The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  Still, after dinner as I went to my room, and laid out my journal and books, I wondered at my hesitancy. Why hadn’t I made larger claims for women’s connection with the sea? I was still uncertain, I supposed, what that might mean. Had we only stood on shore, waving goodbye? How many female captains, sailors, fishers could there have been? How many myths would it take to make a satisfying statistic? Instead of looking through my notes, as I’d meant to, and describing what I’d seen today, I opened the red door of my room, and went out to the thick, whitewashed wall at the cliff’s edge. The sun was setting, familiarly, in the west. Even though I’d grown up on the Pacific, not the Atlantic, my travels over the years in maritime Europe had always pointed me in the direction of my childhood ocean view. The clouds had a stronger whiff of rain now, blood orange and carmine against the flame-blue sky.

  It was easy for me to imagine young Grace scanning the same horizon I had when young, for, though she looked toward what would become Canada and I toward Japan, neither country was visible; there were only waves and more waves.

  The ocean off Long Beach, California, was already much tamed when I came along midcentury. There was a breakwater and a port; the shoreline had been reshaped in places and over the years much more of that would happen, as the city struggled to overcome its tawdry amusement park image and attract back those who’d fled to the suburbs. Nevertheless, to me the ocean was a vast wilderness of water, especially compared with Alamitos Bay, where I often spent summer days when I was small. The bay was the baby beach, separated from the ocean by a thin peninsula of sand, a road with houses on either side. That strip of dividing land was like a curved arm, and in the warmth of that embrace my younger brother and I spent long days splashing in the shallow waters of the bay or making sandcastles on the shore. My mother and her two good friends, Vina and Eleanor, sat under an umbrella, gossiping and keeping an eye on all us children through harlequin-tipped sunglasses.

  The mothers didn’t like to go to the real beach across the road. It was windier, for one thing, and a long, hot trek down to the water’s edge. The waves, though subdued by the breakwater, were tall to a child. But once I reached a certain age, six perhaps, I begged relentlessly to go to the real beach, at least part of the day. I relished the cold slap of the Pacific in my face, loved to feel lifted off my feet and carried into shore by the waves. I even loved—though this was frightening too—to be dragged back into the sea by a powerful force, the most powerful natural force I’d ever known.

  The ocean was huge and even as a child I loved that hugeness and didn’t fear it. The salt water was less a bridge than a world between worlds. If you were a fish, you could swim to Japan. If you were a mermaid, it would be your home. But all this, my mother, raised in the Midwest, swimming and canoeing the Michigan lakes, didn’t understand. The ocean for her was a closed door, the end of the road. She stood on the shore, up to her ankles, complaining that the water was freezing and she just couldn’t understand how the Pacific could be so cold when it was ninety-five degrees in the shade, for goodness sake. She splashed her arms and legs, but not her face or hair, and returned to towel and book, with the firm injunction to me to watch my little brother, and for neither of us to go in too deep or too far.

  But deep and far was just where I’d longed to go.

  THE NEXT morning the Americans were already gone. After breakfast I set off for a walking tour of the island. It was wet but not raining; rills and streams trickled through lumpy fields. Before the Great Famine two thousand people had lived on Clare, and these had been their potato fields. The hills and trenches were grown over now, and turf had spread over the fields, making the landscape resemble a series of rusty-green bundles placed in rows. Bright marsh marigolds were abundant, and wild yellow iris shot up from boggy rivulets. A pair of peregrine falcons soared overhead. Near the few houses along the road bloomed raspberry lipsticks of fuchsias, white-pink rhododendrons, and purple foxgloves. Clare Island had 150 inhabitants now. During the era when the O’Malleys and their retainers summered here, the land must have teemed with cows, for the Irish clans counted wealth in castles and cattle, and in her heyday Grace owned a thousand head.

  After a few hours I arrived down at the harbor and the castle. The square little fortress had looked better from the sea. Some sheep grazed outside on the grassy headland. Inside, the ground floor was dark and rubbishy with beer cans littering the dirt floor. Irish castles were originally the idea of the Norman invaders in the twelfth century; the warring Gaels continued the tradition of military strongholds in which the tower kept enemies out. These castles were the essence of romance: four or five stories high, rounded or square, with slit windows from which to shoot arrows. Some had turrets and crenellations. Family life took place upstairs, where the thick walls were kept whitewashed and hung with skins and furs to keep out the cold.

  Clare Castle

  But this castle had a sour, fusty smell, the mortared walls pee-stained and scarred with initials. The stone stairs that led to the rooms above had broken off at head level; a ladder lay in several pieces below. Even with the diorama from the Granuaile Heritage Centre in my mind’s eye, it was hard to imagine the castle and outbuildings full of life, as the O’Malley clan entertained friends, relatives, and wandering bards and feasted on mead, buttermilk, oatmeal, mutton, game, and wild garlic. I tried to picture young Grace running through the yard, into the castle, shouting that there were ships entering Clew Bay, and could she sail out with her father and his men and attack them? I tried to imagine her living upstairs as a newly widowed sea captain, plotting her future at a window that overlooked the harbor. But—perhaps it was the smell—I couldn’t. The castle seemed less sinister than neglected, hardly a fitting memorial to Clare Island’s most famous past inhabitant.

  Castles often look more romantic from a distance, just as meals of oatmeal and buttermilk or mead and mutton were perhaps tastier described than eaten. But thinking of the stout meals of the O’Malleys, I grew hungry.

  In the bar of the Bay View Hotel, on the other side of the harbor from the castle, I ordered a cheese sandwich and a pot of tea. An elderly couple sat down next to me and we struck up a conversation. They were curious about the converted lighthouse. “The rumor is that they only advertise in Continental papers,” the man told me with a twinkle. “They don’t want the Irish.” Liam was from Belfast, his female companion, Pat, some years older, from Dublin. I’d run into them the afternoon before, when I first arrived on Clare, up by the lighthouse. They’d been scampering around the hillside. Pat was an amateur botanist; they were birders, too. “Though on this trip we call ourselves the Naked Ornithologists,” Liam said. “We don’t have our binoculars.”

  “I’m at the beginning of a long trip,” I said, when Liam asked, and I told them about the voyages I planned to make over the next few months.

  “And why Clare Island? Why Clew Bay?”

  “I suppose a journey needs to start at the right place, and Grace O’Malley is probably the greatest woman seafarer ever.”

  Oh, but they knew all about the Pirate Queen. Liam quoted:

  She unfurled her country’s banner

  High o’er battlement and mast

  And ’gainst all the might of England

  Kept it flying ’til the last.

  “They were singing that song in the rebellions against the English in the late eighteenth century,” he said. “That’s almost two hundred years after Granuaile’s death.”

  “Of course,” said Pat, “Granuaile wasn’t exactly an Irish heroine, but they made her so.”

  “Well, she stood up to Queen Elizabeth,” Liam reminded her.

  “Yes, but eventually she accepted English rule. She did, Liam,” Pat said fondly. “You know yourself that her descendants are still aristocrats. There’s a lord right across Clew Bay there, owns Westport House. You don’t get a peerage by standing up to the English!”

  “There wasn’t really an Irish state then,” Liam explained to me. “It
was her clan that she cared about. She made sure she and her family did all right. And Granuaile—it was only later she became a kind of symbol like, to the Irish rebelling against the English.”

  “Now we think it’s grand she was a pirate,” mused Pat. “Pirate Queen this, and Pirate Queen that, but have you ever thought exactly what a pirate does? She was a thieving, murdering old woman now, wasn’t she?”

  “Ah, woman, will you take the romance out of everything?”

  “Let’s have a glass to her anyway, the old girl,” said Pat.

  The bar was a festive place, even on a weekday afternoon. The three of us had a pint, and joked, and told stories for quite a while and then went outside and took photographs of each other, before I started the three-mile hike back up to the lighthouse. I was sorry to leave them and the easygoing friendliness of the Bay View. The rooms were half the price of the lighthouse and the atmosphere more convivial. Tonight I’d dine in solitary splendor at the huge oak dining table on rich Belgian food. All the same, as I crested the last hill and saw the thick, whitewashed walls of the lighthouse, I found myself walking more quickly.

  Soon I stood at the cliff wall outside the red-painted door to my room. From here I had a sweeping view of Achill Island to the north. It was off Achill Head that Grace saw a ship foundering one gale-riven day. She and her crew immediately set off from Clare, not to rescue the survivors, but to claim the salvage. Among the wreckage on the rocks, she found washed up a handsome young man. His name was Hugh de Lacy, the son of a wealthy merchant from the other side of Ireland. Grace brought him back with her to Clare and the two of them reputedly fell in love. Not long afterward Hugh was murdered by members of the clan MacMahon. Grace took her revenge by killing those responsible for Hugh’s death, and eventually she captured the MacMahon’s castle as well.

  Standing in the stiff breeze at the edge of the high cliffs of Clare, I squinted my eyes and imagined I saw a galley off the coast, sailing close to the wind. A woman with rough-cut hair and a scarred forehead stood at the helm, a spyglass raised to her eye, a knife ready to hand. She was looking for trouble. Oaths spewed from her mouth and all the men rushed to do her bidding. The waves beat high against the bow, and the wind took them south to Galway Town and past. If they saw an English man-o’-war, they would run before the wind. If they found a Spanish caravel low in the water with a cargo of silks and spices, they would board her and take whatever they pleased.

  A pirate in the prime of life! Not only did Grace O’Malley awaken memories of my bold and energetic childhood, a time before my mother became ill, when I dashed through the waves imagining myself a sea creature who could breathe underwater, or when I ran through our neighborhood with a pack of boys and could climb trees, roller-skate, and play softball all summer long; Grace O’Malley offered a possible picture of the future. Why stop being a vigorous adventurer at any stage in life? I’d be fifty in October. Two years ago I’d gone on an Outward Bound trip in the desert that had just about killed me, but that had convinced me that, with encouragement, even a cowardly middle-aged woman could learn to rock climb, rappel off hundred-foot cliffs, and sleep by herself in the wilderness.

  And no warlike chief or viking

  E’er had bolder heart than she.

  This was nothing anybody was ever likely to say about me, but I repeated the words from an old ballad about Grace, and drew strength from them as I walked away from the cliff and back to my cozy room. Heroines make us braver, for whatever we have to do.

  I FELL asleep that night reading in bed and hearing the crash of waves below. The next morning it was pouring and Monica offered me a lift back to Westport, where she had shopping to do. We boarded the larger passenger ferry, The Pirate Queen painted on her bow. The late spring rain lashed the island-strewn bay, and the holms and hummocks were invisible in the mist.

  On the way past Louisburgh, Monica complained about the Irish. “You come to Ireland because it’s freer than Belgium, and because you love the people. But of course the Irish are . . . the Irish. They really are hopeless, you know. Lazy and all that. They take money from the EU; they set up these heritage centres everywhere. But they don’t keep them running. They’re not interested. It’s just a strategy to get free money.”

  I didn’t agree. The Granuaile Heritage Centre, despite its faulty electricity and mildewed cold, was obviously a great labor of love. The Clew Bay Heritage Centre, on the quay at Westport, was even less a candidate for an EU scam. I’d visited it two days ago. It was one of those jumbly little museums of local history whose treasures included the cradle of Lord Haw Haw, a sash once belonging to Yeats’s great love, Maud Gonne, some eighteenth-century coins, Neolithic quernstones, memorabilia from the Easter Uprising, skates taken from the body of a local boy who drowned in a pond, and many photographs of Princess Grace of Monaco, who had once climbed Croagh Patrick. She got to the First Station, anyway.

  “Don’t get me wrong, they’re lovely people . . .” Monica said. “But they don’t take pride in their heritage. They make a big noise about this Grace O’Malley, but have you been inside that castle on Clare? There are always beer cans and trash. My husband goes in there sometimes and cleans it up. Does it shame them? No.”

  “I’m Irish myself,” I said, to dissuade her from going on in this vein. “One of the far-flung Irish. A grandfather of mine was born in County Cork.”

  “Wilson, that’s not an Irish name.”

  “I’m Irish on my mother’s side.” But in fact none of my family names, the Lane of my Irish relatives, the Swanson of my Swedish grandmother, were particularly ethnic sounding. As for Wilson, my father’s adopted name, it was hardly a name at all. It was like a glass of tasteless water. It was a drab jacket I wore because it was familiar.

  Monica sighed. “I love Ireland, of course. And my husband wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

  We drove along in silence for a bit, as the rain gushed down the windows.

  This was the fifth time I’d been to Ireland, and as I always did, I thought about my grandfather who’d left when he was fourteen, in 1902. John Lane was born in Kilronane, outside Dunmanway, a market town in the heart of West Cork. Other relatives must have gone to Boston over the years, for he joined them, then moved on. He traveled to Oregon and joined the cavalry, I’ve heard, then turned up in Detroit. He was a cook in France during the First World War, and sent post cards to his new wife, Faith, a nurse from Battle Creek, Michigan. After the war they moved to Brooklyn and had my mother. He ran an Automat and wore a bowler hat on walks in Prospect Park. They became vigorous Christian Scientists, and during the depression returned to Battle Creek. Both my grandparents became pillars of the church there, and practitioners. My grandfather was especially renowned for his ability to heal. He went from being a poor Irish Catholic to a respectable Midwesterner, known for his elegant pinstriped suits. I remember him well, though he died when I was only six.

  For years, in my early travels to Europe, I’d avoided Ireland, from some peculiar, misplaced resistance to turning into an Irish American looking for her roots. But as soon as I’d come to West Cork, on a scouting expedition to Dunmanway to retrieve my grandfather’s baptismal certificate in order to get an Irish passport, I was immediately taken in by the Irish, including, of course, my own relatives. They made me feel at home, made me feel as if I were recovering some piece of myself I hadn’t known I’d lost.

  Perhaps because I was in equal measure Swedish, and had spent so much more time in Scandinavia, I found it hard to think myself a true Irish American, even with my passport. Yet Grace O’Malley’s story stirred in me more than just fascination at her exploits. I was Irish enough to feel that her story had something to do with my own relatives’ history. I knew why they had kept her story alive for so many centuries, why she belonged to the Irish and no other people.

  WE PULLED into the small town of Westport, where I’d be staying for another day or two. Monica asked me, “Where are you going?”

  She meant, I
realized later, where should she drop me, but I answered, dreamily, “North. To Scotland and Shetland and Iceland and Norway. I’m looking for stories about women and the sea.”

  “Women and the sea,” she said, wondering. I would hear that wondering in voices for weeks to come.

  1 I have held to the conventional nomenclature for Grace because, although she would not have called herself Grace O’Malley, we are not completely sure what she did call herself. Her nickname Granuaile, widely used in the Clew Bay region, is not well known outside Ireland. Anne Chambers, her biographer, calls her both Granuaile and Grace O’Malley. Other writers have referred to her as Grania, a contemporary Irish spelling of Gráinne.

  CHAPTER II

  THE PIRATE QUEEN

  Clew Bay, Ireland

  NO ONE knows what Grace’s second husband looked like, but his nickname was Richard-in-Iron, or Iron Dick, for his habit of wearing a suit of armor left over from his Anglo-Norman forebears. Richard Bourke was a chieftain in the northern reaches of Clew Bay, in line to become the MacWilliam, a title with even greater status. Legend has it that Grace appeared one day at the door of his castle at Rockfleet to propose marriage. Legend also has it that it was really his castle she wanted. It’s easy to see why.

  The stone castle of Carraigahowley stands nearly at the edge of bronze seaweed-covered rocks, deep within the island-crumbled waters of Clew Bay. Unlike the now neglected fortress on Clare Island, the castle at Rockfleet, as it’s now called, is far from passing ships at sea, and still seems to hold the romance of the past intact. This square tower keep, four stories connected by a spiral staircase, came to be Grace’s favorite of the many homes she had around Clew Bay. A taxi driver dropped me there early one morning, and I stood gazing out into the lightly choppy waters where I’d soon be cruising with local angler Mary Gavin Hughes on her boat, Shamrock I. I could see Mary now across the small cove on the dock, pumping diesel.