The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  Before the English Queen she dauntless stood,

  And none her bearing there could scorn as rude;

  She seemed as one well used to power—one that hath

  Dominion over men of savage mood,

  And dared the tempest in its midnight wrath,

  And thro’ opposing billows cleft her fearless path.

  And courteous greeting Elizabeth then pays,

  And bids her welcome to her English land

  And humble hall. Each looked with curious gaze

  Upon the other’s face, and felt they stand

  Before a spirit like their own.

  Of course no one knows exactly what went on at their meeting. It’s said they spoke in Latin, the only language they had in common, and that when Elizabeth offered to make Grace a countess, she refused, apparently feeling she had already attained the same status as the queen. There’s also a story that Queen Elizabeth offered Grace a handkerchief when she sneezed. After blowing her nose heartily, Grace tossed the embroidered cloth into the open fireplace. The court was shocked to see this. “In England,” a courtier rebuked her, “We do not throw handkerchiefs in the fire.” “What do you do with them then?” asked Grace with interest. “We save them for another time.” “What! You save a dirty piece of cloth? The queen may do this, but not I.”

  Amusing as this is, it’s probably unlikely that Grace would have done anything to insult Elizabeth. Yet imagining an encounter between two such similar women, more or less the same age, who operated in a man’s world, has fascinated many. The Granuaile Heritage Centre has an elaborate diorama of their meeting at the Tudor court—Queen Elizabeth with whitened face set off by a huge ruff and red wig and Grace, gray-haired and bent over, disguised in a shabby simple cloak, an elderly mother asking only for her beloved son’s freedom.

  This scene suggests that Elizabeth thought Bingham must have been dreaming, to believe such a worn old woman could be a threat to the crown, and in fact later Elizabeth wrote to Bingham ordering him “to have pity for the poor aged woman.”

  Eventually, with Lord Burghley’s influence, Elizabeth commanded Tibbot’s release and recommended that Grace O’Malley and her son be able to live undisturbed the rest of their lives. I imagine Grace throwing off the shabby cloak as soon as her ship was out of the Thames, and raising her saber high as she set off for the wilder shores of Ireland again. Elizabeth had given Grace and her clan permission to fight the Spanish and French on behalf of the English crown. Grace, of course, interpreted this in her own way, as license to return to plundering ships off Ireland’s coast.

  Not long after, she was reported to have built three large galleys, each big enough to carry three hundred men. Sir Richard Bingham continued to make life miserable for her and her clan, however; two years after her first visit to Queen Elizabeth’s court, she returned to England with a petition for Lord Burghley, complaining that Bingham made it impossible to claim her property and go about her business. Grace’s persistence in claiming her rights was rewarded. In 1595 Bingham’s own followers conspired against him, and he was forced to flee Ireland for England, where he found himself in prison.

  Now there was little to hinder Grace from returning to the sea with her pirate galleys, and one of the last written references to her comes from an English captain who skirmished with one of her ships and got the better of the crew: “This galley comes out of Connaught,” he wrote of the encounter, “and belongs to Grany O’Malley.” At the time she was seventy-one.

  The meeting of Grace O’Malley and Queen Elizabeth I

  She died in Rockfleet Castle, it’s said, in 1603, the same year as Queen Elizabeth. The old Ireland was gone; Grace’s son Tibbot-ne-Long, as astute as his mother, saw which way the wind was blowing, and came out on the side of the English in the Battle of Kinsale, which put an end to serious Irish resistance. For his loyalty to the crown, Tibbot-ne-Long was knighted Sir Tibbot, and amassed the greatest estate in Mayo. Charles I later made him Viscount Mayo and it’s this line, of Bourkes and Brownes, that still owns Westport House, even though the clan of O’Malleys is legion. Grace disappeared from history, though not from memory. She was kept alive in family stories, and in legends told around Clew Bay for centuries.

  The Shamrock I was approaching Clare Island. Again I saw Grace’s castle, and felt a thrill, though, like Grace, I now preferred the fortress at Rockfleet. Mary pulled into the harbor and dropped me off. I planned to walk to the abbey to see the spot where Grace was said to be buried, and then to make my own way back to Westport. Mary said she’d pick me up in town the following day and drive me to Mulrany, for an evening of local music away from the tourist venues. I watched the Shamrock I motor out to sea again. Another storm was coming, and Mary wanted to get the boat to Achill Island. She’d be up at four tomorrow morning to take out a party of anglers.

  AFTER THREE or four, I stopped counting, but Mary and her friend Geraldine continued to put away Bacardi-and-Cokes. They had stronger heads than I did. Myself, I stuck with what the men at the bar had lined up in pints before them: Guinness with a creamy head, expertly pulled and a new one plunked down as the last of the old went down. I managed one pint for every three of theirs.

  I’d taken a short nap today in my hotel, knowing the evening would go late. Mary and I arrived at Neven’s Pub, on the north side of Clew Bay, around eleven, shortly before the Mulloy Brothers started up in the back room. As Mary had promised, there were none of the German tourists that you’d find in the pubs in Westport, nursing a Heineken, good-naturedly and stolidly enjoying the Irishness of it all. This was the real thing, lots of music and lots of drink, and everyone lived nearby. The Mulloy Brothers, beloved locals, were in their fifties and looked not at all related: one round-faced, another black-bearded, a third thin and wrinkled.

  “Let’s have a dance, Geraldine,” Mary urged. Even though she’d been up since dawn, her feet were tapping. Her friend was a youthful-looking mother of seven, red-haired, brown-eyed, cigarette-voiced, a willing dreaminess about her. She teased Mary for a bit, then got up without a word. Mary had said they were both mad for set dancing, whether any partners turned up or not. Mary took off her short leather jacket, the one her son had just brought back from his trip to India, and stepped out onto the small space in front of the musicians. Geraldine smiled indulgently and tossed her red hair. She wore a white blouse and skirt and heels. The two of them crossed their arms high on their chest and lifted their feet. They were quick and precise, circling shoulders or kicking in time. Mary had the same serious face I’d seen yesterday on the boat: modest pride at doing something perfectly. After the jig they waltzed, with narrow-hipped Mary taking a proper lead. They were a joy to watch (though most of the men just quietly drank their beers), their faces flushed and shining.

  After a few sets, Geraldine bowed out for a cigarette. I had the feeling Mary could have danced for hours. She turned instead to one of the men and they began to discuss fishing.

  Geraldine and I got on the topic of religion, and that led to her telling me about a recent pilgrimage to Lourdes. She’d gone with her sister, not because they were sick or crippled, just because it was a long-held dream. “It’s something I just can’t describe . . . the way it made me feel to see Bernadette’s Grotto, to bathe in the waters,” she said, looking about fifteen as she finished another drink and smoked another Winston. I wondered how old her children were. She had also climbed Croagh Patrick, the Holy Mountain, overlooking Clew Bay.

  “So have I, many times,” said Mary, coming over for another round. “My brother and I thought nothing of running up it of a summer evening, just to see the view.”

  I asked if they’d ever climbed without shoes, the way people used to, to show their faith. “I haven’t done anything bad enough to go barefoot for penance,” said Mary, but Geraldine, said smiling, “I’d like to go up it barefoot. I may yet do that.”

  I thought about the Gaelic phrase, an thuras, “the journey,” which I’d come across in readin
g about Celtic pilgrimages. The notion of this particular kind of pilgrimage was still current in certain holy places in the Celtic world, such as Iona, and belonged to an earlier form of Christianity, before such popular Catholic stations-of-the-cross hikes like the one up Croagh Patrick. An thuras meant to make a circuit, usually counterclockwise, around a number of related sites. Each site—a cross, a stone, a chapel, or a shrine—was intended to be a trigger for a certain ritual or prayer. “Mnemonic devices,” they’ve been called, mnemonic meaning to aid the memory. Perhaps it was the Guinness, but I suddenly thought I could see my upcoming journey around the North Atlantic in that light. Beginning with Grace, her castles and even the dioramas and paintings of the Granuaile Heritage Centre, I’d be looking not only for stories but for physical clues about the lives of maritime women from myth and history. My journey wasn’t religious, but it was a pilgrimage of sorts, from site to site in search of relics, statues, homes, castles, and coastlines.

  The evening was breaking up. It was now after two. The nondrinking, singing Mulloy brother, Tom of the black beard, the one who’d once been a carpenter and then had fallen and broken half the bones in his body, began taking people off in his taxi. In fifteen minutes he came back for me, and waving goodbye to Mary and Geraldine, I got in. Tom ran me at high speed back to Westport and gave me a tape from a box in the trunk.

  The night porter showed no sign of disapproval at a woman on her own getting in after three in the morning. Instead he asked if I’d had a good time.

  I told him about my evening in Mulrany with the Mulloy Brothers.

  “Ah,” he nodded. “They’re grand.”

  I WENT back to Carraigahowley Castle at Rockfleet the next day. This time the tide was low, the boulders covered with crinkled ochre and bronze leaves and bulbs glistening wet. Sea gulls sat in all their pristine whiteness on the tangle of seaweed. I’d borrowed a key to the castle, and I went inside, up the cold steps to the fourth floor. The view was excellent, in spite of the fact that castles lacked picture windows in those days. There was a hole in the stone up there, even smaller than the slits that passed for windows in Irish castles. It’s said this was the opening through which Grace threaded the rope that anchored her favorite ship to the leg of her bed. As she slept, she must have felt the galley moving in her dreams.

  I climbed down from the top floor of Carraigahowley, and walked around the castle as the wind freshened. I was still a little tired from my late night with Mary and Geraldine, still a little overwhelmed from all the traveling to get here; yet, in touching the old stone of Grace’s castle, new energy coursed through me. I imagined the Pirate Queen staring out to sea from her tower, or sleeping with her ship tied to her bedpost. The name of this bay abounding in islands came from the Irish god, Cuan Mo. But I thought that clew in the old meaning suited it best. For a clew was a ball of thread, the thread that Ariadne gave Theseus to guide him through the labyrinth, the source of our word clue: anything that points to the solution of a mystery.

  I felt as if, by starting the first stage of my journey, mo thuras, here on Clew Bay, where a fierce little girl had grown up and a wild, canny woman had remained a pirate until late in life, I’d taken hold of a thread, and was ready to follow it, wherever it led. If it was tied to a pirate’s galley, so much the better.

  CHAPTER III

  AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA CAULDRON

  From Oban to the Pentland Firth

  LEAVING IRELAND, I flew to Edinburgh to visit friends, then traveled by train to Oban on the west coast of Scotland. I wanted to slip back in time, further back than Grace O’Malley’s day, to the mythological realm, where sea goddesses stirred up cauldrons of whirling water, storm kettles of surge and drag. In Gaelic these cauldrons are called coire, and one of the most famous of them lies not far from Iona and Mull in the Hebrides, between the sparsely inhabited islands of Scarba and Jura. There, the Atlantic tide comes and goes so quickly and voluminously that the narrow gap between the islands becomes a watery conflagration of currents, creating waves that slap up twenty feet tall. It is called Corryvreckan or coire breckan, “the cauldron of the plaid.”

  This tub of violence is where the great winter hag Cailleach was said to wash her cloak. When storms came on, especially in autumn, people told each other, “The Cailleach will tramp her blankets tonight.” She washed her plaid and when she drew it up, it was white and the hills were covered with snow. They used to say that, before a good washing, the roar of the coming tempest was heard by people on the coast for a distance of twenty miles. It took three days for the cauldron to boil.

  Oban is the end of the rail line from Glasgow, the terminus for ferries to the Inner and Outer Hebrides. I looked longingly at the harbor, where the white ships of the Caledonian MacBrayne line were moored, but they couldn’t take me close enough to catch a glimpse of Corryvreckan. At the Oban tourist office I found an appealing brochure for a small cruise operation farther down the coast, run by a young man and woman. They ran tours out to the whirlpool in the tourist season. I called and reached a machine, left a message, then turned my attention to finding a room for the night.

  It was raining—no, not just raining, but pissing down. I stood dripping in the tourist office with other wet visitors to Oban while a staff member fixed me up with a room for the night. I made my way along the dreary esplanade to a group of tall guesthouses built in the town’s Victorian heyday. Ten days into my trip, my green rain slicker was beginning to feel like a second skin.

  The prospect of viewing a thundering whirlpool in this rainstorm seemed unlikely, as well as perhaps unwise; however, it was perfect weather, I thought as I took off my wet clothes and settled myself into a chair in my garret room at the top of six flights of stairs, to think about storm goddesses. I put on the kettle and blessed the Scots for having the right idea about comfort: plenty of tea, biscuits, and tiny containers of milk.

  LEAN AND mean, that’s the Cailleach, blue-faced, rust-haired, one-eyed, with a single tooth. Stories of this ancient goddess are found in the west of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, and are particularly common around the firths of Oban. It’s said that she created the mountains and the islands by dropping stones from the creel she carried on her back. Many mountains have their own Cailleach. The Cailleach nan Cruchan is said to have lived on the summit of Ben Cruchan, not far from Oban. When anything put her in a temper, she gathered a handful of whirlpools and descended the mountain in a fury. She crossed Loch Etive in a single stride, and doing so, lashed it into a tempest that prevented all passage at Connel Ferry. Connel, from “cona thuil,” which means whirling floods, was also said to be the place through which the Cailleach drove her goats, that is, her frisky waves. The Cailleach is much connected with the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. The frothy swells off its coast are called her sheep and goats. Where waves billow and the coastline seethes white is her stomping ground.

  Donald Mackenzie, who collected Scottish folklore in the first part of the twentieth century, has an entire chapter about the Cailleach in one of his books. He calls her the Scottish Artemis, who roamed the mountains with her animals, and carried a magic wand to control the weather. As with most ancient goddesses, her early power was elemental and to be revered as much as feared. Later she turned into a sea witch responsible for storms and drownings. But she was always associated with the coldest, stormiest part of the year. Her strength grew as autumn arrived; she reigned supreme until spring. Some later stories sentimentalize her as a beautiful girl who turned into a hag in winter, then succumbed each spring to another beautiful girl who replaced her. Other stories tell how she kept her youth by never failing to drink from the waters of life in the moment before the sun rises, once a year. When once she was prevented or forgot, she fell dead, and didn’t rise again.

  I prefer the older stories, of the Cailleach and her ocean form, Muileartach, who appears in Irish poetry and lore. Muileartach came from the west, over the waves; she lived in the ocean with her lover, and enjoyed hav
ing her body massaged by sea merchants. The only way to kill her, it’s said, was to bury her up to her shoulders in soil.

  Her face was blue-black of the luster of coal,

  And her bone-tufted tooth was like red rust.

  In her head was one pool-like eye.

  Swifter than a star in a winter sky.

  Like the Cailleach, Muileartach often took the shape of an old woman. It’s said she visited a house on shore to ask for lodging, pretending to be a cold and weary traveler. When the door was slammed in her face, she kicked it open furiously. This is something I could imagine the real Irish sea queen Grace O’Malley doing. In fact, there’s a story about Grace that has her asking for hospitality at Howth Castle north of Dublin. Turned away at the gate, she retaliated by kidnapping the owner’s grandson, whom she encountered on the beach. She took the boy back with her to Clew Bay, refusing to return him to his frantic relatives unless a single condition was met: No one should ever be turned away from Howth Castle again. For four hundred years this tradition has been observed. The gate to Howth Castle is always open now, and a place laid at the table.

  The Cailleach and Muileartach faced no opposition in their line of work; they were omnipotent forces, unchallenged in a world where the violence of wind and waves could only be worshipped and revered, never controlled. But as the later stories of the Cailleach as a beautiful girl who turns into a hag attest, that ancient power flagged over the centuries. The storm goddess, who did her washing in the whirlpool of Corryvreckan and lashed her frothy sheep and goats into a tempest of white wool, became a worn-out old woman. Prevented from drinking at the stream where she traditionally renewed her energy, she gave up, and withered to nothing.

  The northern waters have another sea goddess, the benign sea deity and summer spirit, the Mither o’ the Sea, often invoked by fishermen in Orkney and Scotland. She brought warmth to the ocean and stilled its storms; she filled the waters with fish. Her enemy was the winter spirit, Teran, and each March, around the vernal equinox, they fought each other. It was Teran’s voice in the howl of the March gales and the thunder of the waves. When the storms subsided, the fishing folk knew the Mither o’ the Sea had defeated Teran, wrapped him tight as a baby in swaddling clothes and thrown him to the bottom of the ocean. Sooner or later, in autumn, Teran escaped again and fought the Sea Mither in a series of shrieking storms known as the gore vellye, or “autumn tumult.” In winter he was victorious and she was bound and banished. In this story it was the male who created storms, and the female who stilled them, quite the opposite of the Cailleach, whose calendar corresponded to Teran’s. In some tales the Cailleach turned to stone April 30 and came alive again October 31. This year she seemed to have missed her deadlines, for it was May and she was still kicking the waters into a froth and bringing the fury of the clouds down upon us.