The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  MIDAFTERNOON I went out again, braving the howling winds coming at me over the esplanade. I made another phone call to the small cruise company, left another message. There was a library across the street from my guesthouse, a tiny one upstairs in a municipal building. I went in to ask about using their computer to access my email, and met the first of many librarians who would answer my question, “Do you have anything on women and the sea?” with complete aplomb. This one had a sense of humor. I had titled my email message “From Bonnie Wet Scotland.” Passing by, he remarked, “May I call you Bonnie?” He helped me find some books of folklore with stories of the Cailleach. The library was a busy place, not exactly with individuals reading books, but with people crowding in to exchange gossip. In a room off the corridor opposite, a screech of little girls in school uniforms practiced the violin for a coming concert.

  Later I wandered around Oban, dipping into shops to get out of the persistent downpour. On a summer’s day the shops advertising ice lollies and shellfood (winkles and cockles) would be doing a brilliant trade. Today people were huddled inside teashops or bakeries, eating, if the signs in the windows were any indication, delicacies like Jap Fancies and Chelsea buns. Tartan-vending establishments were selling everything from thimbles to throw rugs in the family clan motif. One shop was promoting “Kilts for Hire.” Standing inside a woolen blizzard of green, red, black, and yellow, I had a sudden memory of my father. How, as our world fell apart with my mother’s illness and death, he used to tell me stories of his own childhood, the early death of his mother, his unrecalled first years in an orphanage, his adoption by the Wilsons when he was five. His real father was named Walter Stewart. “Stewart was the name of the royal house of Scotland,” he told me. “So that means we’re related to the former kings and queens of Scotland.” Even as an eleven-year-old, I was skeptical of this assertion, an orphan’s fairy-tale dream of having secret royal blood.

  I bought my father a tie nevertheless, and when the clerk said, “Ah, the Stewart clan. Are you a Stewart?” I answered, “Er. Yes, I guess I’m a Stewart,” tasting it on my lips. I remembered at sixteen trying on the identity of a writer, practicing a new signature on lined notebook paper: Barbara Stewart. Barbara Stuart. Even then I seem to have had my doubts about Wilson. In fact, my father’s relatives were more Swedish than Scottish. His mother, who died in childbirth at age twenty, was born in Stockholm. In the one photograph we had of her, from her wedding when she was sixteen, I looked almost exactly like her at the same age.

  Bonnie Stewart? Bonnie Stuart? Was it too late to change?

  Around six o’clock, I finally made contact with the cruise-company couple. “We’re not going out again till next week,” the young woman apologized. “Aside from the weather forecast, we need to replace a part. The motor.”

  I had a vision of being at the lip of the whirlpool and the motor suddenly failing. Down, down we’d be pulled, as helpless to stop our suction as the paralyzed narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “A Descent into the Maelström.”

  How often we made the circuit of the belt it is impossible to say. We careered round and round for perhaps an hour, flying rather than floating, getting gradually more and more into the middle of the surge, and then nearer and nearer to its horrible inner edge.

  “You won’t be around next week?” she asked. “It should be fixed by then.”

  “I’m on my way to Orkney,” I said regretfully, but with some sense of having postponed death for yet a little while. The rain lashed against the plastic walls of the phone booth, and when I stepped out onto the quay at the end of the esplanade, the wind came at me horizontally. All day I’d heard people grumbling, “It’s winter again, isn’t it?”

  Again I had the sense, feeling the icy rain on my face, that the Cailleach was still at large this May. Along the coast she was taking huge strides, her face blue-black and her one tooth rusty and red; she was peering at her tubs of washing with her goggle eye, and giving them a stir with her magic weather wand. I walked again through the streets, which were mostly empty, and passed a variety of eateries, including one that touted “Steak Mince Bridies” on a card in the window, before settling on a take-away of chicken curry from an Indian restaurant. “I’m sorry about the weather,” said the young woman who took my order. “Global warming, I expect.” In earlier times she would have said, “The Cailleach is tramping her blankets tonight.”

  I DIDN’T much like the look of the water between me and the Orkney Islands. All day the rain had flailed against the windows of successive buses, from Fort William to Inverness and now to John o’ Groats. While some of the loveliest lochs and glens of the Highlands slipped by, I felt as if I were in a gray tunnel. The towns looked depressed and bleak. Inverness is not best appreciated from the environs of the bus station. The waiting room consisted of two benches, and the café next door reeked authentically of bacon, fish, and boiled tea. A sign on one of the local buses summed up my sense of being a superfluous tourist here: “Come too close and I’ll smack you in the mouth.” It was an advertisement for a biscuit called “Hit.”

  Yet when we pulled up to John o’ Groats at five-thirty in the evening, I, like the handful of other passengers, all women with shopping bags and inadequate rain parkas, found myself reluctant to get off our warm, dry bus. The Cailleach was not only tramping her blankets, she’d put the world in the washing machine. “I’m a good sailor,” I’d blithely told Paddy when crossing Clew Bay. But I’d not been at the northernmost tip of Scotland then; I’d not been looking at waves of at least twenty feet crashing up against the cement quay.

  The channel between Scotland and the Orkney Islands, the Pentland Firth, is considered one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world. Not because of the relatively short passage through it—only seventeen miles from the North Sea to the Atlantic, and at its narrowest point only about six and a half miles wide. It is dangerous because of tides that sweep through twice daily, from the Atlantic to the North Sea. These tides, combined with the unpredictability of eddies and wave patterns, caused by the churning back and forth of the currents over reefs and around islands, can make the passage rough even on a nice day, but very often it is not nice. In winter a force 8 gale, gusting between thirty-four and forty knots, blows seven days a month, while a force 7, marginally less severe, is reckoned to blow another fifteen days a month. In the summer months seafarers contend with fog, when warm air from the southeast meets the much colder water coming from the west. It’s no wonder the peoples of these northern coasts have as many words for rain as the Inuit have for snow. In the Orkney dialect, a day might be drivvy, ruggy, murry, hagery, roosty, eesky, frizzowy, muggery, rimy, or smuggery.

  We rushed through a ragged wall of precipitation to get off the bus and into the shelter afforded waiting passengers. This rain and wind looked to me more like the beginning of a hurricane than a summer storm. It was clear now why captains and ship owners in the past had preferred to make long detours north of Orkney or south via the English Channel, and why there were so many tales of ships going aground or sinking in the Firth. These days, the huge cargo ships and tankers moving through the strait hardly feel the surge and pull of the tides, but not all of the six thousand vessels passing through in a year are tankers. Some are small passenger ferries, for instance.

  The teashop was closed but the gift shops were open. Today, their offerings seemed incongruous, but no doubt in summer flocks of tourists arriving here at the farthest point north on the British mainland bought a post card or an ice lolly, or perhaps one of the many tartan items for sale. I stood inside one of the gift shops, looking out the glass door at the heaving sea. Behind me, high on the wall, a promotional video flipped through the glories of the Highlands. It looked like another planet, and yet I recognized from the names that these were places not far from here, the lochs and glens through which I’d passed earlier today.

  The Stewart tartan was here, too, in abundance. I’d always wondered why my father didn’t
change his name back to Stewart when he found out he was adopted. His ambivalence formed the basis of my own. “We’re the Wilsons,” he would always say when he was trying to cheer up my brother and me during the years of my mother’s illness. “The Wilsons are all right. The Wilsons stick together.” He would also often say, “Wilson, you know, that’s not my real name.”

  Out the door of the gift shop I spied a tiny boat rocking dangerously off shore. It looked in terrible distress, trying to make for land. The women around me began to edge out the door and down in the direction of the quay. With some consternation I realized that this was our boat, the forty-five-minute passenger ferry across the Pentland Firth.

  There is another sea cauldron or coire off this coast, the Swelchie, which comes from the Norse word for whirlpool, svelgr. The coastal current meets the firth’s ebb and flow and creates a whiplash water maze, a boiling circle in the sea. There is a legend attached to the Swelchie, a story more influenced by Norse mythology than Celtic. Two giantesses, Finnie Grotti and Minnie Grotti, were enslaved by a Danish king called Frodi. He kept them endlessly at work turning a magic quernstone called Grotti, which had the power to grind out anything it was asked to grind. At first Finnie and Minnie whipped out a steady stream of peace and happiness, but then King Frodi demanded gold and more of it. Eventually Finnie and Minnie had enough and decided to grind out instead an army that would enable them to free themselves from Frodi’s tyranny. There are two versions of what happened next, but both have the same result. In one the king was killed and Finnie and Minnie sailed off with a sea rover called Mysing. While sailing through the Pentland Firth, Mysing asked the giantesses to mill some salt. Since they were used to grinding in quantity, the salt soon overflowed the ship and sank it near the island of Stroma. The magic quernstone plummeted to the bottom and continued to churn. It created the whirlpool Swelchie, which is the source of all the salt in the sea. In an alternate version, it was the sea king Mysing who stole Grotti from Finnie and Minnie after Frodi was defeated in battle. He sailed off with it through the firth, and thought some salt would be a good idea. Unfortunately, he couldn’t figure out how to turn the quernstone off, with the same result as above. The ship sank and Grotti kept grinding.

  Long before the folktale was told in Orkney as “The Magic Quernstone” or “How the Sea Became Salt,” the thirteenth-century Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson, in the “Skaldskaparmal” section of the Edda (a guide meant to explain ancient metaphors, or kenningar, to writers of his time), describes a whirlpool: “T’is said, sang Snaebjörn, that far out, off yonder ness, the Nine Maids of the Island Mill stir amain the host-cruel skerry-quern—they who in ages past ground Hamlet’s meal.” Snorri also tells the story of King Frohdi, the owner of a giant mill he couldn’t turn, and two giant bondswomen Fenja and Menja from Sweden whom he found to work it for him. He drove them relentlessly, allowing only time for one of the giantesses to sing her song. Some scholars believe Menja’s song to be the oldest surviving example of Old Norse literature. She tells her story, mourning her and her sister’s fall from power to slavery:

  Such were our deeds / In former days,

  That we heroes brave / Were thought to be.

  With spears sharp / Heroes we pierced,

  So the gore did run / And our swords grew red.

  Now we are come / To the house of the king,

  No one us pities. / Bond-women are we.

  Dirt eats our feet / Our limbs are cold,

  The peace-giver we turn. / Hard it is at Frode’s.

  The story of the millstone appears also in Saxo Grammaticus’s History of the Danes which drew on Icelandic literature. Here it is the Nine Daughters of Ægir, the ocean god, who grind out the meal of Prince Hamlet. “They set the ocean in motion as if a quern were turned round and they crushed out life between the stones. Far out, beyond the skirts of earth, the Nine Maidens of the Island-Mill stir amain the most cruel Skerry quern.”

  Ships caught in the maelstrom off the Norwegian coast

  As far back as the Odyssey there have been stories of giantesses who turn a millstone under duress. Whirlpools were once called the navels of the sea, and the drowning of the millstone has been given a dozen mythic meanings. A less mythic but equally poetic description of a whirlpool comes from the Sailing Directions for the Northwest and North Coasts of Norway, as quoted by Rachel Carson in The Sea Around Us:

  As the strength of the tide increases the sea becomes heavier and the current more irregular, forming extensive eddies . . . These whirlpools are cavities in the form of an inverted bell, wide and rounded at the mouth and narrower toward the bottom . . . Fishermen affirm that if they are aware of their approach to a whirlpool and have time to throw an oar or any other bulky body into it they will get over it safely; the reason is that when the continuity is broken and the whirling motion of the sea interrupted by something thrown into it the water must rush suddenly in on all sides and fill up the cavity.

  ON THE quay I had plenty of time to mull the mythology and geometry of whirlpools as I watched the ferry make a pass at the dock and then retreat. It seemed as if there was no way it could find its way through the tall waves beating against the quay. If it sank offshore, what a terrible sight that would be. Equally terrible was the prospect of the boat’s disembarking its passengers and collecting us for the return crossing.

  “You’re American, right?” a voice emanating from a dark poncho said over my head. A new prospective passenger had joined us. He hadn’t been on the bus but had been hitchhiking. His name was Matt and he was a rangy twenty-five-year-old from the San Francisco Bay Area.

  “This is something, isn’t it?” he said admiringly. “You think we’ll make it? Where you going, anyway? I’m going to the Orkney Islands and maybe I’ll get to the Shetland Islands. You’re going there? Cool! You’re going to the Faroe Islands? Where are the Faroe Islands? Wow! I want to go! Can I come?”

  His fresh-faced excitement was a distraction in any case. The four or five ladies around me were a tight-lipped bunch. I had earlier felt myself to be the only tourist except for a quiet Englishwoman who was going to Stromness to take a painting course. Now there was me and Matt, two Americans, and he was so American that he infected me, and my gender became less important than my nationality. All the ladies moved slightly away from us and I could hear them thinking, So boisterous, these Yanks.

  But I noticed that Matt’s appearance on the quay made me feel more cheerful, and certainly more intrepid. “It is something, these waves. It’s great,” I said firmly. Underneath our streaming rain gear, Matt and I had the same hearts, beating with the desire for adventure on the high seas. He asked me more about my trip. “Wow, you’re going to Iceland, and to Norway! You’re going by boat all the way? That is so cool.”

  The ladies looked flabbergasted by the notion of all this sea travel. It was plenty for them to think of getting on this boat. “Oooch, aaach,” they’d been saying to each other. “And me with my stomach.”

  The ferry finally docked intact, and the passengers disembarked looking only slightly green. “Come on, ye,” waved the crewmen to us. Their skin was soaked, and water gushed off their yellow slickers. “Get on, get on.”

  Matt dared me to go on the upper deck. Even tied to the quay the boat was rolling like a top. It was hard to even get up the stairs. When the ferry pulled away from the dock we were enveloped in a vicious mist. The wind carried off the rain droplets before they hit our faces, so it almost felt as if it weren’t raining, but rather that water was attacking us from all sides like a manic, cold car wash. The roar of the boat and the wind was inconceivably loud. Around 325 B.C. the Greek explorer Pytheas wrote that the North was the sea-lung of the world. He wondered if the northern seas were the end of the earth, a place where sky and land no longer separated but surged together in endless chaos. I expect he wrote that description attempting to cross the Pentland Firth.

  We went downstairs and peered out the fogged-up windows. I told Matt the st
ory of Finnie and Minnie and the magic quernstone. I’d hoped to see the island of Stroma and the Swelchie, but they were lost in the mist. Storm cauldrons and millstones with holes through which all the waters of the world gush are all very well to read about, I suppose, but perhaps it was for the best that our route took us well away from them. I settled back to listen to Matt’s travel soliloquy:

  “So you can only go to the Faroe Islands once a week by boat well that wouldn’t fit into my plans because I don’t have that much money and it’s probably expensive and then I have to work out how to get back to the Mediterranean I’m on a six-month trip and I’m actually hoping to get to India so if it took two weeks to get to the Faroes because you’d have to hit the days right and I didn’t plan to spend so much time up here but I am sure interested in all these places . . .”

  And I thought of Finnie and Minnie off in the mist, singing their songs of lost power and getting ready to chuck the millstone in the sea (“You want salt? We’ll give you salt, Buddy.”) and to move on with their own lives.