The Admiral was a Lady

Author

Geoff Barnes

Subjects

History - general

Tags

Greece, Women, admiral

RAN Ships

None noted.

Publication

December 2023 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)

By Geoff Barnes

 This article first appeared in the Australian National Maritime Museum Newsletter All Hands Issue No 1161 dated September 2021 and is reproduced by kind permission of the editor and the author. Geoff Barnes is a volunteer with both the ANMM and NHS.  

The New Admiral

After reading the promotion orders and pinning on the rank insignia, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt kissed the new admiral – perhaps not standard operating procedure, but perhaps understandable in 1972. The new admiral, Alene B. Duerk, was the first woman in the modern era to be promoted to that rank.

Duerk had been director of the Navy Nurse Corps from 1970. A native of Defiance, Ohio, she was a veteran of World War II, the Korean War and the Viet Nam War. In addition to her combat duty, Duerk had been the first Nurse Corps officer to be assigned as special assistant to the assistant Secretary of Defense for health and environment, from 1966-1967.

Nowadays, it is not surprising to find a female admiral, but two centuries ago, to say the least it was unusual. Was Laskarina Bouboulina Pinotsis the first ever female to achieve this exalted rank?

March 25, 1821 is celebrated as the starting date of a messy and bloody uprising in an inconsequential province of the vast Ottoman colonial empire, and 2021 is the 200th anniversary of that year in which Greece declared its independence from Turkey. One of the Greek Revolutionary heroes celebrated today is Laskarina Bouboulina Pinotsis, the Lady Admiral.

All too frequently we refer to today’s geopolitical borders when discussing yesterday’s history. Contrary to popular opinion, until the Revolution of 1821 there was no country called Greece or Hellas. This gave birth to the concept of a unified ‘Hellas’. Various groups of Hellenic-speaking people now had a national homeland for the first time in history. It became known as ‘Greece’.

The Revolution was both barbarous and heroic, but sometimes had the air of a dark comic opera. It had quite a cast list. The various Hellenic factions were tribal and unforgiving of their neighbours and spent much of the time fighting each other, with a host of cynical opportunists. There were a great many men and women of genuine bravery, but who fought as brigands, ambushed, cut throats and kidnapped, and knew the exact moment when to run away and live to fight another day. There were the militant tourists, a motley collection of mercenaries left over from the Napoleonic wars. There were the Romantics from Europe, like Lord Byron, spawned by the Age of Enlightenment, who wanted to reinstall the Golden Age of Greece. In fact, the chronic disunity and rivalry that had plagued the Greek city-states in the days of Thucydides were to be played out again in this war.

Life Under the Turkish Yoke

For three and a half centuries the region had been ruled over by the Turks. Tribute was paid to the Ottoman Empire and the Sultan in Constantinople. Shared customs, cuisine and wardrobe had long since intermingled vassal and overlord. It was not the severity of the Turkish rule in the Hellenic lands that triggered the revolution, rather it was the laxity, corruption and inefficiency.

There was, of course, the pivotal clash of Islam versus Christianity, both religions confident that God was on their side, but the Turks were never silly enough to attempt a mass conversion. The Orthodox Church was the only institution that bound all Greeks together. The senior positions in the Church were exclusive to the sons of a few privileged Greekfamilies known as Phanariots,  because they had lived for generations in the

Ottoman capital of Constantinople, in the district of Phanar. The Greek Church had often preferred the tolerance of the Moslem rulers to the heresies of the Roman Catholic Church, which it detested.

The Sultans remembered the Western Crusaders, and in later centuries how the Catholic galleys had devastated their fleet at Lepanto. A wary tolerance was the best way to preserve the volatile Greek lands. The inhabitants were rural, tribal and profoundly suspicious of anyone who was not part of their clan. The administration was run by Greeks on behalf of the Turks. These officials were called primates, and they collected taxes, tried to keep the villages and towns in some sort of order, and helped themselves lavishly to the coffers.

One compensation had always been that an enterprising Christian, one way or another, had a chance to dig himself out of poverty. If a tribal chief was powerful enough, the Turks sensibly left him alone.

Failing that, a man could always join the swarms of brigands who lived in the mountains. They were called klephts, and the balladeers made Robin Hood-like heroes out of them. Or he could join the armatoli, a sort-of guerilla police force organised by the Turks for the hopeless task of putting down the klephts. It was often hard to distinguish one from the other. Some were klephts in summer when the weather and pillage was good and armatoli in winter, when it became too cold in the forests. Sometimes they joined forces and cooperated in ravaging the countryside.

The Wine-Dark Sea

There was also the option of becoming a sailor. The Greeks were always better sailors than the Turks, and much of the seaborne trade of the Ottoman Empire was conducted by them. Hellenic sailors could multi-task as fishermen, cargo freighters, and pirates in the good seasons. Sea captains and ship owners could make a handsome fortune.

Then all of a sudden, in 1821, revolts began to break out, spawned by educated members of the urban middle class. The peasants took up their family arms to defend their homes, while men in positions of power laid claims to be the new leaders. Inevitably all tried to lead the revolution in directions that suited their own agendas. The opportunities were there for the klephts, the armatoli, the primates, the tribal chiefs, the Orthodox bishops, the Phanariots and the sea captains.

Laskarina ‘Bouboulina’ Pinotsis

On March 13th 1821, twelve days before the official beginning of the War of Independence, the first ‘revolutionary flag’ was probably raised on the island of Spetses by Laskarina Bouboulina Pinotsis. In the Greek regional rivalry which persists today, it is not surprising that there are other flags which claim to have been first, including Hydra, but Bouboulina’s seems to have the evidence to back it.

Her father was Stavrianos Pinotsis, a sea captain from Hydra. The southern islands of Hydra, Spetses and Psara had a reputation for spawning bold mariners. He was in prison in Constantinople for his role in the failed Orlov revolution (1769–1770) against Ottoman rule. During one of her visits, his wife Skevo gave birth to Bouboulina. When her father died soon after, mother and daughter returned to Hydra, then back to Spetses, where she grew up with her eight brothers and sisters.

Bouboulina married twice, first to Dimitrios Yiannouzas and later the wealthy shipowner and captain Dimitrios Bouboulis, taking his surname. Bouboulis was killed in battle against Algerian pirates in 1811. Then 40 years old, Bouboulina took over his considerable fortune and his trading networks. She had a good head for business, and had four more ships built at her own expense, but in 1816, the Ottomans tried to confiscate Bouboulina’s property because her father Pinotsis has fought for the Russians against the Turks in the Turko-Russian War.

Locked in an ongoing territorial war with the Ottomans, Imperial Russia saw Pinotsis, and subsequently his family, as valued friends of the regime. Bouboulina sailed to Constantinople where she met with the Imperial Russian ambassador Strogonov and sought his protection. In recognition of the family service to the Russians, Strogonov arranged for her to travel in safety to the Russian territory of Crimea.

She did meet with Naksidil Valide Sultan, Sultan Mahmud II’s mother and formidable power-broker behind the throne. Mahmud II was a new-style leader whose Westernising reforms helped consolidate the crumbling Ottoman Empire despite its defeats and losses of territory, and rather than antagonise an influential Greek family, he agreed to leave Bouboulina’s property alone. After three months in exile she was able to return to her home on Spetses.

Plotting the Revolution

It is probable that Bouboulina was a member of the Filiki Etaireia, a secret society that had been preparing for revolution against the Ottoman rule. Although her name is not on the rolls, she certainly shipped in arms and ammunition secretly to Spetses at her own expense, and organised her own band of soldiers and sailors. She also built another new ship, the 18-gun corvette Agamemnon, and bribed the local Turkish officials to ignore the ship’s considerable size. It was launched in in 1820. On 13th March 1821 she raised her own flag on its mainmast, a design probably based on the ancient Komnenos dynasty of the Byzantines, and on April 3rd, Spetses declared independence from the Turks, followed by the islands of Hydra and Psara.

Bouboulina at the Helm

The rebels had some 300 ships available from their fleets. Many were small coastal craft but they were more agile and much better manned than the clumsy Turkish fleets. Agamemnon was the largest warship in the hands of the revolution, and Bouboulina was in personal command of her fleet of eight fighting ships. She was now more than 50 years of age. She sailed to Nafplion and took part in the siege of the huge fortress there. Her later attack on Monemvasia managed tocapture that fortress, and she took part in the blockade of Pylos. In the divided revolutionary forces she became a hero.

The Greeks, led by other heroes like powerbroker Theodorus Kolokotronis from the barren Mani countryside, now controlled the southern Peloponnese region and formed a provisional government with the Phanariot ‘prince’ Alexandros Mavrokordatos as president. Bouboulina arrived at the Peloponnese capital Tripolis in time to witness its fall on 11th September 1821. Here she met with Kolokotronis. Her daughter Eleni Boubouli and his son Panes Kolokotronis would later marry. This would prove to be an ill-fated liaison when factional rivalry once again boiled over.

The Posthumous Admiral  

By June 1822 Athens had fallen to Greek forces but in the Peloponnese the Greeks were now fighting among themselves. When the opposing factions erupted into civil war in 1824, the new Greek government arrested Bouboulina for her family connections with Kolokotronis. Her son-in-law Panes was killed in the fighting, and she was exiled back to Spetses. She had exhausted her fortune and reputation in the cause of independence.

She died in 1825 as the result of a family feud in Spetses. A daughter of the influential Koutsis clan had eloped with one of Bouboulina’s sons, and the head of the Koutsis family and some relatives marched on her home to retrieve the errant girl. Bouboulina confronted them from her balcony. A shot was fired by someone, struck her in the forehead, and she died instantly.

Hearing of Bouboulina’s death the Russian Emperor Aleksander I posthumously awarded her the honorary rank of Admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy. In all of Russian history, she remains the only woman to have ever received the title.

The Battle of Navarino

But by 1826 the Peloponnese region was back in Turkish hands and Athens was one of only a few cities still controlled by the Greeks. By 1827 the Turks had retaken all of Greece with the exception of Nafplion and a few islands. The Greek struggle had been interpreted by many Europeans simplistically and romantically as a battle between the ideals of Classic Greece against the ruthless Turks. Not quite so. The brutal rivalries, the self-interests, the abuses of power and the ruthless struggles for glory and fortune rather dulls the reputation of warlords elevated to heroes of today’s Greek national mythology, but equally Great Britain’s role in supporting a newly independent Greece as part of its economic empire is just as suspect. The Great Powers were now eager to carve up the ailing Ottoman empire for themselves.

The Treaty of London, backed by Britain, Russia and France, declared that the three great powers could intervene ‘peacefully’ to secure the autonomy of the Hellenes. In October 1827 of that year the British, French and Russians demonstrated the power of peaceful intervention when they destroyed the Turkish-Egyptian fleet in the Bay of Navarino in what may have been the world’s biggest and most fatal ‘misunderstanding’. Whether by accident or not, when an Egyptian ship fired on a small boat filled with British sailors, all hell broke loose and when the smoke cleared the entire Turkish-Egyptian fleet was at the bottom of the bay. With the destruction of the Egyptian-Turkish fleet the Greek people of the Hellenes now had a clear path to nationhood and international exploitation and were free to fight amongst themselves.

Reference:

The invaluable book The Greek Adventure, by David Howarth (Collins, 1976).