would normally have been manning the galleys had been left behind in Italy to take part in Charles’s forthcoming coronation; the other was that General Portundo had given strict orders that the galleots were not to be sunk by cannon fire. They were either to be frightened into surrender or captured by boarding. If the General was to get his reward from Count de Oliva, he had to ensure that the Count’s valuables were returned intact, as well as his escaped Moriscos. Greed caused his downfall.

Aydin’s first reaction was to land the Moriscos immediately. If he had to fight an action, he had no room aboard his galleots for unarmed men, women, and children. He then warped his ships off the beach and moved his galleots under oars out into the bay. He knew that they had no chance of running for it, for a galley was much faster than a galleot. Of course, if he had split up his squadron, some of them might certainly have got away. Possibly he was considering this, when something about the behaviour of the four leading galleys made him pause. These galleys were under the command of General Portundo’s son, who had been expressly ordered not to engage by gunfire, but to wait until his father and the other four galleys came up. Young Portundo, therefore, as soon as he was within range of the galleots, instead of opening fire, merely gave orders for the galleys to rest on their oars. General Portundo clearly believed that the sight of eight galleys of Spain would be sufficient to frighten these corsairs into surrender. He did not know his Turks.

Aydin came to the rapid conclusion that what was wrong with these Christians was plain cowardice. Theoretically, most of his squadron should by now have been crippled or sunk by gunfire, while any that might have managed to sneak away should have been pursued and overtaken. Yet nothing happened. He sent his left wing round to the south of the Spaniards, while his right wing drew round in a curve to the north. Then “rowing with the utmost fury, they swooped upon them like eagles, and had surrounded the eight galleys before the amazed Spaniards well knew what they were about.”

At this point, if the galleys had had their normal complement of soldiers and arquebusiers, they should have shot the Turks to pieces before they ever managed to get aboard. This was a risk that Aydin must have calculated before making his attack but, perhaps because he had convinced himself that the Spaniards were cowards, he did not hesitate. This moment, when the attack began, was the critical climax to all galley actions.

“At last we drew near to her side under the full power of our oars, giving out the ‘chamade’, which is the loud shouting noise that the rowers make to frighten the enemy. And it is a really terrifying thing to see three hundred men, on board each galley, naked as Adam, shouting all together and rattling their chains— the sound of which adds to their cries and makes anyone tremble who is unaccustomed to it . . These are the words of a slave who served aboard a Christian galley, but they were just as applicable to a Turkish vessel: Indeed, the high war cry of the rowers as they came in for the final assault had been part and parcel of the Mediterranean world since the galleys of Athens. So, now, the Turks at their oars were shouting “Allahu-Akbar! Aaaallah!” as the first shots were exchanged between the arquebusiers.

By encircling the Spanish galleys, Aydin Rais had ensured that his own forward guns—light though they were—were brought to bear upon the long, oared flanks of the enemy. The Spaniards by failing to open fire from their bow chasers in the early stages had entirely lost their advantage. (Galleys, like galleots, had no side armament and could therefore only use their cannon when they had the enemy ahead of them.) It is difficult at this remove of time to visualize that moment on the hot sultry sea when the swords were unsheathed, the muskets fired, the bow cannon boomed, and the oars churned the water into quick eyes of foam.

Kipling with the intuition of genius caught something of it: “Then we closed up on the other ship, and all their fighting men jumped over our bulwarks, and my bench broke and I was pinned down with the other three fellows on top of me, and the big oar jammed across our backs … I could hear the water sizzle, and we spun round like a cockchafer and I knew, lying where I was, that there was a galley coming up bow-on, to ram us on the left side. I could just lift up my head and see her sail over the bulwarks. We wanted to meet her bow to bow, but it was too late. We could only turn a little bit because the galley on our right had hooked herself on to us and stopped our moving … Then her nose caught us nearly in the middle, and we tilted sideways, and the fellows in the right-hand galley unhitched their hooks and ropes, and threw things on to our upper deck—arrows, and hot pitch or something that stung, and we went up and up and up on the left side, and the right side dipped, and I twisted my head round and saw the water stand still as it topped the right bulwarks, and then it curled over and crashed down on the whole lot of us … It looked like a silver wire laid down along the bulwarks, and I thought it was never going to break.”

That was a galley action—that, and the long splintering sound as the oars broke under the impetus of the charging beak of the enemy. That—and the screams of the rowers as the looms of the oars chopped back into their chests and faces and killed them.

Aydin Rais aided by another galleot had made straight for the Captain-Galley, the flagship of Spain, aboard which the dumbfounded General Portundo watched the ruin of his hopes and of his squadron. Both Turkish galleots, coming in on opposite sides, smashed their prows into the flagship. Their boarding parties leaped over the bulwarks and made straight for the poop where the General and his staff had drawn their swords and stood waiting. In the melee that followed, a Turkish arquebusier managed to shoot Portundo in the chest. The wound was mortal; panic spread through the Spaniards; the flagship surrendered. This was not the beginning of the end, but the end itself. All around, the quick and eager galleots were carrying their encumbered foes - encumbered by the size of their ships and by the fact that the  soldiers who should have been manning them were absent.