The principal captives were made to pass before young Doria.  When Dragut beheld him he cried out in a fury:  “What!  Am I a slave to that effeminate Caramite?” for Doria was but a beardless youth.  These opprobrious epithets being interpreted to the young nobleman, “highly incensed he flew at Dragut, tore out his beard and moustaches, and buffeted him most outrageously:  nay his passion was so great it is said that had he not been prevented, he certainly would have sheathed his sword in the bowels of that assuming prisoner.”

For four long years Dragut rowed in Doria’s galley.  No distinctions were made in those days, and knight or noble, companion or grand master, basha or boy, was, if caught, condemned to the rowers’ bench to slave at the oar beneath the boatswain’s lash, perchance alongside some degraded criminal, filthy and swarming with vermin.  While Dragut was employed as a galley slave there came on board the craft in which he rowed Monsieur Parisot, Grand Master of the Knights of Malta.  This high officer, recognising his old enemy, called out to him in Spanish: 

“Hola, Senor Dragut, usanza de guerra” ("The usage of war, Senor Dragut").

To which the undaunted corsair merely replied with a laugh: 

“Y mudanza de fortuna” ("And a change of luck").

The Grand Master, who had known the chain and lash himself, smiled and passed on—­there was no pity in those days.

But Dragut was not destined to end his life as a galley slave, for, when indeed hope must have died within him, after more than four years of this veritable hell upon earth, there sailed one day into the harbour of Genoa the great Kheyr-ed-Din himself.  The Admiralissimo of the Grand Turk, full of years, honours, and booty, was on his last cruise, and one of the last acts of his active life was the rescue of Dragut, the man who had served him so well, and for whom he had so high a regard as a resourceful mariner, from the degrading servitude into which he had fallen.  The Spanish historian, Marmol, recounts that the sum of three thousand ducats was paid by Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa for the redemption of Dragut.  As this history was published in 1573, we must conclude that the author who wrote of these events so soon after they had happened is correct; at the same time, Barbarossa was in command of one hundred galleys of the Grand Turk, and it was never his custom to pay for anything which he could take by force.  However this may have been, and the point is not one of very great importance, the Genoese Senate was terrified lest their territory should be ravaged; they wrote accordingly to their Grand Admiral, requesting that Dragut might be released and sent on board of the galley of the admiral basha.  This was immediately done, and the man who for four years had tugged at the Christian oar was once again in a position to make war on those who had been for that period his masters.

Not only had he tugged at the Christian oar, but also he had tasted of the Christian whip—­and of very little else, as the food of the rower was as scanty as it was disgusting; in consequence, if he had been an implacable foe to Christendom before this event, he was not likely to have become less so while toiling in the Genoese galley.