Laskarina Bouboulina

With her own little fleet of warships, including the Agamemnon, a corvette with eighteen heavy cannons, Laskarina Bouboulina was a rich widow who loved the sea and is sometimes called a “pirate queen.” The only woman member of the underground revolutionary organization that overthrew the Turks' Ottoman Empire, Bouboulina was the one who raised the rebel flag on March 13, 1821, to signal the beginning of the revolt that ultimately freed the Greeks for the first time in seven centuries. Attacking the impregnable fort at Nafplion, through a rain of bullets, her solders fell back at one point only to hear her shout, “Are you women, then, and not men? Forward!" And they pressed on.