A family yacht with a delicate sensitivity.
Dear Homo Sapiens, There is no need to continue reading this page.
What follows is intended for search engine robots and spiders and not necessarily for human beings.
Further information concerning family yachts cruising Turkey and Greece may be obtained by clicking
on the maroon links immediately above. Thank You. Are you by any chance planning a family
holiday? A sailing holiday? A family sailing holiday perhaps cruising the coast of Turkey and among
neighboring Aegean islands of Greece? A family sailing holiday at the crossroads of history? A family
sailing holiday with history and geography texts as well as with swimsuits and snorkeling gear? If so,
you've found the right web page because here we're dealing with a bareboat sailing yacht ideally
suited to families with youngsters, a yacht which is easy to handle and comfortable to live aboard.
And do we have history!!! History was practically invented here, and the first history text was written
here. Written by Herodotus at Hallicarnassus, now Bodrum, Turkey, and entitled, what else, entitled
History!!! That was hundreds of years after our Homer, born on our island of Chios, recounted
the Iliad and the Odyssey. We've had the Peloponnesian War fought in our waters,
Alcibiades and Lysander the protagonists. We've had Alexander the Great. He fought his way along our
shores, besieging Halicarnassus among other of our centers of history. We've had Julius Caesar. He
studied at our |
School of Rhetoric in Rhodes
and later dispatched one of our local Robin Hoods. We've had Cleopatra. She holidayed here. Brought
along her barges and minions, too. We've had Crusaders, the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem in their
crimson tunics with white crosses, sailing crimson-hulled black-prowed galleys. We've had corsairs by
the dozens, among them the Barbarossa brothers one of whom became Lord High Admiral of the Ottoman Navy.
And we've had a multitude of others who people the pages of history, all of them cruising our shores
and among our offshore islands just as you contemplate doing. One of these others was Gabriele
Boisbaudran des Chambres. What a name! Must have been French. Yes, he was a French knight of the
aforementioned Order of Saint John, then ensconced at Malta. At the pinnacle of a career as a corsair
(pirate with a letter of marque from a sponsoring government) and following twelve years as a prisoner
of (Barbary) corsairs, he was appointed commander of the Order's galleys in December 1642. He appeared
here for the first time in April of 1644 with two of the Order's galleys seeking easy prey and finding it
along our Karamanian coast near Kekova Roads. But easy prey is not worthy of our consideration three and a
half centuries later. It was his next visit in September of the same year, this time with six galleys,
corsairs among them, that earned him a measure of historic notoriety. Still searching for easy pickings,
south of Rhodes he came upon a convoy bound from Istanbul to Alexandria in Egypt, the convoy consisting of
a 1000-ton galleon (an ungainly four-masted sailing ship) loaded with timber
and pilgrims headed for Mecca, two smaller sailing merchantmen, and seven caiques. They were all taken or
sent to the bottom after protracted resistance and with considerable Maltese loss, including our friend
Boisbaudran who took a musket ball in the chest while boarding the galleon. Among those found on board the
galleon was Sunbullu Aga, the Chief Black Eunuch and administrator of the Ottoman Sultan's harem. Reported to
have been close to the Sultan's favorite concubine Turan Hatice, a Ukrainian, he perished during the battle
with more than two hundred other Turks. Among three hundred-odd prisoners were thirty women and a child not
yet four years of age, a boy in fine raiment. You may guess at the drift of this small chapter in history
should you wish; it is not an anecdotal report on a late-medieval sea marauder. As there was considerable
treasure
aboard the galleon in addition to the
large number of captives, the Maltese took course for home, stopping en route at Kali Limenes (meaning
Good Harbor, where Saint Paul while himself a prisoner "came unto a place called The Fair Havens" -
Book of The Acts Of The Apostles, Chapter 27). On the south coast of Crete, it was at Kali Limenes that the
corsairs took on fresh water and provisions. All of Crete at the time was Venetian, as were Kythera and
Cephalonia, the next corsair stops, and Venice was at peace with the Ottoman Empire. It was not long
before the Sultan in Istanbul, Ibrahim The Mad of the House of Osman, invited the Venetian ambassador to
drop by the palace and to bring an explanation with him. The ambassador had no explanation, neither for
the Maltese nor for their visits to Venetian territory. Ibrahim The Mad was furious, and that,
reports have it, is an understatement. He was so consumed by rage he set in motion the wheels of war, a
war not just with the Order of Saint John, but a war with Venice for Crete. It was a war which lasted
twenty-five years from 1645 to 1670 and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Was this war a consequence of
the loss of the Chief Black Eunuch, a member of the Sultan's household staff? Or a consequence of the number
of Turkish dead? Or was it, as George W. Bush once asserted in reference to Iraq, a family affair? The boy
taken from the galleon was raised a Christian. His name was changed by his captors from Osman to Domenico,
and two decades later he became Padre Domenico Ottomano, a Dominican priest. So this is a story not about
a sea marauder who lost his life but rather it is a story about a war and about a boy said to be the elder
brother of the Sultan's son and successor Mehmet IV. It is a story about the tragic consequences of a random
act of crusading activity, a story with vague parallels in the twenty-first century. Contact Charter
Yachts Turkey today at