Page:Daring deeds of famous pirates; true stories of the stirring adventures, bravery and resource of pirates, filibusters & buccaneers (1917).djvu/74

 by little fighting but much manœuvring, so Lepanto was distinguished by an absence of strategy and a prevalence of desperate, hard hitting. Whatever strategy was displayed belonged to Ali Basha. The galleasses of the Christian side dealt wholesale death into the Moslems, though Andrea's own flagship suffered severely in the fight. Spanish, Venetian and Maltese galleys fought most gallantly, but Ali Basha, after capturing the chief of the Maltese craft, was obliged to relinquish towing her, and himself compelled to escape from the battle. At least 5000 Christians perished at Lepanto, but six times that amount were slaughtered of the Moslems, together with 200 of the latter's ships. The corsairs had rendered the finest assistance, but they had failed with distinction.

Christian craft had won the great day, and never since that autumn day in 1571 have the pirates of Barbary attained to their previous dominion and organised power. Ali returned to Constantinople, and even the next year was again anxious to fight his late enemies, though no actual fighting took place. Still another year later Tunis was taken from the Turks by Don John of Austria. For nine years after the event of Lepanto, Ali Basha lived on, and, like his predecessors, spent much of his time harrying the Christian coastline of southern Italy. There were many pirates for long years after his death, but with the decease of Ali Basha closed the grand period of the Moslem corsairs. It had been a century marked by the most amazing impudence on the part of self-made kings and tyrants. But if it showed nothing else, it made perfectly clear what enormous possibilities the sea offered to any man who had enough daring and self-confidence in addition to that essential quality of sea-sense. From mere common sailormen these four great corsairs—the two Barbarossas, Dragut