The republic of adventurers did not bother with constructing nor creating. There does not remain on the Grecian land any trace of their dominion,—edifices, seals, nor coins. Only a few noble families, especially in the islands, took the Catalan patronym.
"Although they yet remember us confusedly, they do remember us," said Ferragut. "'May the vengeance of the Catalans overtake you' was for many centuries the worst of curses in Greece."
Thus terminated the most glorious and bloody of the Mediterranean adventures of the Middle Ages,—the clash of western crudeness, almost savage but frank and noble, against the refined malice and decadent civilization of the Greeks,—childish and old at the same time,—which survived in Byzantium.
Ferragut felt a pleasure in these relations of imperial splendor, palaces of gold, epic encounters and furious frays, while his ship was navigating through the black night and bounding over the dark sea accompanied by the throbbing of machinery and the noisy thrum of the screw, at times out of the water during the furious rocking from prow to poop.
They were in the worst place in the Mediterranean where the winds coming from the narrow passage of the Adriatic, from the steppes of Asia Minor, from the African deserts and from the gap of Gibraltar tempestuously mingled their atmospheric currents. The waters boxed in among the numerous islands of the Grecian archipelago were writhing in opposite directions, enraged and clashing against the ledges on the coast with a retrograding violence that converted them into a furious surge.
The captain, hooded like a friar and bowed before the wind that was striving to snatch him from the bridge, kept talking and talking to his mate, standing immovable near him and also covered with a waterproof coat that was spouting moisture from every fold. The rain was streaking with light, cobwebby lines the slaty darkness, of the night. The two sailors felt as though icy nettles were falling upon face and hands across the darkness.
Twice they anchored near the island of Tenedos, seeing the movable archipelago of ironclads enveloped in floating veils of smoke. There came to their ears, like incessant thunderings, the echo of the cannons that were roaring at the entrance of the Dardanelles.
From afar off they perceived the sensation caused by the loss of some English and French ships. The current of the Black Sea was the best armor for the defenders of this aquatic defile against the attacks of the fleets. They had only to throw into the strait a quantity of floating mines and the blue river which slipped by the Dardanelles would drag these toward the boats, destroying them with an infernal explosion. On the coast of Tenedos the Hellenic women with their floating hair were tossing flowers into the sea in memory of the victims, with a theatrical grief similar to that of the heroines of ancient Troy whose ramparts were buried in the hills opposite.
The third trip in mid-winter was a very hard one, and at the end of a rainy night, when the faint streaks of dawn were beginning to dissipate the sluggish shadows, the Mare Nostrum arrived at the roadstead of Salonica.
Only once had Ferragut been in this port, many years before, when it still belonged to the Turks. At first he saw only some lowlands on which twinkled the last gleams from the lighthouses. Then he recognized the roadstead, a vast aquatic extension with a frame of sandy bars and pools reflecting the uncertain life of daybreak. The recently awakened sea-gulls were flying in groups over the immense marine bowl. At the mouth of the Vardar the fresh-water fowls were starting up with noisy cries, or standing on the edge of the bank immovable upon their long legs.