The Sultan's Admiral by Ernle Bradford Read Free Book Online Page B

man from his Arabic coreligionists.
    When the spring came, the almond blossom to break in bloom, and the short-lived wild flowers to carpet all the Mediterranean islands, two galleots and one galley left the ancient Goletta of Tunis. They turned to the northeast and made their way towards the coast of Sicily. Aruj was well aware that, with the beginning of the sailing season, he might expect to find galleys making their way down from Italy to trade with Palermo or Messina. He passed the small sleepy Aegadian Islands lying off Trapani in western Sicily, while from the vantage point of the high peak of Marettimo the frightened islanders waited and watched to see whether these invaders of their waters would land in search of food, women, and slaves. But the galleots and the galley went on steadily to the north. In the narrow strait to the east of them lay the island of Favignana. Off here, in 241 B.C. the galleys of the newly founded Roman navy had won the First Punic War by annihilating the Carthaginian fleet. The waters off Sicily, so it was said, had run red that day, as they still do after the mattanza when the giant tunny are slain. Now, issuing out of the Gulf of Tunis, so close to ancient Carthage, came galleys from the east destined to take their revenge upon the west. The eternal pendulumlike swing of power in the Mediterranean basin was about to reverse itself.
    The galleys altered course north of Cape San Vito and began to patrol to the eastward, hoping to catch some early merchantman laden from Italy, and eager to do business with the fruit market of Sicily at Palermo. They slid gently towards the Lipari Islands, sometimes being lucky enough to catch a favourable wind on their quarter so that they could hoist the sails and give the oarsmen some relief. The islands came up ahead of them, Alicudi, Filicudi, harsh Salina, tempestuous Vulcano, and smouldering away on the northern horizon the domed sides of Stromboli, where the lava ran down hissing into the sea. At night they saw its peak pulsating with fire. The ancients had graphically termed it “the lighthouse of the Mediterranean.”
    It was after several days of stormy weather from the northwest that the lurking galleots saw their prize. She was a large Spanish sailing vessel that had wallowed far to the south of her course—blown in the direction of the Liparis, when she should have been heading up for Naples and its sheltering bay. The galleots closed in on the great ship, and found to their surprise that they met with no resistance at all. So they “had the good fortune to take, without striking a stroke, a very large ship, on which were five hundred Spanish soldiers, and a great quantity of pieces of eight, sent from the Catholic king to recruit and pay his army in the Kingdom of Naples.”
    The reason the Turks were able to capture the ship without firing a shot was that the troops aboard were all either devastated by seasickness or worn out by working at the pumps of the leaking and waterlogged vessel.‘This year 1505 was indeed a bad one for King Ferdinand of Spain. It is interesting to note that this is the first occasion we hear from the Spanish chronicler Zurita of the activities of Turkish corsairs in the waters of Italy and Sicily. The. previous year’s attack and capture of the two papal galleys had certainly not gone unremarked in Rome and Italy, but this year’s capture of the money destined to pay the garrison in Naples—as well as the troops intended to relieve some of the Spanish soldiers stationed there—was important enough to cause a considerable stir in the Spanish court. That the Turks were masters of most of the eastern Mediterranean was a fact well enough known to the European powers. But now they suddenly found that the waters of the western Mediterranean, hitherto secure for their navigation, were invaded. Small vessels adventuring off the Barbary Coast of North Africa, able to prey only upon local trading vessels, had long been an