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Ochiali was the last of the great Corsairs. He it was who, on his return to Constantinople after the fatal October 7, 1571, cheered the Sultan with the promise of revenge, was made Captain-Pasha, and sailed from the Bosphorus the following year with a fleet of two hundred and thirty vessels, just as though Lepanto had never been fought and lost.
"But shall the Grand Sultan appoint him to succeed thee if thou hast not equipped him so to do? I cry shame on thee, O father of Marzakl, for that thou art lacking in due pride in thine own son." "May Allah give me patience with thee! Have I not said that he is still over young." "At his age thyself thou wert upon the seas, serving with the great Ochiali."
The Marquis de Santa Cruz was already upon the enemy; Don John was after him with twenty galleys; Ochiali was outnumbered, and after a brilliant effort, made off in all haste for Santa Maura, bearing with him the Standard of "the Religion" to be hung up in St. Sophia. The battle of Lepanto is fought and won: the Turks have been utterly vanquished.
Meanwhile, the Turkish and Barbary fleets, commanded by 'Ali Pasha, the successor of Piāli, and Ochiali, ravaged Crete and other islands, and coasting up the Adriatic, worked their will upon every town or village it suited their pleasure to attack. Thousands of prisoners, and stores and booty of every description rewarded their industry.
The captains, too, have their private artificer slaves, whom they buy for high prices and take with them on the cruise, and hire them out to help the Beylik workmen when ashore. The number of vessels possessed at any one time by the Algerines appears to have never been large. Barbarossa and Dragut were content with small squadrons. Ochiali had but fifteen Algerine galleys at Lepanto.
In July, 1570, off Alicata, on the southern coast of Sicily, Ochiali surrounded four galleys of "the Religion" they then possessed but five and took three of them, including the flagship, which Saint-Clément, the general of the galleys, abandoned in order to throw himself and his treasure on shore at Montichiaro. One galley alone, the St. Ann, made a desperate resistance; the others surrendered.
Undeterred by this misadventure, as soon as he got back to Algiers he set out in a brigantine of fifteen banks, and speedily brought back three Spanish prizes and one hundred and forty Christians. He was with Ochiali when that eminent rover seized Saint-Clément's galleys, and was with difficulty restrained from anticipating his admiral in boarding the St. Ann.
After Ochiali had been called to Stambol as Captain-Pasha, in 1572, when he had been Pasha of Algiers for four years, nine governors succeeded one another in twenty-four years. Then the too usual practice was adopted of allotting the province to the highest bidder, and rich but incompetent or rascally Turks bought the reversion of the Pashalik.
His successor was a Sardinian; soon afterwards a Corsican became pasha of Algiers, then another Sardinian; Ochiali was a Calabrian; Ramadān came from Sardinia, and was succeeded by a Venetian, who in turn gave place to a Hungarian, who made room for an Albanian.
Then Ochiali disappeared from the western seas; he fought for his master in the Euxine during the Persian War, and died in 1580, aged seventy-two, with the reputation of the most powerful admiral that had ever held sway in the Golden Horn.
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