I HAD arrived by now at the outskirts of Stromness and was following a road that led alongside the channel separating Mainland from the small island of Graemsay and the much larger island of Hoy rising behind it. If I were to follow this road several miles into the face of the wind, I would come to a point where it could properly be said that I was on the shores of the Atlantic. But even from here it was quite possible to look west and see nothing on the horizon but a reflection from the sun. It was easy to imagine a convoy of three-masted ships bearing for Stromness, the pilot boats competing to be the first to escort them around the point, the excitement growing back in the town. In days gone past young women gave their sweethearts a garland of silk, knotted for as many whales as they hoped they’d catch. These young women would have been waiting at the wharves to catch sight of their beloveds.
Not all women stayed at home waiting. On many sailing ships in the nineteenth century, it was common for wives to follow their captain or officer husbands to sea, and to take their families with them. Christian Robertson’s daughter had married a captain and voyaged with him. In the Stromness bookshop I’d found a delightful memoir by Elizabeth Linklater, the mother of a well-known Orcadian writer, Eric Linklater. Her book, A Child Under Sail, recounts growing up at sea in the late nineteenth century on voyages with her mother and captain father across the Atlantic, around Cape Horn to New Zealand and Cape of Good Hope to India. Some passages reminded me of Pippi Longstocking’s adventures. Linklater recounts:
When we got home from the Boston voyage I had to go to school. This was hard on one who had acquired the lovely importance of a child at sea. I had become, I suppose, a most objectionable little girl. I had been taught songs of all kinds, and stories such as no nicely brought-up child would ever have been allowed to repeat. One such anecdote, I remember, was punctuated by frequent hics, which I did so well as always to elicit rounds of applause—from the sailors, that is. Others were in broad Scots, with an occasional snore, also well done, I think. But this impropriety soon yielded to treatment when my mother got full control of me again. It was not by her will that my education had begun on these lines.
I could see why the young Elizabeth had loved the salty vigor of shipboard life, especially compared to the way girls were raised in those days. Hardly seedy any longer, yet still tinged with the raffish, Stromness made me remember how port towns had always thrilled me. Was it from spending stolen time as a child at the Pike in Long Beach, where sailors from around the world strolled smoking and joking past curio shops, tattoo parlors, and sideshows, where the air smelled of fish, smoke, cotton candy, and the sharp tang of illicit excitement. During my mother’s illness, when I was eleven and twelve, my father, who had an office downtown on Atlantic Boulevard, would take us to the Pacific Coast Club for our swimming lessons. We had strict instructions not to leave the fortress of the club; as soon as the lessons were over, however, I took my younger brother by the hand and set out for the Pike, the seaside amusement park that had descended into seediness. What did I want? Danger, pleasure, the chance simply to look and sniff and imagine. Port towns have a pungent density of smells and sights; yet they are open, too, one whole wall removed and exposed to the sea, a place of comings and goings, dreams hatched and dreams dashed. Downtown Long Beach was not a place for a young girl, and yet in the Pike I found everything to stir my imagination, to feed my wanderlust.
How was a woman of an earlier time to experience adventure and autonomy in the world? The sea, for so many of the women I’d come across in Scotland and Orkney, had been work or trade, not the high road to independence. The women were coastal folk for the most part—fishers and fishwives, kelp gatherers and herring lassies—who stayed close to loved ones on shore. Within the bounds of their society, widow entrepreneurs like Christian Robertson and Margaret Login were successful and emancipated, far more so, in fact, than the scruffy whalers and drunken seamen of the port towns. Yet in our collective imagination, freedom belongs to the sailor, the one who leaves friends and family behind for the wind and the waves.
The Stromness captain’s wife with the most remarkable story was Eliza Fraser, who left her three children here under the care of a pastor and sailed off to Australia on the Stirling Castle, a merchant brig, with her husband in 1835. After a long voyage from London to Buenos Aires to Cape Town to Sydney, Captain Fraser unloaded his cargo, and received instructions to sail to Singapore and load up goods for England. Eliza was by this time heavily pregnant with their fourth child, and the only woman on the ship. Unfortunately her husband was in poor health (one reason Eliza had accompanied him), and in Sydney most of his crew jumped ship. The new recruits were in some cases less able, and certainly less experienced. In stormy weather the ship went aground on a reef north of what is now Brisbane, and the crew was forced to abandon the vessel in two smaller craft, a pinnace and a longboat, which immediately began leaking. Eliza, in the almost swamped longboat, went into contractions and delivered a baby, which drowned immediately. She said later that she was hardly conscious of having given birth at all.
The two boats finally put in at Great Sandy Island, and there their troubles began in earnest. The island was inhabited by aborigines. We don’t have the aborigines’ account, only the white survivors, of course, but their story goes that the two boats were separated while they were trying to escape. Eliza spent almost two months as a captive. She was starved, exhibited, beaten, and had her legs burned. She was most likely raped. She watched her husband speared through, and others of the crew die horrible deaths. Finally, in a daring rescue by an Irish convict backed up by soldiers from Brisbane, Eliza was saved, and taken back to Sydney. There her story becomes less certain, a bit ludicrous, and rather sad. Although she was said to have been strong-willed and capable of command during the first days of abandoning the ship and reaching land, two months of degradation and physical misery had troubled, if not unhinged, her mind. She fell under the sway of a Captain Greene, who seems to have seen in her a good possibility for making money. After an appeal for funds in Sydney for Eliza, they sailed to Liverpool, and made their way to London. Further appeals for money were investigated and exposed, reducing Eliza to humiliation, especially after Captain Greene decided to exhibit her as the only survivor of the Stirling Castle.
Mrs. Fraser fought over by rival claimants
Most of the women who went to sea had more fortunate, if sometimes equally exciting, experiences, particularly in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when as wives of seamen in the Royal Navy, they found themselves under attack by the French. Wives of gunners played a great role in naval battles by carrying up gunpowder from the hold and repacking the cannons. Surgeon’s wives as well as other women acted as nurses and even surgeons themselves if the doctor became incapacitated. In a battle, everyone’s help was needed. As Suzanne Stark points out in her book about women aboard ship in the age of sail, Female Tars, it wasn’t that women didn’t live and work aboard sailing vessels, it was that they were in general invisible and unpaid. But there were also women, and Stark tells numerous stories of them, who disguised themselves as men and joined the ranks of seafarers, particularly in the Royal Navy, where sailors were greatly needed due to the wars with France.
Although the ballads that tell the stories of these women invariably hint at lovelorn girls who longed to be with their sweethearts, it’s probably more accurate to say that these male impersonators longed mainly for a sweetheart’s wages or a sweetheart’s life of adventure. There was no single reason that a woman might join the navy or become a sailor; the life of a woman on shore was so restricted and impoverished that even life before the mast could seem vastly preferable. But economics are never as tuneful as romance. In songs like “The Handsome Cabin Boy,” the only reason for a girl to come aboard ship is love.
Stromness has at least one story of a woman disguising herself as a man aboard ship. She was Isobel Gunn, who called herself John Fubbister when she signed on with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Th
e year was 1806 and young Orcadians were flocking to the town of Stromness to set sail for Canada, with its unknown hardships and secure wages. Perhaps John Fubbister was following a sweetheart, perhaps not. What’s certain is that she looked and acted enough like a strong young man to be taken by the Hudson’s Bay Company as a laborer. Arriving in the town of Moose Factory on the shores of Hudson’s Bay, she seems to have worked as hard as any man, giving no cause for complaint. It was not until about a year later that her sex was discovered (by her superiors; it’s likely her fellow Orcadians knew and supported her).
With others from the company, she had canoed eighteen hundred miles along the Red River in 1807, to spend the winter there at a fur-trading post. A group of HBC men were celebrating Christmas dinner when she asked to lie down, as she was feeling unwell. “I was surprised at the fellow’s demand; however, I told him to sit down and warm himself,” wrote Alexander Henry, the householder where the celebration was taking place. A short while later Henry went into the room where Fubbister was and, as he later wrote:
A woman dressed as a sailor
. . . was much surprised to find him extended on the hearth, uttering dreadful lamentations; he stretched out his hands toward me, and in piteous tones begged me to be kind to a poor, helpless, abandoned wretch, who was not of the sex I had supposed but an unfortunate Orkney girl, pregnant and actually in childbirth. . . . In about an hour she was safely delivered of a fine boy.
Isobel Gunn traveled the following spring with her child to Albany, New York. She managed to stay almost another two years in Canada, although instead of packing furs and canoeing she was put to laundering for her former co-workers. She was in no hurry to return to Orkney, which is reasonable since when she did return, with her astonishing story and her illegitimate son, she was a social outcast. She made a poor living back home knitting stockings and died a vagrant in 1861. The story of her adventures survived her, but as the years passed, any mention of her stamina and courage was left out. Her later years as an outcast took on particularly witchlike characteristics in the telling. It was said of her, without any factual basis at all, that she was the daughter of Bessie Millie, and that she survived by selling charms and love philters to young farmers and maidens.
So often, when we imagine ourselves in the past, we give ourselves permission to have been among the bravest and most fortunate. Perhaps I couldn’t have been Grace O’Malley, but why not the mate of a gunner carrying gunpowder from the hold and repacking the cannons, or the spouse of the ship surgeon, taking over when he was crushed under a falling spar? Surely I might have been the captain’s wife who navigated the ship back to civilization after he was eaten by savages, or the daughter whose genial father allowed her the run of the ship. I saw myself as “The Handsome Cabin Boy” in the old ballad, disguised as a sailor to see the world. Would I have had the nerve, the opportunity, the courage to change my clothes and my sex? Or would I have been a fishmonger’s daughter, an alehouse waitress, a sailor’s whore, a sea witch? No, in imagination I was always on deck, waving at those who stayed behind.
Our gallant ship her anchor weighed,
And from Stromness bore away, brave . . . girls!
And from Stromness bore away!
Tonight I’d have dinner and a half-pint of bitter, and take another evening stroll if it stayed fine. There would be Robertson’s Orkney Fudge for dessert, of course. I’d return to gaze out my window and, since it was light so late, finish off a small watercolor of the Inner Holm at high tide. The Island of Isobel Gunn, I might call it. I had finally figured out a use for my personal bath mat, delivered daily like a newspaper. It made an excellent blotting paper on which to lay my watercolor brushes out to dry.
CHAPTER VII
ENCHANTMENT
From the Orkney Islands to the Shetland Islands
IT WAS ten in the evening when the P & O ship, the St. Sunniva, departed Stromness for the Shetland Islands. The sun still hung in the sky, though the town, protected by a rounded arm of hills against the Atlantic winds, was in shadow. A line of gold fire ran along the top of Brinkie’s Brae, and a peach glow filtered gently along the paths leading down to the harbor. Standing on the top deck of the ferry I was high above the dock and eye level with the upper houses and trees of Stromness. I seemed to stand in daylight, while the town below turned to thoughts of sleep.
The heavy ropes that bound us to the dock were unloosed and winched up. We moved off with a blast from the horn. There was rain in the air, more a fine mist through which the sun sparkled. The harbor waters were gold, overlaid with a scalloped pattern of frost and dark green. I was sorry I didn’t have my camera with me and debated for an instant whether it was worth threading my way back down to my berth to retrieve it. Years ago, feeling the heart-swell of How beautiful, travelers might have quoted Wordsworth or Browning to themselves or each other. We moderns had come to rely almost entirely on photography to respond to the divine in nature. To want to take a picture was to want to perform some act of reverence. How else to explain the fact that so many photographs we snap we never look at again?
But I didn’t dash down to my cabin after my camera, or even go below deck, for as I turned away from the last sight of Stromness, and we began to round the Point of Ness, I found myself looking at a rainbow at least a mile high, whose perfect arch created a gate. The arch had a foot on the island of Graemsay and one on Mainland, with a channel leading to Scapa Flow underneath. Between the portals of the gate was a lighthouse that looked like a candle. I had never seen a rainbow so very tall nor so very close. It must have been the combination of the setting sun and the salt mist that gave it such crystalline radiance. All the colors were present; yet it wasn’t the brightest rainbow I’d ever seen. It was almost more white than multicolored, with glinting filaments of emerald, ruby, and sapphire.
My knees went weak to see this phenomenon in all its perfection, and I was astonished that the people near me didn’t stop their conversations and fall down and begin worshipping it.
“Look—the rainbow,” I said softly to the woman nearest me.
She was English, and hardly paused her conversation. She and her husband were discussing which boarding schools would be better for their grandson. “Yes, it’s very pretty,” she said.
Was I the only one to see this unearthly spectacle? Now I really wanted to rush below deck for my camera, to prove it somehow, but I couldn’t bear to take my eyes from the sight. Already its colors were fading slightly. We’d come out into Hoy Sound, and the island of Hoy rose majestically to our left. The sun was dropping fast over the western horizon and a strong cold wind met the prow of the ship head on. Passengers were deserting the top deck now, and the rainbow was behind us. I watched it until it vanished completely, and even then I still seemed to see it, a gateway to another country of the imagination.
The Orcadians have long held a myth about an enchanted world called Hilda-land. This was a place rarely seen, for it was almost always hidden by heavy fogs and mists. Only when the light was absolutely right, when the atmospheric refraction of clouds and sea turned into solid earth, could you look upon the rich green fields and river valleys of Hilda-land. As for getting there, you’d need a guide, a guide perhaps like Annie Norn.
Annie was a young woman on one of the Orkney isles who went to the shore one evening and never returned. Three or four years later a ship was returning to Orkney from Norway in the autumn of the year, and on that vessel was a cousin of Annie, called Willie Norn. Storms and tempests kept the ship whirling around the North Sea, and then, even worse, a thick fog came and the wind abated, leaving them directionless and their ship becalmed.
It was then they heard the splash of oars and became aware of someone or something coming toward them through the fog. When they could finally see, it appeared to be a small boat rowed by a woman. Was she a Fin Wife? If so, it was more trouble for them. She approached the side of the ship and before they could stop her, leaped aboard. Once she was on deck, Willie Norn r
ecognized her as his cousin Annie.
Turning to the crew, quoth she to them, “Ye muckle feuls! why stand ye gaping an’ glowering at me as gin I war a warlock? Gae veer your vessel aboot,” and then she put the helm to lee, brought the vessel in the wind, and sang out her orders to the men, as if she had been a born skipper.
When the fog lifted they found themselves in a bay as calm and bright as a lake, with beautiful hills and valleys all around. The men thought they were dreaming, but Annie brought the ship to anchor and led them to shore. She took them to a magnificent house that was her home, and gave them meat and drink. Then she showed them to their beds, where they slept a very long time. When they awoke, another lavish meal had been prepared for them, to which the neighbors all arrived riding on sea horses. Annie’s husband sat on the high seat next to her and welcomed the sailors to Hilda-land. When the feasting was over, Annie bade them all go back to their ship. Willie asked Annie to return with him, but she told him she was well off where she was with her husband and would not think of leaving. She did tell Willie to give all the folk at home loving messages, and to tell her mother she had three “bonny bairns.”
Hilda-land was the summer home of the Finfolk, who otherwise lived at the bottom of the sea in Finfolkaheem. Anyone lucky enough to visit Finfolkaheem would find palaces of crystal and coral illuminated by phosphorescence. The dancing halls had curtains made of the aurora borealis. The sand was gold, and the gardens of the great houses were full of waving seaweed, richly colored. The Fin Men hunted on sea horses; otters and seals were their dogs. If you were invited to a banquet in Finfolkaheem, you could count on whale, otter, and seal—fried, roasted, or boiled—with tureens of whale soup, thickened with cod roe, accompanied by seaweed stewed in seal fat, and washed down with conches of blood-red wine.
The Pirate Queen Page 11