The Wends were conquered, but the end was not yet. They had savage neighbors, and many a crusade did Absalon lead against them in the following years, before the new title of the Danish rulers, “King of the Slavs and Wends,” was much more than an empty boast. He organized a regular sea patrol of one-fourth of the available ships, of which he himself took command, and said mass on board much oftener than in the Roskilde church. It is the sailor, the warrior, the leader of men one sees through all the troubled years of his royal friend’s life. Now the Danish fleet is caught in the inland sea before Stettin, unable to make its way out, and already the heathen hosts are shouting their triumph on shore. It is Absalon, then, who finds the way and, as one would expect, he forces it. The captains wail over the trap and abuse him for getting them into it. Absalon, disdaining to answer them, leads his ships in single file straight for the gap where the Wendish fleet lies waiting, and gets the King to attack with his horsemen on shore. Between them the enemy is routed, and the cowards are shamed. But when they come to make amends, he is as unmoved as ever and will have none of it. Again, when he is leading his men to the attack on a walled town, a bridge upon which they crowd breaks, and it is the bishop who saves his comrades from drowning, swimming ashore with them in full armor. Resting in his castle at Haffn, the present Copenhagen, which he built as a defence against the sea-rovers, he hears, while in his bath, his men talking of strange ships that are sailing into the Sound, and, hastily throwing on his clothes, gives chase and kills their crews, for they were pirates whose business was murder, and they merely got their deserts. In the pursuit his archers “pinned the hands of the rowers to the oars with their arrows” and crippled them, so skilful had much practice made them. Turn the leaf of Saxo’s chronicle, and we find him under Rügen with his fleet, protecting the now peaceful Wendish fishermen in their autumn herring-catch, on which their livelihood depended. Of such stuff was made the bishop who “Used his trusty Danish sword As the Pope his staff in Rome.” Wherever danger threatens Valdemar and Absalon, Esbern is found, too, earning the name of the Fleet (Snare), which the people had fondly given to their favorite. Where the fighting was hardest, he was sure to be. The King’s son had ventured too far and was caught in a tight place by an overwhelming force, when Esbern pushed his ship in between him and the enemy and bore the brunt of a fight that came near to making an end of him. He had at last only a single man left, but the two made a stand against a hundred. “When the heathen saw his face they fled in terror.” At last they knocked him senseless with a stone and would have killed him, but in the nick of time the King’s men came to the rescue.