She Captains

Agrippa, on the other hand, had only four hundred craft, but in addition to the same armory that Antony’s fleet carried, many of his ships were fitted with a harpex, or catapult grapnel, which he had already employed with huge success in a sea battle against his patron’s rival, Sextus, the previous year. This was a timber fitted with ringbolts and

Mainland Europeans regarded Scotland as a poor and infertile country, populated by near-barbarians who were hostile to foreigners and obsessed with honor and revenge. A nuncio from the Vatican City called it “the arse of the world.”

Queen Aud, widow of Olaf the White, the proclaimed king of Dublin, led a navy from the Western Isles of Scotland to colonize Iceland. Hers was an extremely well-organized expedition, each longship towing another ship laden with livestock such as cattle. An English princess, Æðelflæd, “Lady of the Mercias,” was prominent enough in battle to merit ad

Hatshepsut built a grand temple at Deir el-Bahri, complete with wonderful bas-reliefs which illustrate and document one of her greatest achievements, a trading voyage to Punt, a country on the African coast below the Red Sea. Intricately captioned, the carved vignettes detail not just what the people said (“Watch your step!” is carved over the stev

Herodotus called this collection of plain, unvarnished facts History, which in Greek means “inquiry,” and so written history was born.

In Japan, they used to tell of a beautiful pearl fisher named Tokoyo who saved her father from a long and cruel exile in the Oki Islands. Single-handedly, she sailed a coracle to find him, and then as ransom for his freedom she killed the evil god Yofune-Nushi. Like Beowulf, the Icelandic hero, she dived into the roaring deep to meet and murder her

Fourteen centuries later, Cleopatra was not so lucky. After three years of joint rule with her brother, she was deposed and sent into exile. Instead of taking this tamely, she assembled an army and turned to the most accessible powerful Roman for help.