Archie, as his friends knew him, had been born in 1911 in Izmir -- the only son of a rough-and-ready American marine-mercenary and a beautiful, but sharp-tongued Circassian gypsy ‘princess’. Four years after his father was killed at Gallipoli, he was befriended by the Turkish-born Aristotle Onassis (in his early teens at the time) -- whose influence saved him from a life of petty thievery. Subsequently, the two young men formed a loose association and began buying ships in the early ‘30s. It made Archie a rich man -- though on a much smaller scale than his more famous ‘mentor’ -- before his 24^th birthday.

But, besides his towering interest in making money in every seaport from Beirut to Gibraltar, Archie was also deeply attracted to the history of the Ottoman Empire between 1300 and 1600 -- and was a ‘legitimate’ (though self-trained) Turkish-language ‘expert’ (much more so than this editor). His love of the language encompassed modern Turkish, but also Osmanlica -- and it seems he became familiar with the Arabic script just so he could decode the original Stefano/Habibullah Arabic manuscript into Osmanlica (thence into modern Turkish, and finally into English).

Exactly how the original Arabic manuscript got into Archie’s hands is not well-known to me. His cryptic notes about its acquisition are attached to what appear to be cash-receipts (three in Arabic, two in Greek, and one in Russian) -- which suggests, to me at least, an illegal transaction of some sort. In that regard, the names of the distinguished Turkish writer/scholar Ziya Görkalp (who died in 1924) and three of his associates (a Syrian, an Egyptian, and a Jew) keep cropping up. I also don’t know the current location of the Arabic/Osmanlica/Turkish manuscripts. This is distressing because fresh translations of any of them, in light of recent Ottoman Empire archival discoveries, would no doubt bear delicious fruit! I am still investigating these matters. Grandfather did leave me a trail -- a twisting winding one, to be sure -- but a trail, nonetheless. And as I discover more, I’ll add it to the public record.

As for this first episode from the Stefano/Habibullah Memoirs -- that I’ve taken the liberty of naming "Habibullah and the Great Cannon Caper" -- a few brief comments. Firstly, I’ve left the translated text almost exactly as grandfather Kenglo wrote it. For the most part, I’ve done no more than add the occasional clarifying footnote and to modernize some of grandfather’s phrasing and word selection. In only one instance, where he let his anachronistic 20^th century knowledge sneak into Stefano’s 16^th Century mouth, have I made what might be called a real revision -- though I have included his original translation as a footnote.