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- Santa Cruz – Although his victory was marred by his execution of all the French prisoners in contravention of the rules of war, Philip II made him “Captain-General of the Ocean.”
- Rajendra Chola – To complete the task begun by his father, Rajendra led an amphibious invasion of Sri Lanka in 1018, wreaking havoc and overthrowing the ruling Sinhala dynasty.
- Leif Erikson – Back in Greenland, Leif’s father proved “unreceptive” to the muddled Christian faith, but Leif did manage to convert his mother. When Eric the Red passed, Leif took over as chieftain of the Greenland holdings.
- Laskarina Bouboulina – Inheriting the trading business and family fortune, she used the money to build and outfit warships, including the ‘Agamemnon,’ one of the largest in the Mediterranean.
- Joaquim Marques Lisboa – At 20, he was given command of a decrepit schooner and engaged, but was captured by the Argentine warship ‘Patagonia.’ Repatriated home, in 1840 Lisboa was promoted to captain-de-fragata and in 1847 to full captain.
- Horacio Nelson – first saw action in the West Indies during the American Revolution, beating up on hapless and outgunned Spanish ships and towns. But American independence had the Royal Navy facing cutbacks, and Nelson returned to England on indefinite leave and half-pay.
- Grace Hopper – Grace was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance computation project at Harvard, where she was part of the programming staff working on the “Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator,” better known as the Mark I computer.
- Gaius Duilius – But when Scipio Asina managed to get himself captured at the battle of the Lipari Islands, Gaius Duilius was suddenly in command of the whole fleet… or what remained of it.
- Francis Drake – Since the family obviously couldn’t support useless mouths, he was eventually apprenticed to a merchant sailing the coastal waters between England and France; with a gift for navigation, he was soon recruited.
- Clancy Fernando – At the time Fernando took command of the navy, the government was locked in a long-running struggle with the Liberation Tigers, which sought to create a separate and independent state for the Tamil people in the northern portion of the island.
- Ching Shin – Shi soon took a hand in the pirate operations, and together with Zheng they built it into an imposing 200 ships. As the piracy became ever more successful, the Red Flag Fleet fissioned into others.
- Chester Nimitz – Graduating from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, seventh in his class, he was assigned to the battleship USS ‘Ohio’ and actually met Admiral Tōgō when it visited Japan.
- Franz von Hipper – He was at that post when that minor brouhaha broke out among the great European powers in August 1914. For the rest of his career, Franz (now “von”) Hipper would battle the British for control of the North Sea.
- Artemisia – When the Persians approached the reinforced Greek forces under Themistocles, she was the only Persian commander to advise against attacking, urging patience instead.
- Themistocles – Even as the Persians rolled over the Spartans and Thespians at Thermopylae and advanced on Athens, Themistocles lured the Persian fleet into the narrow confines of the Straits at Salamis.
- Togo Heihachiro – As Japanese ground forces laid siege to the city, Tōgō readied his ships for the arrival of the Russian Baltic Fleet, which had sailed halfway round the world to reach the war.
- Yi Sun-Sin – The kobukson was the first ironclad in civilization, its upper deck covered in armored plates, armed with cannons, with smoke pots to obscure the ship. Just in time for the Japanese invasions that commenced in 1592.
- Zheng He – Ritually castrated, he was trained as an imperial eunuch and assigned to the court of Zhu Di, the bellicose prince of Yan.
