The Pirate Queen Read online

  THE PIRATE QUEEN: IN SEARCH OF GRACE O’MALLEY AND OTHER LEGENDARY WOMEN OF THE SEA

  Text © 2004 by Barbara Sjoholm

  Maps © 2004 by Avalon Publishing Group

  Some photos and illustrations are used by permission and are the property of the original copyright owners.

  Published by Seal Press

  A member of the Perseus Books Group

  1700 Fourth Street

  Berkeley, CA 9 4710

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

  Portions of this book appeared in The North American Review, Spring 2003 (“The Lonely Voyage of Betty Mouat”), and in A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe, Seal Press, 2001 (“Halibut Woman”).

  Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-58005-605-2

  9 8 7 6 5

  Designed by PDBD

  Cartographer: Suzanne Service

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  To my mother

  in memoriam

  “I’m going to be a pirate when I grow up,” she cried. “Are you?”

  —Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CROSSING CLEW BAY

  CHAPTER I

  GRACE O’MALLEY’S CASTLE

  Clare Island, Ireland

  CHAPTER II

  THE PIRATE QUEEN

  Clew Bay, Ireland

  CHAPTER III

  AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA CAULDRON

  From Oban to the Pentland Firth

  CHAPTER IV

  RAISING THE WIND

  Kirkwall, the Orkney Islands

  CHAPTER V

  HERRING LASSIES

  Stronsay, the Orkney Islands

  CHAPTER VI

  A MAN’S WORLD

  Stromness, the Orkney Islands

  CHAPTER VII

  ENCHANTMENT

  From the Orkney Islands to the Shetland Islands

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE LONELY VOYAGE OF BETTY MOUAT

  Sumburgh Head, the Shetland Islands

  CHAPTER IX

  SEAGOING CHARM SCHOOL

  Unst and Yell, the Shetland Islands

  CHAPTER X

  HALIBUT WOMAN

  The Faroe Islands

  CHAPTER XI

  AUD THE DEEP-MINDED

  From the Faroe Islands to Iceland

  CHAPTER XII

  CAUGHT IN THE NET

  Reykjavík and the Westmann Islands, Iceland

  CHAPTER XIII

  ICEBERG TRAVEL

  Snæfellsnes Peninsula, Iceland

  CHAPTER XIV

  LEIF’S UNLUCKY SISTER

  Reykjavík and Glaumbær, Iceland

  CHAPTER XV

  A WOMAN WITHOUT A BOAT IS A PRISONER

  Tálknafjördur, Iceland

  CHAPTER XVI

  SEAWIM

  Tjøme, Norway

  CHAPTER XVII

  TROUSER-BERET

  Drag, Norway

  CHAPTER XVIII

  STATUE OF A WOMAN STARING OUT TO SEA

  Norwegian Coastal Voyage

  EPILOGUE

  RETURN TO CLEW BAY

  SOURCES AND NOTES

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Grace O’Malley at the Granuaile Heritage Centre

  O’Malley coat of arms

  Clare Castle

  Carraigahowley (Rockfleet) Castle

  The meeting of Grace O’Malley and Queen Elizabeth I

  Ships caught in the maelstrom off the Norwegian coast

  A witch selling the wind to sailors

  Norna from The Pirate

  Women carrying their husbands out to the fishing boats

  Herring lassies gutting fish

  Three generations of New Haven fishwives

  The Fisherlass

  Mrs. Fraser fought over by rival claimants

  Woman dressed as a sailor

  Seal folk listening to a mermaid’s song

  Betty Mouat on the Columbine

  Betty Mouat rescued by Norwegians

  The women of Trondra were famed for their boatmanship

  Pastor Peter Lorentz Heilmann and wife Flora are joined by Elizabeth Taylor (wrapped in a blanket) in 1901

  Faroese women grading cod on the docks

  Christian slaves in Algiers

  The Islendingur

  Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir with her son Snorri

  Skipper Thurídur

  Thurídur’s cabin

  Women carrying fish from boats, northern Norway, late 1800s

  Sami sewing boat with sinew

  Alfhild the Viking princess

  Alfhild battles Prince Alf

  Fisherman’s wife

  Sea islands

  LIST OF MAPS

  The author’s journey

  Grace O’Malley’s Connaught

  The journey of Aud the Deep-Minded

  The voyages of Freydís and Gudríd

  Steamer route up the Norwegian coast

  The author’s journey

  INTRODUCTION

  CROSSING CLEW BAY

  ONE AFTERNOON in May I found myself in the stern of the Very Likely, a motor launch ferrying me and four other passengers across Clew Bay on the west coast of Ireland. We were bound for Clare Island, where the sea captain, clan chieftain, and pirate Grace O’Malley had lived in the sixteenth century. Born in 1530, Grace grew up to become a rover, a raider, and such a scourge to the English that her name appears regularly in Elizabethan state papers. “This was a notorious woman in all the costes of Ireland,” wrote Sir Henry Sidney in 1583. Another English governor, Lord Justice Drury, called her “a woman that hath impudently passed the part of womanhood and been a great spoiler and chief commander and director of thieves and murderers at sea.” Queen Elizabeth put a price of five hundred pounds on her head.

  The inner reaches of Clew Bay are riddled with hidden reefs and rocks, dotted with hummocks and holms, those small islands that are sometimes exposed and sometimes submerged. Its currents are fierce; any invading force would think twice about trying to navigate it. Grace O’Malley knew it like the back of her hand. She grew up on its shores and for years made Clare Island, just outside the entrance to Clew Bay, her stronghold and base for raiding the coast.

  Her pirate galleys and the English ships that pursued them are long gone, but ferries and launches make the crossing several times a day from Roonagh Pier, on the mainland. I’d just arrived in Ireland from Seattle, and was now on the first of what would be many voyages around the North Atlantic in search of the stories, lost, forgotten or otherwise misplaced, of seafaring women like Grace. It was a brisk, sunny day, and the midday light winked up from the choppy waves like tiny mirrors on an Indian bedspread patterned in aqua and dark green.

  An elderly, tweed-capped gentleman called Paddy leaned over the railing of the Very Likely. The seagulls keened in swoops above, the whitened green water boiled under us, and Paddy clung in misery to my arm. From the small cabin forward his wife called anxiously, “Paddy, if you feel the urge, remember to hold on to your teeth, will you now?”

  He nodded weakly in her direction and confided to me, “I’m not a good sailor. Are you?”

  “Yes, except for the very worst weather.” The short voyage of the Very Likely across the island-flung channel was a heart-leaping, wave-skidding pleasure to me.

  “You’re a seafaring woman then?” Paddy asked.

  Aye, matey! I wanted to say, though kayaking around Lake Union in Seattle and off the rocky coastlines of the Pacific Northwes
t wasn’t exactly like commanding a pirate galley in the North Atlantic. But I’d always loved the ocean, whether I was in it or on it. I’d grown up in Southern California swimming in the ocean, and though I never had a boat, I did have a surfboard. More importantly, I’d always dreamed of ships and the sea. Long Beach was a port city, filled with sailors, tattoo parlors, and blood banks. Our next-door neighbor was a longshoreman; school field trips were to the harbor to watch the cargo being hoisted on and off the ships. Growing up, I liked to read about cabin boys on clipper ships and was much taken by the adventures of Pippi Longstocking, whose father had been a sea captain before he became a cannibal king, and who dreamed of becoming a pirate herself.

  I’d first become interested in Grace O’Malley the year before, while on a writer’s residency in another sea-smashed landscape, Cape Cornwall in England. Passing through London, I’d picked up a book on women pirates. Bold in Her Breeches, edited by British writer Jo Stanley, had a whole chapter on Grace, and it was this pirate who most captured my imagination, for everything she was, and everything she wasn’t. Commanding vessels at sea and a fighting force of two hundred men, engaging in piracy and swordplay, looting, destroying, murdering—the captain of a pirate ship must be, hands down, the most transgressive role to which a woman could ever aspire. Dirty, greedy, sensual, tough, and charismatic; a gambler, a wife, and a mother; a leader of men, a politician when necessary, Grace comes down to us as that rare woman who claimed freedom as her birthright. For to go to sea is to feel that ordinary boundaries cannot hold you; to be a pirate is to assert that whatever you fancy belongs to you. The boldness of Grace’s adventurous life long past youth was something that appealed to me particularly; she had, after all, remained a pirate into her seventies.

  Grace O’Malley was only one among many pirates in Bold in Her Breeches. Jo Stanley had collected material on women as disparate as Alfhild, a Viking princess who commanded a fleet of longships for battle and piracy, the Chinese pirate Cheng I Sao, and Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who plied the trade in the Caribbean in the 1700s. It was Grace O’Malley who interested me most, however, and not just because she was a pirate, but because she was, from all accounts, a great seafarer, and stories of women and the sea were sparse. After reading Anne Chambers’s biography, Granuaile: The Life and Times of Grace O’Melley, I began searching for other stories of seafaring women from the past and was disappointed, though perhaps not surprised, to find so few.

  The scraps I discovered here and there often seemed to be more mythic than historic. Creation stories told of Tiamat, the Babylonian goddess of salt water, whose waters commingled with the fresh waters of her consort, Apsu, to engender all the gods. Norse myths sang of Ran, the sea god’s wife, who captured the drowned and carried them to her watery kingdom. Legends from many northern European countries described underwater creatures—mermaids, seal people, Finfolk—while more recent folklore mentioned “sellers of the wind” and sea witches, who had the power to create storms and calms. The more I poked around in the library, at used bookstores, and on the Web, trying to satisfy this new, consuming interest, the more curious I became. When mythology told us there once had been sea goddesses who ruled the watery depths, why did it seem that women had so rarely rowed and sailed the ocean’s surface? Or, if they had, what had happened to those histories?

  Like most people I’d been raised to believe that women never went to sea, and a glance at some of the best-known anthologies of sea literature bore this out. Their names simply weren’t there. Yet, with just a bit of research, I found references to women who passed at sea as sailors and marines, to fishers and fishwives, to ship owners, stewardesses, and navigators, to wives and daughters who sailed with their families on whalers and merchant ships. Why didn’t their intriguing stories figure more prominently in maritime history and literature?

  I kept looking and found tantalizing fragments in histories, sagas, and old travelogues, fragments that only whetted my appetite. Many of them seemed to come from the European North Atlantic, from Ireland, the British Isles, and Scandinavia. With source materials so hard to obtain from the other side of the world, I decided that to really get a picture of women’s maritime lives in history and myth, it would be far easier to travel there myself than to keep requesting interlibrary loans. I wanted to see those same coastlines I was reading about, to sail those same seas.

  I decided that my pilgrimage would take me, as often by sea as I could manage, from Ireland to Scotland, to Orkney, to the Shetlands, to the Faroes, to Iceland, and finally to Norway. Although many other parts of the world—Africa, Brazil, the Mediterranean countries, and Polynesia—claim sea goddesses, and although women have fished, rowed, swum, and sailed off every inhabited coastline on the planet, I knew that the North Atlantic has an ancient tradition of myth and folklore about the sea, as well as a long, recorded seafaring history. I suspected I was most likely to find written material in the local libraries and bookshops of the British Isles and Scandinavia. Other northern countries—France, Germany, the Netherlands—all with rich mythic and maritime cultures, seemed beyond my ken, language-wise. On the other hand, I read and spoke Norwegian from many visits to that country. I was particularly interested in stories from Norse myths and sagas, as well as the sea-going culture of coastal Norway. It had often struck me in my reading of maritime literature how infrequently Scandinavia was mentioned. Yet the Vikings were some of the greatest sailors in world history, and in times past the Norse influence was strong all through the region I proposed to travel.

  The northern waters were my heritage, too. With a grandfather born in Ireland and a grandmother from Sweden, I sometimes wondered if I carried an inborn love of cold gray waves and blustery winds. I might have grown up under sunny skies, along white sand beaches in Southern California, but there was nothing I liked more than a rocky coast and a howling gale, and I’d settled in the Pacific Northwest as a young woman in part because it had a salt-wet climate and a maritime history.

  I’d once been to sea in the North Atlantic. The summer I was twenty-two I worked as a dishwasher on the Kong Olav, one of the Norwegian coastal steamers that plied the long and tortuous fjord country from Bergen around the North Cape to the Russian border. Every third trip we crossed the Norwegian Sea to Svalbard. Although I’d been far from keen on dishwashing, I’d loved the ship itself, and everything about being at sea. I’d always wanted to take the trip again—as a passenger. I was looking forward to that voyage, at the end of my journey, in late August. Now, however, it was mid-May, and I had leagues and centuries to travel first.

  I’d wanted to begin the trip in Ireland because of Grace O’Malley. She was one of the very few seafaring women to be remembered so heroically in ballad and story. She had castles as her monuments and a growing contemporary interest in her life not only as a pirate, but as a powerful female leader in a fracturing society. Whatever I might find as the weeks went on, Grace would be my touchstone: the one maritime woman who really was remembered, in folklore and song, if not always in the history books.

  Grace O’Malley even had a small museum now—the only one in the world dedicated to a seafaring woman. I’d been there this morning, before embarking on the Very Likely. Dim, mysterious, and cold, the Granuaile Heritage Centre in Louisburgh smelled of cleaning fluids and old carpet. A life-size figure of Grace O’Malley met me at the entrance to the exhibition room. She wore a long auburn wig, like a transvestite, and had a saber in a leather belt slung around her waist. Her arms, in a white shirt with vast sleeves, were arranged awkwardly, as if she were dancing the Swim. Perhaps, over the winter, her posture had slipped. One hand, I was sure, was meant to be shading her brow as she looked into the distance for doubloon-laden galleys to plunder.

  Grace O’Malley at the Granuaile Heritage Centre

  The museum wasn’t yet open for the summer season, but I’d arranged with caretaker Mary O’Malley (a common last name in these parts) to let me in for a look around. Fortyish, quick stepping, with her
cardigan held close around her neck, Mary was apologetic about the state of the museum, which had been closed up since the previous September. The building, a former Anglican church, was unheated and mildewy. The electricity was dodgy. The spotlights on the exhibits kept shorting out. Boxes of post cards and books had yet to be put on shelves. “We need to Hoover! We need to wash windows!” They had so much to do before next week! She explained it all in a hopeless but jolly rush. They were all volunteers here, and very proud of the place.

  “You’ll show yourself around?” she asked. “I’ve a few things to do at home and then I’ll be back.” She sidestepped a pair of tourists who were hammering at the door, “We’re closed, my dears. Come back in June,” and drove off.

  I hadn’t expected to be left to myself here. I walked past erratically lit maps of sixteenth-century Ireland and found myself in front of a model of a typical castle of the time, four stories high, with ramparts and a wall walk. Storage was on the lower floors, and quarters for the chieftain’s family on the upper. Green branches, animal skins, and antlers decorated the whitewashed walls; bits of hay and rushes were strewn about the flagged floor. Along with fireplaces on each level, narrow, recessed windows opened in the thick stone walls. On the ground floor someone had placed a few model sheep and pigs. More sheep and cows ruminated outside, in between the beehive-shaped huts of the clan’s followers and local peasants. These tiny, barefoot figures with disheveled hair milled around in worsted trousers and overshirts.

  This was Ireland in the early sixteenth century, a tribal society that had hardly changed for centuries. Unlike the rest of Europe, where the humanistic ideals of the Renaissance were flourishing and nations were on the rise, Ireland was fragmented into warring fiefdoms, each controlled by a clan. Raiding and cattle stealing were the norm. There was no central government, no head of state who could have gathered the loyalties of the chieftains and parleyed with other European rulers. In the Europe that was shaping itself, this decentralized, tribal society had no chance. The world Grace O’Malley was born into would be almost gone by the end of her lifetime. Paradoxically, it was the very disorder of the sixteenth century that allowed Grace to assume a powerful role that few women in history have matched. As the clan system disintegrated under the increasing colonial control of Henry VIII’s and Elizabeth’s governors, space opened up for an enterprising and wily woman who could play both sides, and keep her own counsel.