aptain was a son of the famous corsair Barbarossa. It
was taken by the chief Neapolitan galley called the She-wolf, commanded
by that thunderbolt of war, that father of his men, that successful and
unconquered captain Don Alvaro de Bazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz; and I
cannot help telling you what took place at the capture of the Prize.

The son of Barbarossa was so cruel, and treated his slaves so badly,
that, when those who were at the oars saw that the She-wolf galley was
bearing down upon them and gaining upon them, they all at once dropped
their oars and seized their captain who stood on the stage at the end of
the gangway shouting to them to row lustily; and passing him on from
bench to bench, from the poop to the prow, they so bit him that before he
had got much past the mast his soul had already got to hell; so great, as
I said, was the cruelty with which he treated them, and the hatred with
which they hated him.

We returned to Constantinople, and the following year, seventy-three, it
became known that Don John had seized Tunis and taken the kingdom from
the Turks, and placed Muley Hamet in possession, putting an end to the
hopes which Muley Hamida, the cruelest and bravest Moor in the world,
entertained of returning to reign there. The Grand Turk took the loss
greatly to heart, and with the cunning which all his race possess, he
made peace with the Venetians (who were much more eager for it than he
was), and the following year, seventy-four, he attacked the Goletta and
the fort which Don John had left half built near Tunis. While all these
events were occurring, I was labouring at the oar without any hope of
freedom; at least I had no hope of obtaining it by ransom, for I was
firmly resolved not to write to my father telling him of my misfortunes.
At length the Goletta fell, and the fort fell, before which places there
were seventy-five thousand regular Turkish soldiers, and more than four
hundred thousand Moors and Arabs from all parts of Africa, and in the
train of all this great host such munitions and engines of war, and so
many pioneers that with their hands they might have covered the Goletta
and the fort with handfuls of earth. The first to fall was the Goletta,
until then reckoned impregnable, and it fell, not by any fault of its
defenders, who did all that they could and should have done, but because
experiment proved how easily entrenchments could be made in the desert
sand there; for water used to be