He is involved in a naval skirmish with the Turks, who are now attacking the island, but makes harbour and is welcomed by the Grand Master of the Order, Jean Parisot de Valette.

Renewed Turkish attacks are repulsed, partly as a result of Ramegas' exploit in destroying a new secret weapon of the Turks, a giant elevating cannon.

From this point on all of the original Spanish characters, apart from Ramegas, are silently dropped from the story, and Scott begins to turn his novel into a simple military chronicle of the siege.

Walter Scott's last years were blighted firstly by a series of strokes which greatly impaired his physical and mental powers, and secondly by enormous debts, which he attempted to pay off by writing novels with all the exertion and diligence he could still muster.

[1] On 24 October 1831, shortly before leaving England, Scott mentioned in a letter to his publisher that he proposed to write a novel, at that stage called The Knight of Malta.

[2] His main source for this project was the Abbé de Vertot's History of the Knights of Malta, a book which he had read as a boy, and which he took with him on the voyage.

In 1928, an anonymous contributor to The Scotsman pressed for publication to be considered, and the following year the Scott scholar Sir Herbert Grierson read The Siege of Malta with that end in view, but in the event he advised a publisher against bringing it out.

Some years later a minor English novelist, S. Fowler Wright, also read the manuscript or one of its copies, and then published his own Siege of Malta, which he claimed was "Based on an unfinished romance by Sir Walter Scott".

The author Paul Scott said of The Siege of Malta that "It starts off as a very intelligent, very well written and interesting piece of work, but as it gets towards the end of his life, it begins to fall apart.