bar upon which the depth varies from six and a half to thirteen
feet. With his light-draught ships Barbarossa occupied the interior
position, while the heavy ships of Doria must in any event remain outside.
A strong sea-breeze was blowing on shore; all night the nefs and the
galleys were nearly rolling their gunwales under. In these packed and
crowded vessels the misery and discomfort of their crews may be imagined.
On the morning of the 26th, however, the west wind dropped, and a light
wind sprang up from the northward.

The position at this time was one of surpassing interest. Here at long last
the two most renowned sea-captains of the time were face to face. Each was
aware that his antagonist was worthy of his steel, also that great issues,
political and national, hung upon this conflict; which was no mere affair
of outposts, but a struggle to the death as to whether the Crescent or the
Cross was in time to come to be supreme in the tideless sea. And yet--such
is the irony of fate--this battle proved indecisive, and it was not until
thirty years later, at the battle of Lepanto, that this momentous question
was set at rest for a time.

Would Doria, greatly daring, go in and risk all in attacking a fortified
position; or would Barbarossa make a sally and fight it out to the death on
the element on which he was so supremely at home?

But Doria had no mind to attack a fleet anchored under the guns of a
fortress; Barbarossa would not risk all in an encounter with a foe
possessed of great numerical superiority without orders from
Constantinople. On Doria's side nothing but a disembarkation and a
land-attack would offer a fair security for success, Kheyr-ed-Din, who
held, as we have said, the interior position, was well aware of this fact,
and in this supreme moment of his career was not disposed to give away any
advantage. The situation occupied by Kheyr-ed-Din at the battle of Prevesa
was, in a sense, different from any which he had held before, as he was in
this case hampered by his sense of responsibility as Admiralissimo to the
Grand Turk. What happened on the distant shores of Africa mattered but
little to that monarch, and he had been content to allow his admiral an
entirely free hand; here in Europe, on the shores of Greece, so close
relatively to his own capital city, it was a very different matter, and
Soliman was kept in touch with the happenings of his fleet as far as was
possible in those days. But if the gre