Katsonis was a familiar type in the Aegean of his century: a fighter who turned the wars of great powers into a vehicle for his own people's struggle. He had taken part in the failed Orlov revolt of 1770, then entered Russian service and rose to officer's rank. When war broke out again between Russia and the Ottomans in 1787, he went to Trieste, recruited Greek crews, and built a fleet to prey on Ottoman shipping. He fortified the little island of Kea as a base and raided from there with an aggression that made him a hero to the Greek islanders and a marked man to the Sultan. He beat a Turkish fleet between Syros and Mykonos, blockaded the Dardanelles, and so unnerved the Ottoman court that they offered him a fortune to stop: a full pardon, an island of his own to rule, and 200,000 gold coins. He refused.

The new Sultan, Selim III, sent a squadron out of the Dardanelles with a single order: find Katsonis and destroy him. Katsonis sailed to meet it, but the wind betrayed him, delaying his ships, and on 17 May the two fleets collided in the channel between Euboea and Andros. The first day favored the Greeks. Then the wind died at nightfall, pinning his ships in place, unable to disengage. At dawn the situation turned catastrophic: a squadron of Algerian xebecs, heavily gunned, arrived to reinforce the Ottomans. Now Katsonis was caught between two fleets, more than thirty ships against his handful, and as his crews began running low on powder, their fire slackened and the enemy closed in to board.

What followed was slaughter. The brig Maria was rammed and taken; another captain blew up his own vessel rather than surrender it. Five ships were destroyed or captured. Katsonis steered his shattered flagship into the harbor of Kea, only to find the Ottoman fleet blockading the entrance, and in the end he set fire to his own ship and escaped by skiff, slipping between the enemy hulls in the dark. His fleet had lost 565 dead. The victors' triumph was savage in turn: prisoners were hanged, decapitated before the Sultan, hunted across Andros for bounty. Yet some islanders hid survivors and smuggled them to safety, among them a young man named Nikolis Apostolis, who would one day become an admiral of free Greece.

The battle should have ended Katsonis. Instead he fled to Ithaca, rebuilt, and within a year commanded twenty-one ships again. Catherine rewarded him with promotion and the Cross of St. George. But the war was ending around him, and when Russia made peace and ordered him to lay down arms, he refused once more. He gathered his ships near Cape Tainaron, where a combined Ottoman and French fleet finally annihilated them. Katsonis escaped even that, fleeing to Russia and a quiet old age in Crimea, the last survivor of a one-man war against an empire.