with guns, from which fire, smoke, and
iron were now hurled against them. One of the first shots crashed into the
deck of Ali Pasha's flagship, scattering destruction as it came. The
Turkish line swayed and lost its even array. Some ships hesitated, others
crowded together in order to pass clear of the galleasses. Daring captains,
who ventured to approach with an idea of boarding them, shrank back under
the storm of musketry that burst from their lofty bulwarks. The Turkish
fleet surged past the galleasses, broken into confused masses of ships,
with wide intervals between each squadron, as a stream is divided by the
piles of a bridge.

This disarray of the Turkish attack diminished the fire their bow-guns
could bring to bear on the Christian line, for the leading galleys masked
the batteries of those that followed. Along the allied left and centre,
lying in even array bows to the attack, the guns roared out in a heavy
cannonade. But then as the Ottoman bows came rushing through the smoke, and
the fleets closed on each other, the guns of the galleys were silent. For a
few moments the fight had been like a modern battle, with hundreds of guns
thundering over the sea. Now it was a fight like Salamis or Actium, except
for the sharp reports of musketry in the melee and the cannon of the
galleasses making the Turkish galleys their mark when they could fire into
the mass without danger to their friends.

The first to meet in close conflict were Barbarigo's division on the
allied left and Mohammed Scirocco's squadron, which was opposed to it on
the Turkish right. The Egyptian Pasha brought his own galley into action on
the extreme flank bow to bow with the Venetian flagship, and some of the
lighter Turkish galleys, by working through the shallows between Barbarigo
and the land, were able to fall on the rear of the extreme left of the
line, while the larger galleys pressed the attack in front. The Venetian
flagship was rushed by a boarding-party of Janissaries, and her decks
cleared as far as the mainmast. Barbarigo, fighting with his visor open,
was mortally wounded with an arrow in his face, and was carried below. But
his nephew Contarini restored the fight, and with the help of
reinforcements from the next galley drove the boarders from the decks of
the flagship. Contarini was mortally wounded in the midst of his success.
But two of his comrades, Nani and Porcia, led a rush of Venetians and
Spaniards on to Mohammed Scirocco'