On the right of the Christian line things had not been going so propitiously for them.  Here Occhiali had managed, by his apparently persistent attempts to outflank John Andrea Doria, to decoy that commander away from his supports and from the main body of the Christians.  This tactical manoeuvre of the corsair was successful; having drawn off some fifteen of the Christian galleys, he suddenly flung the whole of his greatly superior force into the gap and surrounded them.  These galleys were Spanish, Venetian, and Maltese, and, although they offered a most vigorous resistance, they were mostly destroyed or captured.  Doria, in spite of all his efforts, was on this day both outgeneralled and outfought:  the Sea-wolves, under their grim leader, manoeuvring for position, obtaining it, and then falling like a thunderbolt on the foe.  They were all brave men at Lepanto on this memorable October day; but few there were like the corsair king, in whom a heart of fire was kept in check by a brain of ice, who, during the whole combat, never gave away a chance, or failed to swoop like an eagle from his eyry when the blunders of his enemy gave him the opportunity for which he watched.  It was the old story of “the veritable man of the sea” pitted against gallant soldiers fighting on an unfamiliar element.  And yet it was against the best seaman on the Christian side that Occhiali pitted himself on this stricken field; and none can deny that with him rested such honour as was gained by the Turks on this day, the day which broke up for ever the idea of the invincibility of the Ottomans on the water.  It needs not to say, to those who have read the story of the siege of Malta, how the Knights comported themselves in the battle; and yet Occhiali captured the Capitana, or principal galley of the Order, He was towing her out of action, a prize, when the Marquis of Santa Cruz bore down upon him with the reserve.  By this time the battle was lost; the Moslems were in full retreat.

The corsair recognised that he could do no more:  sullenly he cast off the tow, and, forming up some thirty of his galleys, still in a condition to navigate, stood boldly through the centre of where the battle had once raged, and escaped.  The Capitana of Malta had been taken; and to the Sultan did Occhiali present the great standard of Saint John, as an earnest of his achievement.

Bernardino de Escalente, in his work Dialogos del arte militar, printed in Seville in 1583, says that the Captain Ojeda, of the galley Guzmana, recaptured the Capitana of Malta; and that, in recognition thereof, “the Religion” pensioned him for life.  Ojeda, it is to be presumed, was under the orders of the Marquis of Santa Cruz during the battle.