One morning in 529 b.c., in an encampment on the Volga River, north of the Caspian Sea, Tomyris, Queen of the Massagetae, woke up to find herself a widow, a tricky situation. The Massagetae, a mighty tribe of watermen and warriors, were under siege by Persian forces led by Cyrus the Great, a tyrant whose ambition to control the whole of Asia from the Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean was almost fulfilled. Cyrus's conquests stretched from Greece to India and from Babylon to Lydia (now Turkey), and it was just the Massagetae that barred his path to the north.

Queen Tomyris was probably not at all surprised when the news of her husband's death led to a prompt proposal of marriage from the Persian monarch. Obviously, to Cyrus the Great a convenient wedding would seem an easy path to domination of the tribe. She flatly refused, understanding his reasons, so Cyrus ordered that the mighty Volga River be bridged with boats, while his marines and cavalry prepared for battle. Seeing this, Tomyris decided to negotiate, offering terms to which Cyrus pretended to agree. Before he withdrew his forces, however, he gave orders for a great feast of roasted meat and unwatered wine to be left in his abandoned encampment. The Massagetae warriors fell for the trick, eating and drinking so heavily that they became stupefied, and easy victims for the Persians, who stealthily returned in the night.

Furious at this treachery, Tomyris sent Cyrus a message in which she vowed "by the sun, the lord of the Massagetae, that for all you are so insatiate of blood, I will give you your fill thereof." And she was as good as her word. They met on another battleground, and this time her forces prevailed. Cyrus was killed. As soon as the dust had settled Queen Tomyris personally searched the battlefield for his corpse. Then she chopped off the Persian king's head and triumphantly plunged it into a bag of human blood.

Thus runs just one of the ancient lost tales of the powerful women of the rivers and seas -- the female maritime heroes. Nowadays, "hero" is an unequivocally masculine noun meaning "a man distinguished for bold enterprise." Yet Hero was a legendary priestess whose lover, Leander, swam across the Hellespont to join her every night, guided by a beacon in her window. One night, a storm blew the lantern out, and Leander drowned. Distraught, Hero cast herself into the sea, the first in the long line of women who star in the old magic legends of maritime lore.

They are stories that span the world. Like the siren sea nymphs of Greek mythology who would have lured the Greek pirate-hero Odysseus to destruction on the rocks if he had not been forewarned by the sorceress Circe, the fox fairies of Chinese folklore were dangerously seductive to susceptible seafarers. The Greeks also told stories of the Amazons -- a race of tough and beautiful battlers who were allied with Troy in the Trojan War -- while the Norse bards sang of the Valkyria, the warrior-handmaidens of Valhalla. 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 foe -- an impressive sea monster with writhing, serpentine shape, phosphorescent scales, fiery eyes, and many tiny, waving legs -- and at the same time retrieved a statue of the emperor that Yofune-Nushi was holding hostage. She did not wait for a man to do it; Tokoyo did it all by herself.

In the third century b.c., another kind of maritime heroine flowered in the East. The beautiful Princess Sanghamitta boarded a ship to sail from her homeland to meet the king of a deeply forested and very mountainous island. She was the daughter of the great King Dharmasoka of India, and the island was Sri Lanka, which in times to come was occasionally known as Ceylon.

Princess Sanghamitta was following in the footsteps of her brother, Prince Mahinda. King Dharmasoka was a fervent Buddhist who felt a great desire to share his faith. When the king of Sri Lanka had heard of this, he decided it would be diplomatic to ask for a missionary to come to the people of his island. As the request came from a fellow ruler, King Dharmasoka sent Prince Mahinda. Princess Sanghamitta's brother did such a good job that the women of Sri Lanka wanted a female to teach them this new philosophy, so, of course, the appropriate emissary was Princess Sanghamitta.

She carried a precious gift, a rooted sapling of the tree that had sheltered the Buddha when he had experienced his great enlightenment. This made a wonderful impression on the waiting crowd, the Sri Lankan king himself wading waist deep to carry the sapling ashore on his head. Indeed, it was so solemn and marvelous that Princess Sanghamitta's ship was turned into a shrine. The men lifted up the entire craft and carried it to shore, then built three temples about it, focused on the stem, mast, and rudder. And so, be cause of a pretty princess with a persuasive gesture, Buddhism is the national religion of Sri Lanka.

Thus it can be seen that women were as distinguished for bold enterprise as their male equivalents. The rivers and beaches and seas were equal-opportunity spheres back then. It was not until the Victorians rewrote the old legends that women became pictured as weak and frail and witless, in great need of the gallantry of bearded sailors and the kisses of handsome princes, and it was not until the time of Disney that pirates became jolly, and nymphs and mermaids were guarded by smiling dolphins. Before that, all over the world, maritime women were proper heroines -- heroines who are now almost forgotten. Their stories, at one time passed down from generation to generation, ritually related by bards and old grandmothers, now need rescuing, and that is the intent of this book.

Their narratives need investigation as well as retelling. How true are the tales of heroines like Tokoyo, Queen Tomyris, and Princess Sanghamitta? The perception of female roles in folklore has changed so much that disbelief is the rule. The tendency is to dismiss such yarns as exaggerations, fairy stories, superstitions, and allegories handed down in the unverifiable ramblings of old men and women, at one with the legends of Olympus and Valhalla. Yet, that is how the recording of events began -- in the spoken word. What is required is not blanket disbelief, but a sifting of myth from reality, and that is the intention here, too.

For example, while the evil god Yofune-Nushi is unlikely to have existed, it is quite plausible that a woman who dived every day for pearls could have retrieved a precious artifact from deep in the sea and used it to ransom her father. Documentary evidence can be very persuasive, too, even if just in the form of pictures. Although the actuality of Amazons is doubted by some, their images appear so often in classical Greek sculpture and earthenware that it seems very likely that they did indeed exist. Some scholars have even pinpointed their territory, beside the Black Sea and just to the westward of Massagetae lands where Queen Tomyris ruled.

Princess Sanghamitta was real. While the three shrines that were built about her ship have been crumbled away by time, the tree she carried still stands, the oldest historically documented tree in the world. Indeed, it has its own military guard. Her story remained oral history until the first century b.c., when the Buddhist monks of Sri Lanka included it in a historical preface to the Buddha's teachings, called "the Mahavamsa of the ancients." And vengeful Queen Tomyris, who sank the head of Cyrus the Great in a bag of human blood, was an actual person, too. We know this because her story was documented by the father of history, Herodotus.

Herodotus was a Greek, born about 484 b.c. in Halikarnassos on the Aegean Sea, now Bodrum, in Turkey. For some reason, perhaps because he was banished for political machinations, he became a well-heeled and leisured wanderer, traveling throughout Greece and the Aegean, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and the northern coast of the Black Sea. Everywhere he went, he studied the people, observed their habits and customs, and made note of the tales they told. Then, in the middle of the century, he settled down to write a record of "astonishing and heroic achievements," in particular an account of the conflicts of the Greeks with the Persians. It is the earliest known creative work in prose.

Herodotus was more than a mere raconteur, for not only did he make an effort to get the facts right if he could, but he wrote without preconceptions or bias. "Many stories are related of Cyrus' death," he wrote at the end of his recounting of Queen Tomyris's story; "this, that I have told, is the worthiest of credence." Herodotus called this collection of plain, unvarnished facts History, which in Greek means "inquiry," and so written history was born. And, in the spirit of the first historian, this book sets out to relate, investigate, and document the stories of the "she captains" -- the women distinguished for bold enterprise in the history of the sea.