Chapter XXXIX. In which the captive tells his life and adventures

“My family had its beginning in a village in the mountains of León, and nature was kinder and more generous to it than fortune; though, in the narrow means of those parts, my father still had the name of a rich man, and truly he would have been one had he been as skillful at keeping his property as he was at spending it. And this disposition of his to be open-handed and a spender came to him from having been a soldier in the years of his youth, for soldiering is a school where the stingy man becomes generous and the generous man prodigal; and if some soldiers are found to be misers, they are like monsters, which are seldom seen. My father went beyond the bounds of generosity and bordered on those of prodigality, a thing that is of no profit whatever to a married man who has children to succeed him in his name and his station. The children my father had were three, all sons, and all of an age to choose their course in life. Seeing, then, that, as he said, he could not keep his own nature in check, my father resolved to deprive himself of the instrument and cause that made him a spender and a giver, which was to deprive himself of his property, without which Alexander himself would have seemed tightfisted.

“And so, calling the three of us one day to a room by ourselves, he spoke to us words much like those I shall tell you now: ‘My sons, to say that I love you, it is enough to know and say that you are my sons; and to understand that I wish you ill, it is enough to know that I do not hold myself back where keeping your inheritance is concerned. So, then, that you may understand from now on that I love you as a father, and do not wish to ruin you as a stepfather would, I mean to do something with you that I have had in mind for many days now and have arranged after ripe consideration. You are now of an age to take up a station in life, or at least to choose a calling, such as will bring you honor and profit when you are older. And what I have thought of is to make four parts of my property: three I shall give to you, to each what falls to him, without the least difference, and the other I shall keep, to live and support myself on for the days of life that heaven may be pleased to grant me. But I should like each of you, once he has in his hands the part of the property that falls to him, to follow one of the roads I shall name to you. There is a proverb in this Spain of ours, a very true one to my mind, as all of them are, being short maxims drawn from long and wise experience; and the one I mean says: “Church, or sea, or royal household,” as if it were saying more plainly: “Whoever would rise and be rich, let him follow the Church, or go to sea and practice the merchant’s art, or enter the service of kings in their households”; for they say: “Better a king’s crumb than a lord’s favor.” I say this because I should like, and it is my will, that one of you should follow letters, another trade, and the other serve the king in war, since it is a hard thing to enter his service in his household; for though war may not give much wealth, it commonly gives a great deal of worth and a great deal of fame. Within a week I shall give you your whole share in money, without cheating you of a single ardite, as you will see by the deed. Tell me now whether you are willing to follow my opinion and advice in what I have put before you.’ And when he bade me answer, as the eldest, I first told him not to part with his property, but to spend as much of it as he pleased, for we were young enough to know how to earn our own; and then I ended by saying that I would do as he wished, and that my wish was to follow the profession of arms, serving God and my king in it. The second brother made the same offers, and chose to go to the Indies, taking his share invested in goods. The youngest, and, as I believe, the wisest, said that he wished to follow the Church, or go to finish the studies he had begun at Salamanca. As soon as we had come to an agreement and chosen our callings, my father embraced us all, and, as promptly as he had said, carried out everything he had promised us; and, giving each of us his share, which, as I recall, came to three thousand ducats apiece in money (for an uncle of ours bought the whole estate and paid for it in cash, so that it should not pass out of the family stock), on one and the same day all three of us took leave of our good father; and on that same day, since it seemed to me inhuman that my father should be left old and with so little property, I made him take two thousand ducats out of my three thousand, for the rest was enough for me to furnish myself with what a soldier needs. My two brothers, moved by my example, each gave him a thousand ducats, so that my father was left with four thousand in money, plus another three thousand, which was apparently what the land that fell to his share was worth, for he would not sell it, but kept it in land. I say, in short, that we took our leave of him and of that uncle of ours I have mentioned, not without much feeling and many tears on all sides, they charging us to let them know, whenever there was a chance to do so, of our fortunes, good or ill. We promised it, and, after they had embraced us and given us their blessing, one of us took the road to Salamanca, the other to Seville, and I to Alicante, where I had word that there was a Genoese ship loading wool for Genoa.

“It will be twenty-two years this year since I left my father’s house, and in all that time, though I have written some letters, I have had no news of him or of my brothers. And what I have gone through in the course of those years I shall tell you briefly. I took ship at Alicante, had a good voyage to Genoa, went from there to Milan, where I furnished myself with arms and some soldier’s finery, and from there I meant to go and enlist in Piedmont; and, being already on the road to Alessandria della Paglia, I had news that the great Duke of Alba was on his way to Flanders. I changed my plan, went with him, served him in his campaigns, was present at the deaths of the Counts of Egmont and Horn, rose to be ensign to a famous captain from Guadalajara named Diego de Urbina; and, some time after I reached Flanders, news came of the league that His Holiness Pope Pius the Fifth, of happy memory, had made with Venice and with Spain against the common enemy, which is the Turk; who at that very time had won with his fleet the famous island of Cyprus, which was under Venetian rule: a lamentable and unhappy loss. It was known for certain that the general of this league was to be the most serene Don Juan de Austria, natural brother of our good King Don Felipe. The news spread of the vast preparations for war that were being made. All this stirred my spirit and roused my desire to be present at the battle that was expected; and, though I had hints, and almost sure promises, that at the first opportunity that offered I would be promoted to captain, I chose to leave it all and come, as I came, to Italy. And my good luck had it that Señor Don Juan de Austria had just arrived in Genoa, on his way to Naples to join the Venetian fleet, as he later did at Messina.

“I say, in short, that I was present at that most happy battle, already made a captain of infantry, to which honorable rank my good fortune raised me rather than my merits. And on that day, which was so fortunate for Christendom, because on it the world and all the nations learned how wrong they had been in believing that the Turks were invincible at sea: on that day, I say, when Ottoman pride and arrogance were broken, among so many who were fortunate there (for the Christians who died there had better fortune than those who were left alive and victorious), I alone was the unfortunate one; for, instead of what I might have hoped for had it been in the days of the Romans, some naval crown, I found myself on the night that followed so famous a day with chains on my feet and manacles on my hands.

“And it came about in this way: Uchalí, the king of Algiers, a bold and lucky corsair, had attacked and taken the flagship of Malta, on which only three knights were left alive, and those badly wounded, when Juan Andrea’s flagship, in which I was sailing with my company, came to her aid; and, doing what I ought on such an occasion, I leaped aboard the enemy galley, which, sheering off from the one that had attacked it, kept my soldiers from following me; and so I found myself alone among my enemies, whom I could not resist, they being so many; in the end they took me, covered with wounds. And since, gentlemen, you will have heard it said already that Uchalí got away with his whole squadron, I came to be left a captive in his power, and I alone was the sad one among so many glad, and the captive among so many free; for there were fifteen thousand Christians who on that day won the freedom they longed for, all of them pulling at the oar in the Turkish fleet.

“I was carried off to Constantinople, where Selim, the Grand Turk, named my master general of the sea, because he had done his duty in the battle, having carried off as a token of his valor the standard of the Order of Malta. The second year, the year of seventy-two, saw me at Navarino, pulling an oar in the flagship of the three lanterns. I saw and noted the chance that was lost there of catching the whole Turkish fleet in harbor, for all the levents and janissaries aboard it took it for certain that they would be attacked inside the very harbor, and had their clothes and their pasamaques, which are their shoes, ready to run off at once overland without waiting to be fought: so great was the fear they had taken of our fleet. But heaven ordained otherwise, not through the fault or carelessness of the general at the head of our forces, but because of Christendom’s sins, and because God wills and permits that we should always have executioners to punish us.

“In effect, Uchalí withdrew to Modon, which is an island close to Navarino, and, putting his men ashore, he fortified the mouth of the harbor and stayed quiet there until Señor Don Juan went back. On this voyage the galley called the Prize was taken, whose captain was a son of that famous corsair Barbarroja. She was taken by the flagship of Naples, called the She-Wolf, under the command of that thunderbolt of war, that soldiers’ father, that fortunate and never-conquered captain Don Álvaro de Bazán, Marquis of Santa Cruz. And I must not fail to tell what happened at the taking of the Prize. Barbarroja’s son was so cruel, and treated his captives so badly, that, as soon as the men at the oars saw that the She-Wolf was bearing down on them and overtaking them, they all let go of their oars at the same moment and seized their captain, who was standing on the poop rail shouting at them to row faster; and, passing him from bench to bench, from stern to prow, they took bites out of him, so that he had passed little beyond the mast before his soul had passed into hell: such, as I have said, was the cruelty with which he treated them and the hatred they bore him.

“We went back to Constantinople, and the following year, which was seventy-three, it became known there how Señor Don Juan had won Tunis and taken that kingdom from the Turks and put Muley Hamet in possession of it, cutting off the hopes Muley Hamida had of reigning there again, the cruelest and bravest Moor the world ever had. The Grand Turk felt this loss deeply, and, using the shrewdness all those of his house possess, he made peace with the Venetians, who wanted it far more than he did; and in the following year, seventy-four, he attacked La Goleta and the fort that Señor Don Juan had left half built near Tunis. Through all these trials I was at the oar, with no hope of freedom whatever; at least I did not hope to win it by ransom, for I had made up my mind not to write the news of my misfortune to my father.

“La Goleta was lost, in the end; the fort was lost; and against these strongholds there came seventy-five thousand Turkish soldiers drawing pay, and over four hundred thousand Moors and Arabs out of every part of Africa, and this huge number of men came with so much ammunition and so many engines of war, and with so many sappers, that they could have buried La Goleta and the fort with their hands, in fistfuls of earth. La Goleta was lost first, though it had been held until then to be impregnable; and it was not lost through any fault of its defenders, who did in its defense everything they should and could, but because experience showed how easily trenches could be thrown up in that desert sand; for water had been found there two spans down, and the Turks did not strike it at two yards; and so, with a great many sandbags, they raised their trenches so high that they overtopped the walls of the fortress, and, firing down on the defenders from above, they left no one able to stand or take part in the defense. Most people held that our side ought never to have shut itself up inside La Goleta, but should have waited in the open at the landing place; and those who say this speak from far off and with little experience of such matters; for if La Goleta and the fort between them held barely seven thousand soldiers, how could so small a number, however brave they were, both take the field and hold the forts against a host as great as the enemy’s? And how is it possible for a fortress not to fall when it is not relieved, and all the more when it is besieged by many stubborn enemies, and in their own country? But it seemed to many, and so it seemed to me, that it was a special grace and favor that heaven did Spain in allowing the destruction of that workshop and cloak of iniquities, that glutton, or sponge, or moth of the countless sums of money that were spent there to no purpose, serving for nothing but to preserve the most happy memory of its having been won by the most invincible Charles the Fifth; as if those stones were needed to hold up that memory and make it eternal, as it is and will be.

“The fort was lost too; but the Turks had to win it from them span by span, for the soldiers who defended it fought so bravely and so stoutly that more than twenty-five thousand of the enemy were killed in twenty-two general assaults that were made on them. Of the three hundred who were left alive, not one was taken captive unwounded, a sure and clear sign of their courage and valor, and of how well they had defended and held their positions. A small fort or tower standing in the middle of the lagoon surrendered on terms; it was held by Don Juan Zanoguera, a gentleman of Valencia and a soldier of renown. They took captive Don Pedro Puertocarrero, general of La Goleta, who did everything possible to defend his fortress, and who felt its loss so keenly that grief killed him on the road to Constantinople, where he was being carried as a captive. They also took captive the general of the fort, whose name was Gabrio Cervellón, a gentleman of Milan, a great engineer and a most valiant soldier. Many persons of note died in these two strongholds, one of whom was Pagán de Oria, a knight of the Order of Saint John, of a generous disposition, as was shown by the very great liberality he used toward his brother, the famous Juan de Andrea de Oria; and what made his death all the more pitiful was that he died at the hands of some Arabs whom he had trusted, when he saw the fort was lost, and who offered to take him in Moorish dress to Tabarca, which is a little port or post that the Genoese who work at coral fishing keep on those shores; and these Arabs cut off his head and brought it to the general of the Turkish fleet, who fulfilled toward them our Castilian proverb, ‘Though the treason may please, the traitor is loathed’; and so it is said that the general ordered those who brought him the present to be hanged, because they had not brought him the man alive.

“Among the Christians lost in the fort there was a certain Don Pedro de Aguilar, born in some place in Andalusia, I do not know which, who had been an ensign in the fort, a soldier of great account and rare intelligence: in particular, he had a special gift for what they call poetry. I mention it because his fate brought him to my galley and my bench, and to be the slave of my own master; and, before we left that port, this gentleman made two sonnets, in the manner of epitaphs, one to La Goleta and the other to the fort. And truly I must recite them, for I know them by heart and I believe they will give you more pleasure than pain.”

The moment the captive named Don Pedro de Aguilar, Don Fernando looked at his companions, and all three of them smiled; and when the captive got as far as the sonnets, one of them said:

“Before your grace goes any further, I beg you to tell me what became of this Don Pedro de Aguilar you have mentioned.”

“What I know,” answered the captive, “is that, after he had been two years in Constantinople, he escaped dressed as an Albanian, with a Greek spy, and I do not know whether he won his freedom, though I believe he did, because a year later I saw the Greek in Constantinople, but I could not ask him how that journey had turned out.”

“Well, he did,” answered the gentleman, “for that Don Pedro is my brother, and he is now in our village, well and rich, married, and with three children.”

“Thanks be to God,” said the captive, “for all the mercies he has shown him; for there is no happiness on earth, to my mind, that can equal regaining one’s lost freedom.”

“And what is more,” replied the gentleman, “I know the sonnets my brother made.”

“Then let your grace recite them,” said the captive, “for you will know how to say them better than I.”

“With pleasure,” answered the gentleman; “and the one on La Goleta went like this:”