More rapidly than ever the distance diminished; the _Revenge_ creeping up on the starboard side, the _Sophia_ holding her course to port, until at length the doomed ship was nearly between them, and on the moment the Capsina gave the word to fire, and the broadside crashed into the Turk. A moment after Kanaris fired, and the Turk replied with a broadside to each. The Capsina did not wait to reply again, but sailed past her, and then put the helm hard to port, risking masts and sails, so that the ship swung round with her broadside to the Turk's bows some five hundred yards off. Kanaris, who kept his distance, fired again, and section by section, slowly and with deliberate aim, the Capsina volleyed at her bows. Steady shooting was impossible on such a sea, but some of the shot they saw went home, one hitting the bowsprit, and several others crashing through the bulwarks and raking the ship lengthways. No fire answered them, but her broadside replied twice or thrice to Kanaris, doing some damage. The Turk was now practically a log on the water, and the Capsina, knowing there was time and to spare, made a wide tack off into the northeast, and returning on the opposite tack again closed up with the Turk from behind, putting a broadside into her stern. At that there was only silence from the Turk, and the Capsina closed in again on the starboard quarter, signalling Kanaris to do the same on the port side, and as they approached they saw that the decks were strewn with dead. A company of men were marshalled forward with muskets, who separated into two companies, and manned the bulwarks on each side, waiting for the ships to come to a closer range. But the Capsina laughed scornfully. "I would not waste the life of a man on my ship over those dogs," she said. "Train the bow guns on them and do not sink the ship. Kill the men only." The wind was abating and the sea falling, and in a quarter of an hour of the eighty or a hundred men who had been left they could only see sixteen or twenty. But these continued firing their muskets coolly and without hurry at the approaching ships, and a couple of men on the _Revenge_ were wounded and one killed. "I should not have thought Turks were so brave," said the Capsina. "Be ready with the grappling-irons! Port the helm! And be quick when we get in. Fifty men with muskets man the port side. Keep up the fire! Keep under shelter of the bulwarks all of you!" The _Revenge_ slid up to the Turk's starboard quarter, and as they got within a hundred yards the Capsina gave orders to furl all sail; as the distance lessened, the irons were thrown, the ropes were pulled home, and the two ships brought up side by side. A dozen Turks or so were still gathered in the bows, but as the crew of the _Revenge_ swarmed the deck, they laid down their muskets and stood with arms folded. One of them, in an officer's uniform, was sitting in a chair smoking.