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Updated: May 5, 2025
Upon this occasion he was present as the representative of Dragut, and urged, on behalf of his master, that the time was not yet ripe for an attack on Malta. First, he contended, it was necessary to recapture the Goletta and the Peñon de Velez, and to defeat the Moors of Tunis, who were feudatories of the Spanish king and avowed enemies of the Ottoman Empire.
He presented himself before Tunis; and having there made the same demands, the dey of that republic bade him look to the castles of Porto-Farino and Goletta, and do his utmost. Blake needed not to be roused by such a bravado: he drew his ships close up to the castles, and tore them in pieces with his artillery.
"What matter, comrades?" said the veteran on one occasion when he was superintending the fitting out of the galleys. "These dogs have gone back from whence they came, and they have left that creature, Muley Hassan, to do their will in Tunis. It is true that there is Mendoza and his thousand Spaniards in the Goletta, but did not Martin de Vargas hold the Peñon here?
The Goletta was in the hands of the Spaniards; Carouan, an inland town, had set up a king of its own, while the maritime towns passed from the domination of the Sea-wolves to that of the Christians, and from the Christians back to the Sea-wolves, according to which party happened to be the stronger for the time being.
The first to fall was the Goletta, until then reckoned impregnable, and it fell, not by any fault of its defenders, who did all that they could and should have done, but because experiment proved how easily entrenchments could be made in the desert sand there; for water used to be found at two palms depth, while the Turks found none at two yards; and so by means of a quantity of sandbags they raised their works so high that they commanded the walls of the fort, sweeping them as if from a cavalier, so that no one was able to make a stand or maintain the defence.
Hamid, finding that his people were everywhere in revolt, fled to the Goletta, carrying with him a quantity of money, jewels, and portable valuables, and placed himself under the protection of the Spanish garrison not, however, without the loss of the major portion of his baggage, plundered from him by certain Moors in the course of his flight.
"And what is more," said the gentleman, "I know the sonnets my brother made." "Then let your worship repeat them," said the captive, "for you will recite them better than I can." "With all my heart," said the gentleman; "that on the Goletta runs thus."
The governour, having planted batteries along the shore, and drawn up his ships under the castles, sent Blake an haughty and insolent answer: "there are our castles of Goletta and Porto Ferino," said he, "upon which you may do your worst;" adding other menaces and insults, and mentioning, in terms of ridicule, the inequality of a fight between ships and castles.
Immediately on his arrival Paul had learned that the Chamber of Justice was beginning to hear the Jansoulet case in secret, a mockery of a trial, lost beforehand; and the Nabob's closed counting-rooms on the Marine Quay, the seals placed upon his cash boxes, his vessels lying at anchor in the harbor of Goletta, the guard of chaouchs around his palaces, already denoted a species of civil death, an intestacy as to which there would soon be nothing left to do but divide the spoils.
Returning to the south, he appeared before Algiers, and extorted from that government an illusory promise of respect to the English flag. To his demands the dey replied: "There are Goletta, Porto Ferino, and my fleet; let him destroy them if he can."
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