A small Royal Navy squadron was sweeping the Aegean for submarines: the light cruiser HMAS Sydney under Royal Australian Navy Captain John Collins, and five destroyers - Ilex, Hyperion, Hero, Hasty, and Havock. At about 0730 the destroyers spotted two unfamiliar silhouettes in the haze. They were the Italian light cruisers Bartolomeo Colleoni and Giovanni delle Bande Nere, the 2nd Cruiser Division under Vice-Admiral Ferdinando Casardi, en route to garrison the Italian-held islands of Leros. Sydney was twenty miles north, off on her own search. The destroyers turned and ran, drawing the Italians northward. Casardi gave chase, smelling easy prey. He was being herded.

Sydney saw the Italians at 0826 and opened fire three minutes later. The Italian cruisers wheeled southwest, hoping to break clear, but the Cretan coast pinned them - they could not turn south without running aground. Their speed advantage shrank with every mile. At 0923 a 6-inch shell from Sydney punched through Bartolomeo Colleoni's unarmored hull and detonated near her boilers. Steam screamed from her funnels. Her engines died, her main guns fell silent, and she lay drifting in the chop. Her secondary 100-millimeter battery kept firing for thirty-six more minutes. Her crew did not stop trying. Captain Umberto Novaro stayed on his bridge as the ship slowly heeled. At 0959 torpedoes from Ilex and Hyperion finished her, and she rolled under. Sydney pursued Bande Nere until she ran low on ammunition - one Italian shell punched a hole through her forward funnel that the ship would carry like a bullet wound for the rest of her career - then turned for home.

Of Bartolomeo Colleoni's roughly 670 men, 555 survived. One hundred and twenty-one did not. The British destroyers picked up Italian sailors from oil-streaked water all afternoon, the same destroyers that had hunted them an hour before. Captain Novaro, mortally wounded by a shell splinter, was taken aboard HMS Hyperion and given the dignity of medical care from his enemies. He died on 23 July, four days after his ship. The story of Sydney saluting his coffin as it was transferred ashore has become part of how both navies remember Cape Spada - a moment when the brutal arithmetic of cruisers and torpedoes briefly made room for something else. None of this brought back the men sleeping at the bottom of the Aegean. Their names are inscribed on the Italian naval memorial in Brindisi.

Cape Spada is a finger of pale limestone cliff at the western end of the Rodopou peninsula, the northernmost point of western Crete. From the cape today you can see across the Gulf of Kissamos to the smaller Gramvousa peninsula, with the Aegean stretching to a flat blue horizon where the battle unfolded. Less than a year after Cape Spada, German paratroopers would fall on Crete itself, and Sydney's sister ships would be running fugitives back to Alexandria under Stuka attack. The hull of Bartolomeo Colleoni still rests somewhere beneath that horizon, never recovered. HMAS Sydney was lost with all 645 hands off Western Australia in November 1941, sunk by the German raider Kormoran. Cape Spada was her finest hour and her crew would not survive long enough to see the war's end.