s life, was bound to acquire that dominance necessary for
control of the wild spirits of the age. Nor was this ascendancy by any
means easy to obtain, as the rank and file led lives of incredible
bitterness, almost inconceivable to modern ideas. What they suffered they
alone knew, but it was compounded of hunger, thirst, heat, cold, sickness
unrelieved by care or tending, wounds which festered for lack of
medicaments, death which ever stared them in the face, and last, and worst
of all, the risk of capture by some Christian foe, by whom they would be
chained to the rowers' bench and taste of a bitterness absolutely
unimaginable. As a set-off to this the man who aspired to lead must offer
to his followers at least a record of success in small things; also he had
to be something of an enthusiast, something of an orator, some one subtly
persuasive. Against all the disagreeables of the strenuous life of the
corsair he had to hold before the dazzled eyes of Selim, Ali, or Mahomet
the promise of fat captures of the merchant vessels of the foe; when they
had but to slit a few throats and to return with their brigantines laden to
the gunwale with desirable plunder. Again he had to hearten them for
possible encounters with Spaniards, with the terrible Doria, or worst of
all with the dreaded Knights of St. John themselves; to point out that to
die in conflict with the infidel was a sure passport to heaven and its
houris, and to invoke great names, such as that of Barbarossa to show to
what dizzy heights the fighting Moslem could climb. In such an age and
among such men as these it was no mean feat to become a leader by whom men
swore and to whom they yielded a ready obedience.

Fashioned by the hammer of misfortune on the anvil of racial expropriation,
such leaders arose among the Moslems, men of iron, before whom all who
worshipped at the altars of Islam bowed the knee. These men, whose fame
extended throughout all the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, taught
to European rulers something of the value of that great force which is
known to us under the modern name of "Sea Power."

Next in importance to Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa himself and in many ways his
very worthy successor, was Dragut Reis. We have it on the authority of
Messire Pierre de Bourdeille, the Seigneur de Brantome, that Dragut was
born at a small village in Asia Minor called Charabulac, opposite to the
island of Rhodes, and that his parents were Mahommedans. Be