"Ouch" --Me
Laskarina Bouboulina ~ you're never too old to gar started as a naval commander.
Laskarina Bouboulina proved that you're never too old to gar started as a naval commander. She was 40 years old, twice widowed, the mother of seven children, single, and ready to mingle by the time she set about building up her shipping empire.
Laskarina was born in 1771 inside a prison in Istanbul where her mother was visiting her father, who had been jailed for his participation in a 1770 independence uprising against the Ottoman Empire.
The family hailed from the Greek island of Hydra and like most Greeks in maritime communities they were skilled sailors. Laskarina was a hard drinker and, as the story goes, so ugly the only way she could get laid was to point a pistol at a man and threaten him. What is the truth of it and what is the locker room talk of sexually rejected men, we will never know. Laskarina's second husband, Dimitri Bouboulis, from whom she got the name Bouboulina, died in 1811 in battle with pirates, a leading cause of death in the day.
He had four ships to his name, which she took over and began to build up into a formidable fleet, crowned by the massive warship Agamemnon, evoking the Trojan War. Laskarina and her fellow Greeks had been preparing for another independence uprising for years as part of the innocently named underground organisation 'The Friendly Society'. She recruited a private army of men from the island of Spetses, and spent the fortune she had inherited from her husbands on feeding and paying her men.
Laskarina had also been secretly amassing arms and reeping them in her house. Imagine an Ottoman ofcial coming to inspect this middle-aged Greek mother's home and finding the building blocks for a private army. 'Oh, these? Oh no, just a hobby, don't mind silly old me!'
When the Greeks rose up in their bloody bid for independence, Laskarina commanded her ships all round the Greek islands, fighting in key blockades and battles and sieges of Turkish forts, and assisting Greek forces wherever they were.
Though outnum-bered, the Greeks were better sailors and a mighty match for the Ottomans. When sea battles weren't enough for her, Laskarina came ashore to fight the revolution on horseback.
When the Greeks captured the town of Tripolis, Laskarina negotiated a prisoner swap with the defeated Turkish commander in order to save the lives of the Turkish women and children of the harem of the Ottoman governor Hourshid Pasha.
She had made a promise years earlier to the mother of the Sultan that she would protect Turkish women in need, in exchange for returning her confiscated fortune. And so in the midst of a war marked by brutal massacres of civilians, she commanded her soldiers not to harm these women and children, warning them that, 'Whoever attempts to do so will have first to pass over my dead body. The women and children were safely evacuated.
The Greek War of Independence lasted from 1821 until 1832 and resulted in an independent Greek state, but Laskarina wouldn't survive to see it.
After all her daring feats at sea and on the battle-field, Laskarina was killed in 1825 in a family dispute, when her son ran off with the daughter of another family and someone shot her.
It just goes to show that no amount of revolutionary spirit and battle experience can save a person from their family drama.
Source ~ 100 Nasty Women of History ~ Ann Shen
Amor fati....In love with one's fate in which all that has happened should be embraced whether the good things or the suffering.They should all be embraced without any regrets.
“I think that no matter how old or infirm I may become, I will always plant a large garden in the spring. Who can resist the feelings of hope and joy that one gets from participating in nature’s rebirth?” Edward Giobbi
Vincent Van Gogh - Memory of the Garden at Etten, (Ladies of Arles) 1888.
"My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am."--Anaïs Nin
You look like you smell of honey and no pain let me have a taste of that
-Rupi Kaur
"If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or, "I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore…" Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down." Ray Bradbury - (speech to Brown University).
Laura Knight - A Dark Pool, 1918.