_ 334 _ Dom Fernando de Meneses, it circled it very slowly. When some local Arabs were notified, they put some fishermen in a large and imposing terranquin, took some thick hawsers, spliced them together and made a noose. They placed their bait inside it. The monster promptly made for it, was caught in the noose and became a prisoner. As soon as the Moors saw this, they began to slacken all the hawsers to give it space so that it would not dive to the bottom. It started to pull them outside the bar, and it continued thrashing about and, with its enormous strength, spending a great deal of time dragging the terrada. When the beasts were exhausted, the Arabs started to row, dragging it behind them as far as the [Mukallah China] cove where they cast the cables ashore and moored in a safe spot. A crowd of people gathered, and they hauled the monster to the water's edge, where they cut it up because they could not bring it ashore. Another thing that was observed was that one night before the fight with the galleys, an errant comet, very large and radiant, was seen in the sky for a very long time, and it disappeared in the area where our men later captured the galleys. Thus, with the fleet anchored, the foists that had gone to spy on them arrived and reported to the captain major that the galleys were among the islets
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