The Escape, the Corsairs, and Velez Malaga — Don Quixote

The renegade buys a vessel for more than thirty souls and legitimates it with repeated fig runs to Shershel, anchoring in a cove within crossbow range of Hadji Morato's garden. He cannot speak to Zoraida without alarming her father, since Moorish women hide from Moors unless bidden; the captive, already ransomed, recruits twelve rowers left in Algiers because twenty galleys are away on cruise, directs each to wait stealthily at the garden on Friday evening, and goes himself the day before under pretense of salad herbs. Hadji Morato questions him in the lingua franca of captives; Zoraida appears in pearls and gold, asks why he is not ransomed and when he sails. He claims a French ship tomorrow though his hunger for home is true; she probes whether he has a wife, he pledges marriage there to a lady like her. When Turks steal unripe fruit her father sends her inside; the moment he vanishes among the trees she asks in tears if the Christian is going, receives his promise for Juma, feigns collapse with her arm around his neck when her father returns, then lets him study gate and fastenings as he gathers herbs.

Friday comes after long impatience. With city gates shut the renegade anchors at nightfall where Zoraida watches; hidden Christians join the captive party, debate whether to take the garden first or the ship, and accept the renegade's order to secure the vessel before anything else. He leaps aboard, cutlass drawn, and forbids movement on pain of death; fainthearted Moors submit, half the party binds them while the rest follow him to the unlocked garden gate and the house where Zoraida waits at a window, whispering whether they are Christians before she opens and descends in jewels. She says her father sleeps; the renegade would wake him and plunder the house, but she refuses any touch to her father and brings only a trunk heavy with crowns. The old man wakes, shouts that Christians are thieves; they gag him and carry him aboard, Zoraida hiding her eyes, he horror-struck at her quiet embrace of the captive.

They push off barely two hours after dark, Zoraida begging release of the bound Moors and her father rather than see them captives because of her; the renegade explains they must free them on Christian ground lest Algiers send cruisers. Her father, ungagged enough to weep, sees her quiet in the captive's arms and cannot understand; Tramontana blocks Majorca and they coast toward Oran, passing Shershel in fear, rowers eating in shifts without leaving the oars. Zoraida keeps her head in the captive's hands so as not to see her father; when the renegade tells Hadji Morato his daughter is Christian and file of their chains, the old man asks if she gave him to enemies; she says she sought good for herself and names Lela Marien. He throws himself overboard, is saved half drowned, and later at the cape called wicked Christian woman they put the Moors ashore as promised; he reviles her as led by immodesty not faith, tries to pull his beard on the beach, and cries after the sailing boat for his daughter to return though she answers only through tears that Marien chose rightly.

Mid-sea under moon a square-rigged Frenchman crosses their course, receives no answer because the renegade fears corsairs, then fires chain-shot that fells mast and staves the hull amidships. They sink into a French longboat; robbers take all, even Zoraida's anklets, debate drowning the party wrapped in sail, but the captain who plundered her grants a skiff, water, biscuit, and forty crowns to the weeping girl while the renegade drops her trunk unseen. They row toward Spain by night, land below a mountain when moon and cloud make the coast dangerous, kiss the soil, carry the skiff inland, and climb still unsure whether they stand on Christian ground or within reach of Tetuan corsairs who raid at daybreak. hear a bell, frighten a shepherd trimming cork who screams Moors landed, strip the renegade's Turkish dress, meet fifty riders, and a young captive recognizes his uncle Pedro de Bustamante: they stand on Velez Malaga's ground. Horsemen offer mounts and some fetch the abandoned skiff; the town pours out astonished at Zoraida's travel-flushed beauty; all enter church to thank God, she adoring Mary images the renegade explains. Six days later he leaves for Granada and the Holy Inquisition to restore himself to the Church; other freed captives scatter to their homes; the captive and Zoraida go on alone, he her father and squire not yet husband, buying her a beast with French gold, seeking news of his father and brothers while she bears poverty patiently and burns to be Christian. He closes apologizing if the long tale wearied them, for he left out more still.