My God. I can’t quit so soon. What would the men think?
******
Morning brought an empty sea except for a dot on the distant horizon that could be seen from the top of the mast. We waited and rested as it got closer and closer.
“It’s a galley, by God,” said Harold as he joined me after climbing the mast to see for himself. “No telling whose it is, but most likely from the armada because there were so many of them.”
Then he got to what had been worrying me as well.
“Do you think our Cyprus post will be able to hold out if that’s the way the Moors were going?”
Harold’s really asking if his wife and children and those of his men are safe.
“Of course, it will. They’ve got their own water well and enough siege supplies to last for a year, and probably more. Besides, there aren’t enough Moorish sailors and pirates in the whole world to get over a wall defended by our archers, let the alone the three walls we’ve got on Cyprus. They’re fine. I hope.
“At the very most, the Moors may have gotten into Limassol city and sacked it or taken some of our galleys and cogs that were in the harbour. It’s our galleys and cogs I’m worried about, not the people who are safe in our fortress.”
said it loudly enough for the men standing nearby to hear. Word would get around quickly as it always does on a galley. Harold’s galley was home-based on Cyprus; some of the men probably have women there and were likely to be worried.
Hmm. I wonder how many galleys and cogs we usually have in the harbour or coming and going in their normal sailings. It used to be five or six with a new arrival or departure almost every day. I’ll ask Harold later when no one is around. There’s no hurry; there’s nothing we can do about it if the Moors have already been there or are headed there.
******
Taking Moorish galleys was something Harold was experienced and quite good at doing. He had the grappling lines coiled and set out and the arrow bales opened. Then he sent most of our men to the rowing benches. He wanted to clear the deck long before the lookouts on the on-coming galley could get close enough to mark them.
“We don’t want the lookouts on their mast to see fighting men on our deck, do we?” he said to me with a determined smile as we pretended to flee. “Not until we’ve grappled them so they can’t get away.”
Harold and I and our apprentices and his loud-talker and sailing sergeant were standing on the roof of the rear castle. We appeared to be alone on the roof with three or four unarmed sailors rushing about on the deck and looking anxiously at the approaching galley as we tried to escape with only some of our oars rowing.
In fact, the arrow bales had been laid out on the deck and both castles were jammed full of archers and pike men who would come rushing out when the fighting started. We had six of the galley’s big land-fighting shields lying on the roof with us and ready to be picked up on a moment’s notice if our pursuer had archers.
Our galley looked exhausted and feeble. Our sail was low and drooping all the way to the deck on one side, and only the oars of the lower deck were rowing. They were rowing as slowly as they would if we had only one exhausted slave was at each oar. Harold also had half the oars on each side of the upper bank of oars rowing, as would be the case if most the galley’s sailors and fighting men had been sent to the oars in a desperate effort to escape.
The Moor, or whatever it might turn out to be, took the bait. There might have been archers on the Moor, so we had only one dependable sailor man in the lookout’s nest. He’d been selected because he had particularly good eyes. He had one of our big fighting-on-land shields up there with him in case he needed protection from enemy arrows.
We’d know soon enough if there are archers on the approaching galley. If not, the sailor with the long distance eyes would be quickly replaced by two of our best archers.
“Hoy, the deck. They’s deck is crowded with fighting men. They means to board us.”
A few minutes later a small initial flight of arrows came up from our pursuer and flew towards our lookout. Damn, they have archers; but not very many, from the looks of it, and not very good.
“Hoy, the deck. Archers. They be having archers with short bows,” our lookout cried down to us as he crouched behind his shield. His warning wasn’t needed. We were standing on the roof of the stern castle and we’d all seen the arrows begin to fly towards him.
The roof of the stern castle, as everyone knows, was the best place from which to command a galley in a fight—even if the galley you’re fighting has archers. This one certainly did, so we all crouched down behind the big shields which had been laid out just in case; the big shields our first three lines of pike-carrying archers use when we fight on land.
*******
The enemy galley approached us with much cheering from its deck full of armed men waving their swords. There was no doubt about it—they were Moorish pirates. What was unique was that some of them were carrying the shields of men who fight on land.
They’re part of a force that’s been organised to fight on land. Is this some kind of an invasion fleet?
Our men maintained good order and were silent.
“In oars,” shouted Harold as the Moorish galley came up alongside. There were the usual sounds of a few oars being broken off, and a few seconds later our hulls crashed together with enough of an initial bump to send several men on the enemy galley to their knees. At the same instant, grapples began to be thrown on to our deck from the Moor and an arrow thudded into the shield of Andrew Priest, my sergeant apprentice.
The two galleys were still ten or fifteen paces apart with the Moors hauling on their grapple lines to bring them together side by side when Harold and his loud-talker screamed the words our men had been waiting to hear.
“Now. Throw your grapples. Attack; now. Attack.”
Our fighting men and grapple-throwing sailors came rushing out of the castles and the upper rowing benches, where they’d been hidden out of sight and waiting. They did so with great shouts. It was something our archers and sailors practised at least once every day. I was looking carefully around the corner of my shield and saw everything including the faces of the Moors standing only a few feet away on the deck of their galley.
Stunned and surprised was the only way to describe the looks on the faces of the men on the Moorish galley as our men suddenly charged out of where they’d been hiding.
Our own grapples were quickly thrown as our archers ran to their assigned places and began to pour arrow after arrow into the mass of men a few feet away on the Moorish galley’s deck. The Moors were close, and our archers rarely missed. It was pandemonium as the decks of both galleys were covered by shouting and screaming men. Now it was our grapple throwers who were pulling the two galleys together.
Everyone on the castle roof had come out from hiding behind our shields as soon as the fighting started. We immediately realised there were only a few archers on the enemy galley, and they couldn’t loose their arrows because they were jammed into the disorganised crowd of Moorish boarders who were waving their swords and shouting on our enemy’s deck.
We pushed arrow after arrow into the would-be boarders from our positions up on the castle roof. Our numerous other archers on the deck below us did the same from their various, carefully assigned shooting positions, and so did the handful of archers on the roof of the forward castle and up on the mast. We took the enemy archers and thrusters first. Four of Harold’s best archers came out of the castle below and joined us on the roof.
A handful of the Moors who’d been waiting to board us managed to climb on to our deck when the galleys were pulled together. Bad luck for them. They were instantly chopped down by the pike men who had led our archers out on to the deck for just such a situation.
A virtual storm of arrows poured into the Moors and the handful of Moorish bowmen we could initially see were gone almost instantly. I used my longbow to push an arrow at a Moor attempting to get to the safety of his
galley’s forward castle. My arrow and at least one other took him just as he reached the entrance. He staggered and fell through it.
I never did find out what happened to him.
It seemed like the fighting lasted a long time. But it didn’t. Many of the Moors were wounded but still alive as our archers poured on to our deck and castle roofs to take their shooting positions—and then on to the Moorish galley, which was now tightly lashed to ours by a number of grapple lines.
Wounded Moors who tried to run or fight back were quickly hacked down or stabbed by our pike men and had more arrows pushed into them by our archers. Some of them attempted to escape by jumping down into the upper rowing benches and then ran further down to get in amongst their slaves on the lower rowing benches.
It was mostly over in a few short minutes. Andrew, my apprentice, and I stood on the castle roof and watched as our archers began to shoot down into the bowels of the Moorish galley at the Moors who had attempted to temporarily escape their fate by jumping down to the rowing benches.
What would happen to those we take alive was Harold’s decision to make as the sergeant captain of our galley. They’ll almost certainly go into the water if they are pirates; we’ll hold them to be exchanged for Christians and Jews if they are soldiers and sailors. Since our prize looks to be a pirate galley with land soldiers on board, it’s likely some of them will be going for a swim after we question them.
“Hoy, the mast,” I shouted as Harold moved over to our new prize to direct the mopping up and engage in the nasty business of deciding who should get mercies and who could be saved.
“Are there any sails in sight?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Our response to the alarming news.
The hold of the Moorish galley we took was packed full of recently captured Christian slaves including, to our shocked surprise, three of our own men and some of their passengers. They had been caught by the Moorish fleet when their cog was surprised as it entered Beirut’s harbour. They were all, as you might imagine, ecstatic at being freed. Our hearing that the Moors had already been to Beirut was the first confirmation we had that the Moorish armada we had encountered was moving westward after raiding the Holy Land’s Christian ports.
We plied our newly freed men and Moorish prisoners with questions about what happened and what they’d seen and heard.
It was with great relief that we learnt that the Moors had raided Limassol on their way west after raiding Beirut and the coastal ports along the Holy Land coast, but that raid had been largely unsuccessful, limited to the taking of an ill-fated cog, which had been approaching the harbour with a load of refugees and cargo from Constantinople. The Moors also sailed away with a barely seaworthy unmanned galley we had been using for training purposes.
No effort had been made by the Moors to land and try to take our fortified post or the city. According to the captives we released, our people had been in our citadel and ready to fight because one of our galleys had escaped from the Moors’ raid on Acre and come in a day earlier with a warning that the Moors were out in force.
Yoram and Randolph had taken the warning to heart and immediately moved all of our men and their families inside our walled fortress. They’d also sent our galleys and cogs in the Limassol harbour to safety with skeleton crews by sending them north into a rarely visited part of the Mediterranean in the middle of nowhere. The gates of the city and our fortress had been shut and the walls manned by the time the Moors arrived. The Moors had taken one look at the deserted harbour and quay and had made no effort to come ashore.
According to Harold’s interpreter, the ships of the Moorish armada were returning to Tunis, Algiers, and some of the smaller Moorish ports after raiding the Christian ports along the Holy Land coast to take slaves for the Moorish King to sell. They were on their way back to Tunis and had hit Cyprus on their way home. According to one of the merchants we rescued who could jabber in Moorish, there had been talk among the Moors of also raiding some of the Greek ports, and, possibly, Malta or Crete on their way back home. Malta?
It quickly became apparent that we had somehow run into the galleys of the Moslem King ruling Tunis and Algiers, the one who was fighting for control of Spain and the entire Islamic world.
There had been rumours that the King had begun using his galleys to take Christian slaves to sell in order to help pay for his wars and this would seem to prove it—his galleys had come from Algiers and Tunis and hit Christian ports all along the Holy Land coast before they started back and reached Cyprus four days ago. They had almost certainly raided elsewhere along the Cyprus coast in addition to Limassol.
The worst news of all was that the Moors may have captured some of our other galleys and cogs when they launched their surprise raids on the Holy Land ports up and down the Christian coast. Among the prize’s rowers was one of our company’s sailors, a man from Hartlepool who had been taken only a few days before from another one of our cargo cogs. It had been anchored in the harbour at Acre whilst waiting its turn to move to the quay and load cargo and passengers bound for Alexandria.
******
Limassol’s safety was good news, and there was nothing we could do about our lost galleys and cogs except revenge them and try to free any of our men and passengers who had been taken captive. But Harold and I still had a big problem —the galleys and prizes of the damn Moorish armada could be anywhere in the sea around us. Accordingly, we were not sure in which direction we should sail because we didn’t know where the war galleys of the Moorish armada might be located. All we knew is that we had rowed hard all night so that the armada of Moorish galleys was likely to still be between us and Cyprus.
“Should we sail on to Cyprus or back to Malta or head elsewhere? And where should we send our prize—Malta? Or should we all stay here and rest until they pass us by?” Those were the questions Harold and I asked each other.
Finally, I made a decision. Both our new prize and Harold’s galley will stay right here and bob around in the sea for a few hours whilst we feed our men and rest and reorganise.
“When the men are thoroughly rested we’ll sail straight for Cyprus and row right past any Moors we encounter along the way unless they look like an easy prize.
“We’ll put the Moors we’ve taken and their newly freed captives and slaves on the oars of both galleys and move enough archers on to the prize to make it hard to take if it comes to a fight at sea. Our archers will rest so they’ll have fresh arms if and when we need them.”
Archers inevitably had strong arms and shoulders. No galley rowed by slaves and Moorish pirates had any hope of catching one of ours when there were two of our archers on every oar.
That’s why, normally, I would not have been at all concerned about having our galleys row right through the Moorish fleet. The problem, of course, was that we had put some of the archers from Harold’s galley onto our prize and replaced them with Moorish slaves and captives.
******
We raised the sails on our two galleys several hours later and began slowly moving eastward towards Cyprus without rowing. Sure enough, that afternoon we began to see sails in the distance. The Moorish galleys were clawing their way into the wind towards us as they moved westward towards Tunis and Algiers.
Everything changed when we saw the distant ships. Our decks were cleared and we began slowly rowing towards them using only the lower bank of oars—just as we would if we were a slave-rowed Moor heading east.
Our best deception, suggested to us by a newly freed merchant from Acre, was to put a line of seven or eight men in Moorish robes on the roof of the stern castle praying towards the east. Harold and I were among them so we could jump up and take command if our ruse failed. The others were archers.
It worked even though it was hard on my knees. Everyone we passed heading in the other direction looked us over with great curiosity but without alarm. The only responses from the Moorish galleys were arms lifted in greeting as we went past them. We raised ours i
n return.
******
We kept the sail up and rowed easterly all that night in an effort to get well clear of the scattered Moorish fleet. It worked. No sails were in sight the next morning, and we reached Cyprus the day after that.
Limassol Harbour was a welcome sight, although, our arrival caused much initial running about as the few people out and about ran for our fortress and the city gate. They slowly returned as we rowed up to the quay and moored. The quay was empty. Not a cog or galley in sight and not a person standing on the quay. The gates to the city and our adjacent fortress were closed.
“Hoy,” Harold shouted to one of the men tentatively approaching us from our fortress next to the city walls. “I’ll give you copper if you’ll run to the English post and tell them that Captain William has arrived with a prize.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
We wait anxiously and make plans.
Within minutes, people began pouring out of our fortified post and then from the city gate. They rushed to the quay in ever-increasing numbers and it was soon packed with celebrating people. It was as if our arrival with a prize had signalled the end of the Moorish threat. And, at that moment, it seemed that it did. Little did we know that it didn’t.
Yoram and Randolph were appalled and Lena began crying when I haltingly told them about Anne’s death as we walked along the cart path from the quay to the entrance of our post. It was so absolutely senseless. That evening there was a great sadness in Randolph’s voice as he summed up the situation quite well as we sat outside in the moonlight. Harold and I had just finished going over the details once again.
“What’s done is done. Lisbon is an important port for us because it has so many merchants, I’ll grant you that; but if it becomes too dangerous to stay we could always move our hospital and post to a smaller port along the coast and stop there for water and supplies.”
Yoram agreed.
“We’d lose some custom if we moved our post out of Lisbon, but we could appoint a local agent from among the merchants so we wouldn’t lose it all.”
Sea Warriors Page 14