The one to port came alongside soonest, its sails and rigging struck and furled for the attack, its rail, and the poop deck, crowded with corsairs, many of them swinging grappling-hooks on the ends of ropes, others brandishing boarding-ladders with vicious curved spikes on the ends. Jack – and all of the others aboard God's Wounds :saw, and understood, the same thing at the same time. They saw that almost none of the fighting men were Arabs except for the agha shouting the orders. They were, instead, white men, black Africans, even a few Indians. They understood that all of them were Janissaries, which is to say non-Turks who did the Turks' fighting for them.