s if on this occasion each of the great
rivals was hypnotised by the presence of the other; all their lives they
had been seeking honour and riches on the sea, they knew, of course, that
all men in both the world of Islam and that of Christendom looked upon them
in the light of the special champions of the opposing sects, that the eyes
of the entire world were fastened on this meeting of theirs in the classic
waters of the Ambracian Gulf. In consequence neither man was at his best;
indeed, we might go further than this, and say that on this occasion both
lamentably failed. There is no fault to be found with the strategic
preliminaries to the final conflict, each admiral acting with prudence and
wisdom in the situation in which he found himself placed. That the
perfectly correct idea of not giving battle to a superior force when he
held so strong an interior position was given up by Barbarossa, was, as we
have seen, not his fault; and when he issued from his anchorage, in
deference to a sentiment among those under his command which he could no
longer resist, his dispositions seem to have been made with his usual
skill. Where he failed, however, was where, from all his previous history,
we should least have expected failure, in his abandonment of the attack on
the _Galleon of Venice_; this, of course, was inexcusable, and can only be
set down to failure of nerve at the supreme moment. The ship had been
battered by artillery all day long, a huge percentage of her company were
dead and wounded, and the remainder worn out with fatigue. On the Moslem
side we have seen that there were squadrons of galleys able to relieve one
another with no interference from Doria, who was persisting in his futile
manoeuvring miles away. Had the galleon been boarded, as she might and
should have been, at nightfall, nothing could have saved Condalmiero and
his crew: so strenuous, however, had been their resistance, that the
Turkish seamen feared the issue; in consequence the battle between them and
the Venetians was a drawn one, with all the honours on the Christian side.

It is here that we shall take leave of Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa, as although
he was yet to live another eight years before he died in his bed at
Constantinople in July, 1548, there are no further happenings of any great
importance in his career.

"Valorous, yet prudent, furious in attack, far-seeing in preparation, he
ranks as the first sea-captain of his time;"[1] as the story