EACH MORNING on my way to the library I passed through the woods and each afternoon returned under a hail of disdainful cawing.
“I hate those crows,” said Mrs. Harris. “I wish we could kill them. They make such a racket, and a terrible mess.” Mrs. Harris was a very tidy woman. The house, which, on closer inspection, had two decorating motifs—maps and mementos of the Falkland Islands, and ceramic and crystal swans—was spotless. Each morning I had a new personal bath mat.
I said I didn’t think they were crows, known to be solitary, but rather rooks, ancient and sociable birds—at least social among themselves.
“Rooks, crows, they’re nasty birds, here and all around St. Magnus Kirk, too. It’s a shame we can’t have a bit of woods without all those evil-looking birds.”
I sometimes felt the same, that the rooks were rather sinister. Yet I also knew that their relative, the raven, was a sacred bird, revered among many northern peoples, particularly in my own Pacific Northwest, for its swift flight and intelligence. I was fascinated by these birds, too. Whenever I walked in their woods, I stared up at them until they grew annoyed and swooped at me and sometimes shat. In olden times a group of these birds was called a “parliament of rooks.” They did indeed look like rows of irritable backbenchers, waiting for their day to shine.
Sunday morning I walked down to the town center to find all the tearooms and most of the shops closed. I gravitated to the cathedral, the only public building that was open, and sat through two services to keep out of the wind. St. Magnus is small as cathedrals go, very pleasingly faced with an alternating pattern of ochre and red sandstone. It is Romanesque, built over the course of three centuries, beginning in 1137, and dedicated to the peaceable Norse earl who was murdered for trying to carry out Christian principles in his leadership. Next to the medieval cathedral in Trondheim, Norway, St. Magnus is the finest surviving example of a Norse church building and evokes the many centuries of Norwegian rule in Orkney. The cathedral is still the natural center of the town; it sits on Kirk Green, next to the ruins of the Renaissance Earl’s Palace and the twelfth-century Bishop’s Palace. All these structures are grand, and quite overwhelm the next spate of construction, from the nineteenth century, when landowners, rich from potash production, put up townhouses. In the seventeenth century all the houses would have been smaller than those standing today. How the cathedral must have loomed above the market square then.
The Church of Scotland service was safe and kindly. A woman next to me took my hand when the minister asked us at the end to turn to our neighbor, and she welcomed me to Orkney and seemed pleased I was in church. But outside the cathedral I found the walks slippery with rook droppings, and their cries tore up the air in a haunting, angry refrain. Their beady downward looks of irritation were personal. They didn’t wish me or any of my kind well.
The next day, back upstairs in the comfort of the library’s Orkney Room, I thought about St. Magnus and the rookeries in the sycamores around its old stones as I began to read about Orkney’s seventeenth-century witch trials, many of which had been conducted here in Kirkwall, in the cathedral. The Calvinist kirk in post-Reformation Scotland wasn’t made up of kindly churchgoers like those I’d met the day before. The ruling order was composed of men of the church dedicated to rooting out sin wherever they might find it, which often seemed to be in women’s bodies.
It was here in the library that I first came across the curious story of a woman seafarer whose very abilities were seen as evidence of witchcraft: Janet Forsyth, the “Storm Witch of Westray.” In 1627, Janet was twenty, living with her father on the outer island of Westray. She loved a young man called Benjamin Garrioch, who put off to sea one morning with friends. Janet had begged him not to; she’d had a terrible dream the night before. Sure enough, although the day was cloudless at first, a fog soon came up and the boat and its crew vanished.
Weeks passed and Janet fell into melancholia. Soon after, her father died. She took to putting out to sea in her father’s boat, especially when the wind blew strongly. That she always came back safe and sound impressed no one. Instead, her neighbors started to call her the Storm Witch and to say that when she sang plaintive songs to herself at night (local boys knew this from peering into her poor, thatched house), she was calling the Storm King from his caverns deep in the sea. Her neighbors began to blame her for shipwrecks and drownings. One day, during a terrific gale at sea, a large ship was sighted offshore. The island folk stood waiting on shore, making no move to help the crew. They expected the ship to break up on the rocks, and were ready to scramble for the spoils.
Then Janet came down to the shore and set off in her small boat. In spite of the rough seas that obscured her craft from the onlookers’ view at times, she managed to sail up to the foundering vessel and to board it. She took the helm, giving the crew a series of orders that brought the ship into harbor. The captain tried to reward her with a purse of money; the crew crowded around to thank her. But she hurried away, saying only that she wished that someone might have done the same for her poor Ben.
Probably her neighbors were angry that they’d missed the chance to scavenge; perhaps they were ashamed to have been shown up by a mere girl in front of the foreign crew. At any rate, instead of being rewarded, Janet’s heroism at sea was taken as conclusive proof she was a witch. She was arrested and brought to trial in the Cathedral of St. Magnus in Kirkwall.
No place in Orkney is without a sea witch story or two, and in many of the tales the witch is killed without benefit of trial. On the Isle of Stronsay, my next stop after Kirkwall, there is a natural seat in a cliff overlooking Mill Bay, called the Maiden’s Chair. This is where Scota Bess used to sit and predict the weather at sea. One day the men of the local kirk decided she was a witch who must be killed. Scota Bess was dragged from her cliffside seat by Stronsay men and beaten with flails washed in communion water. But the day after they buried her she rose to the surface. After this happened twice more, in desperation the men flung her body into the Muckle Water and then brought boatloads of dirt out to cover her. In this way, it’s said, they created the sole island on the Muckle Water, and Scota Bess stayed buried.
But Janet Forsyth did have a trial. Its record opens with her crime:
In the first ye the said Jonet ar indytit and accusit for airt and pairt of the abominable superstitioun and superstitious abusing and disceveing of the people within the said Isle and for practeising of the wicked and devilish pointis of witchcraft and devilrie done by yow.
Witnesses were brought forth to describe how they’d been bewitched. In Janet’s case, Robert Reid testified that he had been taken ill at sea and had to be brought back by his mates to land. He then sought Janet out and accused her of bringing his “seiknes” upon him. For answer she seems to have thrown a bucket of salt water on him—in irritation or in an attempt to cure him, it’s not recorded, though he did seem to feel well enough the next day to return to the sea.
Janet Forsyth had numerous accusers. No one stood up for her. At the end of the trial she was, unsurprisingly, found guilty. Such was the fate of hundreds of women and a few men in Orkney during the seventeenth century, at the height of witch-hunting fever. Many were hanged or burnt because a cow stopped giving milk, or a child fell ill; others for crimes to do with the sea, for selling the threads to raise the winds or causing storms or casting spells on ships offshore. Whatever respect and reverence women had been accorded in ancient times for their connection with the forces of life and for their abilities as healers were transformed to suspicion and murderous hatred within the Calvinist church.
Janet’s recorded trial ends with the verdict that she must be “taine be the lockman and conveyit to the place of execution with her hands bund behind her back and worried at ane staik to the dead and brunt in assis.”
In other words, she must be hung on Gallows Hill in Kirkwall and burnt to ashes.
There is another version of her trial, however, told in an old collection of nineteenth-
century newspaper columns called Around the Orkney Peat-Fires. The story, “The Westray Storm Witch,” has an unexpected conclusion, one I’d like to believe is true. In this story her trial took place in the cathedral before a crowd violently and noisily against her, but Janet defended herself bravely from all charges: “In saving the crew of the vessel referred to, I had no assistance but from God, with a powerful arm to guide the tiller of my boat, and a quick eye to avoid the breakers which surrounded me.”
The judge nevertheless found her guilty and sentenced her the next day “to be fastened to a stake, to be worried to death by the hangman, and her body thereafter to be burnt to ashes.”
As this sentence was being delivered, some sailors from the Royal Navy came into the court and cheered along with the crowd. Contemptuously Janet turned to face the crowd; she suddenly said, “Save me, Ben,” and fainted. In a moment, one of the sailors was beside her. They pulled him off and took Janet to her cell. She would be hung the next day with great ceremony. The crowd assembled in Broad Street, and at ten in the morning the cathedral bell began to toll. Everyone awaited Janet’s appearance. But when there was no sight of her or the hangman, the sheriff went to her cell. He found the door open and the hangman and guards dead drunk.
Some years later, when an Orkney man was passing through Manchester, England, he saw a shop sign with the Orkney name “Benjamin Garrioch.” When he went inside, he found Janet Forsyth at the counter, looking years younger. She told him that her Ben and his companions had been picked up in the fog by a ship from the Royal Navy and press-ganged into service in the French wars. His appearance in Kirkwall the morning of the trial was his first return to Orkney in two years. He hadn’t let her hang, but had spirited her away to the ship she’d saved from destruction a few weeks before. The captain gladly took her aboard and deposited her in Liverpool until Ben could join her. They never returned to Orkney—who could blame them?—but made a success of their business in Manchester, and lived there ever after.
ON MY last evening in Kirkwall I returned from the library through the woods as usual, and stood a while looking out over the hill that led down to town and the harbor. The wind, unquiet, muttered around my shoulders and tried to tease the scarf from my neck. You could sooner imagine someone making a living in Orkney calming the wind than raising it. Could I unloose the wind just by chanting an incantation? The rooks stood out like black candles on the strange, thickened gray branches of the sycamores.
“I am Norna of Fitful-head!” I shouted on impulse. “Double, double, toil and trouble!”
One of the birds flew up and headed toward me. The wind roared. Anybody watching would have thought I was mad. Or maybe just a witch.
CHAPTER V
HERRING LASSIES
Stronsay, the Orkney Islands
A CURIOUS old photograph hangs in the Scottish Fisheries Museum. In it several women carry men on their backs. The women, their full skirts tucked into waistbands, are knee-deep in sea water. They grip the men’s booted legs firmly; the men clasp the women around the necks. These are wives hauling their husbands from shore out to their fishing boats, carrying them high above the water so their feet don’t get wet. Apparently this was common practice on the east coast of Scotland around 150 years ago. In his book Fishing Boats and Fisher Folk on the East Coast of Scotland, Peter Anson describes the women of one village, Avoch:
The women were as strong as the men. They could carry immense burdens without apparently feeling the strain. They thought nothing of a hundred pounds of fish in a creel on their backs. At that time there was no pier at Avoch. The shore is flat, and the boats had to lie some distance off, so the women used to carry out their husbands on their backs, “to keep the men’s feet dry.” In a like manner they brought in all the fish and tackle from the boats, never objecting to wading out into the sea, no matter what might be the weather or time of year.
Two weeks ago, my friends in Edinburgh had taken me north of the city to the coastal village of Anstruther to see this photograph, and I was glad they had. For it was in the Scottish Fisheries Museum that I first began to glimpse the old, preindustrial world of fishing, when women and men worked together in the family and community. Before the advent of decked sailing smacks in the mid-nineteenth century and the steam drifters and trawlers that came into use around 1880, fishing tended to be done on a smaller scale, and few fishermen ventured out in their open skiffs more than a day’s row from their coastal villages. In those days women’s contribution to the home economy was prized. In many Scottish fishing villages, women kept their maiden names, and their initials were used to mark their husbands’ fishing gear. In addition to keeping house and caring for the children, women mended the nets and baited the lines with shelled mussels and limpets. “White fishing” (for cod, halibut, and haddock) was line fishing; “full” or “great” lines had about twelve hundred hooks and could be two miles long; “small” lines were about three hundred feet. Women helped bring in the boats at day’s end and prepared the catch for sale.
Women carrying their husbands out to the fishing boats
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, women and men came to do more sharply defined tasks; however, women were still active and important participants in the fishing life all around the Scottish coasts and the western and northern isles. The museum has a large room devoted to Scotland’s once thriving herring industry. In addition to photographs on the walls, there is a group of male and female mannequins in nineteenth-century dress displayed against a painted background of wharves and fishing boats. The women wear long, striped skirts and shawls over their hair; their fingers are wound with rags and string called “cloots” to prevent infection from knife cuts and fish guts. While the men put together barrels, the women stand in front of troughs of shining silver fish. These were the herring lassies, the gutter girls, an astonishing number of whom migrated like fish in their thousands up and down the Scottish and English coasts and islands, from Lerwick in the Shetland Islands to Great Yarmouth in England. In economic terms they were a migrant workforce that followed the fishing fleets and dealt with the catch. Some were fishing widows, but more were independent, often young, women who saw a chance to improve their lot and to support themselves. Their mothers and grandmothers may have worked closely with their menfolk to bring in the catch in the villages, but the herring lassies forged communities of their own.
ORKNEY IS made up of more than seventy islands, and I wanted to know more of the archipelago than just Mainland’s Kirkwall, so I took a ferry to the village of Whitehall on the island of Stronsay. Whitehall was once a major fishing port for all of Orkney. Its harbor on Papa Sound faced the North Sea and was easily accessible to foreign vessels from the east. British ships, meanwhile, could dock on Stronsay without getting too close to the Pentland Firth. Most importantly, Stronsay was near the route the herring shoals took on their annual migration south. I’d come to Whitehall looking for traces of the strong-backed, no-nonsense herring lassies who had flocked here in such numbers—fifteen hundred each season—up through the 1930s.
It was a bleached-cold day, gusting heavily, and Whitehall looked bleak and abandoned as I walked off the ferry. Everything spoke of crushed dreams and straitened circumstances, yet the gray stone and pebble-dashed stucco buildings that lined the waterfront gave evidence of a once prosperous and thriving little town. It didn’t help that the wind bent me double as I walked to the hotel.
The man who’d taken my two-night booking had made a pretense on the phone of checking to see that a room was available. It was clear from the absence of tourists on the ferry that, more nights than not, all the rooms were free. Mine had hideous yellow walls, a lumpy bed, and the ubiquitous personal bath mat. It looked out at the harbor and a street that was always empty except for the few cars that drove on or off the ferry three times a day. A hundred years ago, looking out at this same view, I would have seen the harbor filled with sailing craft and steam drifters, the summer herring fleet. Horse-drawn
carts would have been taking herring to the many curing stations on the docks. The wharves would have been jammed with barrels, just made by a raft of coopers. The herring lassies, in long skirts and shawls and with cloots on their fingers, would have been standing at troughs of fish, gutting them with a quick flash of the knife and tossing them aside to a packer, who’d sort them into grades and layer them into barrels to be salted.
In the 1920s and ‘30s, the scene would have looked almost the same, except the “Zulu” sailboats and coal-fired steam drifters would have been replaced by diesel trawlers and large herring seiners. The women would no longer be wearing shawls, but oilskin aprons over overalls, and sweaters rolled up to show muscular arms. Their hair would be bobbed; many would sport jaunty round caps and berets. They’d be from all over Scotland, looking forward to freedom, fun, and the chance to make their own money. They roomed by the hundreds in close quarters across the harbor on the tiny island of Papa Stronsay, in dormitories that still stand, but are derelict now. All of it was abandoned now, on both sides of the bay: the wharves, the shops, the houses. In half an hour of looking out the window, I didn’t see a single person go by.
Across from the hotel was a long low building called the Fish Mart. The brochures had made this sound like a bustling place: “And while in Stronsay, be sure to visit the Fish Mart, with its museum of herring culture and its teashop.” While in Stronsay . . . There was actually not too much to do in Stronsay except visit the Fish Mart. After unpacking, I went over to take a look. Marion, the other owner of the hotel, had to let me in. She put on a brave front; like her husband, she seemed chagrined at the emptiness of the hotel and the entire village, but acted as though that would all change when summer finally came. It seemed to me it might take more than blue skies to get people to Stronsay, but I didn’t want to argue with her determined optimism. Marion’s dyed-red spiky hair and colorful leggings were the brightest things about Whitehall. She had a bevy of tiny yapping dogs and an intermittently vivacious manner.
The Pirate Queen Page 8