High life
Captains courageous
Taki
ouboulina is a Greek heroine of our war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. She was born in an Istanbul jail while her mother was visiting her father, who had been imprisoned by the Turks for having followed Admiral Orlof when the Russian prince made his premature move against the Sultan.
By a strange coincidence, Bouboulina:s mother married a sea captain by the name of Orlof after her husband died in jail. The sea captain was a Greek from Spetsai, and there are still a lot of Orlofs living on the island at present. By an even stranger quirk of fate, Bouboulina herself was killed — some say murdered — by her half- brother, Lazaros Orlof, after an argument over family matters. Before her death, however, she had spent her vast fortune (sea captains back then were richer than ship-owners were ten years ago) in building ships to fight against the Ottomans, ships that she personally captained, incidentally.
Her flagship was the Agamemnon, a boat that ran circles round the Turkish fleet in the Peloponnese, and from which she led many successful attacks against the Sultan's sailors. She retired almost penni- less to Spetsai in 1825, and died three months later. There are a few streets named after her in Greece today, and a rather ugly statue of her off the main square in Spetsai, but otherwise her de- scendants have not exactly been taken care of by the state in the style in which it cares for its politicians and civil servants.
Bouboulina was a member of the `Filiki Etereia', a group of Greeks living outside occupied Hellas who financed the war of independence. So was an ancestor of mine, and I guess this is why in Spetsai last weekend I took the side of an Orlof against a bunch of ship-owners.
Spetsai is located some 60-odd miles south of Athens, a distance I can cover in less than two hours on my old man's gin palace, which can cruise at 35 knots. Last week I packed the boat with friends and headed down to visit my English buddies, some of whom own houses on the island. Spetsai and its environs attract the best as well as the ghastliest of foreigners. There are people like the Russells, the Trees and the Deons, and then there are some people whom even the gutter wouldn't accept. Needless to say, I visited the former, namely Alexander Russell and his bride of one year, Libby Manners.
The only trouble with Alexander is that he's too generous. (He's half Greek, and that's where the generosity comes from.) He plied me with so much drink that by the time I left his house my sailors had to help me stand upright. Worse, the boat was anchored in the old harbour, a stone's throw from a nightclub called Figaro. Leonidas Goulandris, a man who could impoverish Paul Getty were the latter a friend of his, insisted we go for one last one. So off we went to the Figaro, a rather expensive decision as it turned out.
As I don't remember most of the details, I will not bore you with them, but I do recall receiving a bill of about £900 for three bottles of whisky. Being too drunk to protest, I simply remained in my seat while some of my friends made vague signs of displeasure. Finally I told the management to come round to the boat in the morning to collect their blood money.
The waiter who had presented me with the bill was a local boy by the name of Orlof. He is of the family I mentioned previously. The next day he cheerfully informed us that he had made a mistake, and presented me with a normal bill. Soon after some vulgarians arrived and asked me to tell the police about the bill of the night before. I asked them why, and they told me that they had been overcharged and were trying to recover their loot. That is when I became Hamlet. My ambivalence, however, did not go over big with the vulgarians. Just come and tell the truth, they wailed. So I did. I testified that I had not been overcharged, and that Orlof had more integrity than all his accusers put together. End of case.
So, now I've once again made more friends among the parvenus in Spetsai, and once again I learned the difference be- tween lying and withholding the truth. I certainly didn't commit the former, and anyone related to Bouboulina certainly deserved the latter. If Greece were a proper country, the parvenus would be wearing the white jackets, not Orlof.
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