With Barbaro agrees another competent witness, Jacques Tedaldi, a Florentine merchant, who took part in the defence of the city, and who gives the distance over which the ships were carried as from two to three miles: “Fit porter de la mer par terre deux ou trois milles, de soixant dix a quatre-vingts gallées que aultres fustes armées, dedans le gouffle de Mandraquins qui est entre les deux citez, auxquieuls est le port de Constantinople.”[882] If, in the next place, we judge between the two routes by their comparative fitness to facilitate the accomplishment of the Sultan’s design, the Dolma Bagtchè route can claim the superiority in that respect. Had the matter of distance been all the Sultan required to consider in choosing the road for his ships, the decision would necessarily have been in favour of the Top Haneh route. But, surely, other matters also had to be taken into account. It was desirable, for example, that the route should be situated where all the preparations necessary to effect the passage could be readily made, where they would be beyond the reach of interference on the part of the Greeks, where they would, as the conveyance of the ships by night proves was the Sultan’s wish, be screened from hostile observation, and result in taking the enemy by surprise. All this was impossible at the site now occupied by Top Haneh, which stood but a short distance outside the chain and its guard-ships. There the Sultan’s preparations—the levelling of the ground, the laying down of sleepers and planks along which the cradles carrying the ships were to be drawn, the gathering of seventy to eighty vessels, the army of men collected to draw the ships out of the water and overland,—would be too much in the public eye to satisfy the requirements of the case. On the other hand, although the Dolma Bagtchè route laboured under the disadvantage of being longer than the road from Top Haneh, the distance it presented was not excessive, while it offered ample compensation for the additional efforts which its greater length occasioned. It started from the usual station of the Turkish fleet in the Bosporus, where all requisite means for executing the Sultan’s purpose could be obtained with the least difficulty, where no attack was to be apprehended, where the presence of a large number of ships would excite no suspicions, and where, it was reasonable to expect, the great secret could be kept as long as necessary. From the point of fitness to serve the scheme contemplated, the route from Dolma Bagtchè had most to recommend it, taking all things into consideration.