Aguirrez knew that the firepower arrayed against his ship would be formidable. The galleys were nearly twice the eighty-foot length of his tubby caravel. The fighting galley routinely carried fifty of the single-shot muzzle-loaded smoothbore arquebuses. The heaviest gun, a cast-iron, high-angle mortar called a bombard, was mounted on the bow artillery platform. Its position on the right-front side was a holdover from the days when naval strategy centered on ramming the enemy head-on.

While the galley was a throwback to the sturdy Greek craft that carried Odysseus from Circe to Cyclops, the caravel was the wave of the future. Fast and maneuverable for its day, the rugged ship could sail anywhere on the watery surface of the earth. The caravel blended its southern rigging with a tough northern hull of flush-built plank- ing and a hinged, axeled rudder. The easily rigged lateen sails, de- scended from the Arabic dhow, made the ship far superior to any contemporary sailing vessel when sailing close to the wind.

Unfortunately for Aguirrez, those sails, so miraculous in their sim- ple efficiency, now hung limply from the twin masts. With no breeze to stir the canvas, the sails were useless sheets of fabric. The becalmed caravel was glued to the surface of the sea like a ship in a bottle.

Aguirrez glanced at the lifeless canvas and cursed the elements conspiring against him. He seethed at the short-sighted arrogance that had led him to defy his instinct to stay far out to sea. With their low freeboard, the galleys were not designed for open waters and would have had difficulty following the caravel. But he had sailed close to land because the route was more direct. With favorable winds, his ship could outrun any vessel on the sea. He'd never antic- ipated a dead calm. Nor had he expected the galleys to find him so easily.

He brushed away his self-recriminations and suspicions. Time enough to deal with questions later. Tossing his blanket aside as if it were a matador's cape, he strode the length of the ship bellowing or- ders. The men came alive as the captain's powerful voice echoed from one end of the ship to the other. Within seconds, the deck re- sembled a stirred-up anthill.

“Launch the boats!” Aguirrez pointed to the approaching war- ships. “Look smart, lads, or we'll be keeping the executioners work- ing day and night.”

They moved to their tasks with quicksilver speed. Every man on board the caravel knew that the horrors of torture and burning at the stake would be their fate if the galleys captured them. Within min- utes, all three of the caravel's boats were in the water, manned by the strongest rowers. The lines attached to the ship went bowstring-taut, but the caravel stubbornly refused to move. Aguirrez yelled at his men to row harder. The air over his head turned blue as he appealed to their Basque manhood with every salty curse he could muster.