There remains one incident connected with the battle of Lepanto which must be told.  In the Marquesa galley, in the division of Doria, was lying in his bed sick of a fever a young man twenty-four years of age; a Spaniard of Alcala de Henares, “de padres hidalgos y honrados,” we are told, although these parents were poor.  When this young man heard that a battle was imminent he rose from his bed and demanded of his captain, Francisco San Pedro, that he should be placed in the post of the greatest danger.  The captain, and others, his friends, counselled him to remain in his bed.  “Senores,” replied the young man, “what would be said of Miguel de Cervantes should he take this advice?  On every occasion up to this day on which his enemies have offered battle to his Majesty I have served like a good soldier; and today I intend to do so in spite of this sickness and fever.”  He was given command of twelve soldiers in a shallop, and all day was to be seen where the combat raged most fiercely.  He received two wounds in the chest and another which cost him the loss of his left hand.  To those to whom he proudly displayed them in after-years he was accustomed to say, “wounds in the face or the chest are like stars which guide one through honour to the skies.”  Of him the chronicler says:  “He continued the rest of his life with honourable memory of this wonderful occurrence, and, although he lost the use of his left hand, it added to the glory of his right.”  How glorious was that right hand is known to all readers of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha.

The losses at the battle of Lepanto are something so prodigious that imagination boggles at them.  It is said that the Christians lost five thousand men and the Turks no less than thirty thousand.  Enormous as these numbers are, they represent probably a very conservative estimate of the loss.  The Turks lost two hundred vessels, and when we recollect the number of men embarked on board of the sixteenth-century galleys we can see that the numbers are by no means exaggerated, especially as no quarter was given on either side.  When the Captain Ojeda recaptured the battered wreck which had been the Capitana of Malta, we are told that on board of her were three hundred dead Turks; if this were the cost of the capture of one galley we need not be surprised at the total.

With the results to Europe of this amazing battle we have nothing to do in this book.  That which it demonstrated, as far as the Sea-wolves were concerned, was that they still remained the most competent seamen and sea-fighters in the Mediterranean, and that the legend of the invincibility of the Ottomans at sea rested on what had been accomplished during a long period of years by these insatiable pirates and magnificent warriors.

That which the fighting Pontiff, Pius V., said when he heard of the victory is in character with everything which history has told us of this remarkable occupant of the chair of Saint Peter.  It was short but very much to the point, consisting of the one sentence, “Fuit homo misus a Deo cui nomen erat Joannes.”