How did you get to Hilda-land or Finfolkaheem? You had to be lost or in love to find those lands of harmony and abundance, so much wealthier than the barren, stony islands that lay above. But sometimes, if the sun hit the clouds just right, in the rainbow mist you could see the outlines of Hilda-land, with its green pastures and bubbling brooks.
IT WAS long after eleven when I finally went below deck to my cabin. As on all my night voyages in northern summer seas, where it didn’t get very dark, I found it a dilemma whether to sleep or to stay up and explore the ship and watch for the first sight of land. Boarding the St. Sunniva I’d had the sense that only now, after several weeks of travel, had my own seafaring begun. Clare Island, Stronsay, and Papa Stronsay—they were all islands, certainly, and I had reached all of them by boat, but only now did I feel well and truly launched out into the vast Atlantic, onward to places that were far away and less known, floating in the mists.
I was tired, as I’d spent the day hiking around the island of Hoy before returning to Stromness to catch my boat, but I wasn’t sleepy. I slipped between the clean white sheets of my narrow berth and surveyed my small overnight domain with pleasure. The St. Sunniva was west of Orkney now and the current pulsed upward and the waves knocked sideways and the ship pitched and undulated so that my pack fell over and the porthole curtains swung like a girl tossing her hair. I know many people who do not enjoy this kind of motion, not one bit, but I do, very much. On nights like these in cubbyhole cabins at sea, I feel deeply cozy. The rolling of the sea is restful to me. I can sleep well and remember my dreams. Now I wanted to rock and to dream, but not quite to sleep yet. I wanted to feel where I was, feel myself at sea.
Earth is a misnomer; we live on a water planet. Some of our earliest myths are of the watery deep, the dark liquid abyss, the oceanic womb of formlessness. Since organic life began in the water, it’s not strange that we would feel at home there, nor that the depths could cause us anxiety as well as reverence. At the beginning of human history it was the Goddess who divided the waters and her names became legend. She was Nammu in Sumeria, Tiamat in Babylon, Temu in Egypt, Thalassa in Greece, Yemaya in Yoruba. Aphrodite, “she who rises from the waves,” sometimes called Marina or Mari, was a sea goddess and so was the Virgin Mary, whose name in Latin, Maria, means “the seas.” St. Jerome gave the name of Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, to Mary. Her symbols were a blue robe and a pearl necklace, sea and sea foam. In the North, where I was traveling, there was the Mither o’ the Sea, and Ilmatar, from the Finnish epic, the Kalevala. Its opening pages tell a creation myth.
Ilmatar, the daughter of the wind, lived long ages in sacred loneliness in the smooth and endless gardens of the air. At last she grew tired of her life in boundless space, and stepped down to the waves on the broad back of the open sea.
At once there came a great blast of an angry east wind, which raised the sea into a foam of white-capped waves. The winds rocked Ilmatar, the frothing waves cradled her, until wind and wave had wakened life within her womb.
Pregnant for seven hundred years, she floated around in the sea until a sea bird lit on her knee and laid its eggs and brooded them. When the eggs broke open, the lower half became the earth, the upper half the sky. Nine years later,
[Ilmatar] lifted her head from the waters, and in the throes of birthgiving began her creations on the wide back of the sea. Where she turned her hand, she made the headlands. Where she touched her feet, there sank the fish holes, and wherever she splashed bubbles came the depths of oceans.
More ages passed, but still her child, who was to become the hero Väinämöinen, was not born. “Then Ilmatar swam farther from the land. She stopped upon the endless waters, creating seas, and planting hidden reefs where ships are shattered and where seamen meet their deaths.” Finally her son had to free himself, by moving “the bony lock of his chamber with his forefinger.” Once he was out, he had to swim in the sea for eight years before reaching land.
I remember reading the story of the Finnish world maker in a book of northern myths and tales as a child. It reminded me of my own knees sticking up from the water in the bathtub, or my mother’s, between whose legs I’d splashed as a baby, whose arms and knees and feet, with red-enameled toes, were the holms and headlands of an early water world.
My mother was no great swimmer, but she was at home in the water. Born in Brooklyn, raised in the Midwest, she’d taken easily to the pools and beaches of Southern California, and I have many memories of being with her, skin to skin, in varied waters, from the backyard wading pool with its silky sides to the salt-soft lapping waves of the shallow bay at Belmont Shores. It was my mother who gave me my first swimming lesson, who took me to an indoor pool one evening when I was five. The water had a greeny-white glow; the sides were white tile; everything was chlorine wet. My mother’s arms were white and slightly freckled; her head looked small in the tight cap, because her hair was usually so fluffy and dark. I splashed around, centered in the hole of a pink plastic tube.
“Kick,” my mother told me, and demonstrated in a flurry of scissoring water. She was with me, surrounding me, showing me, and then, suddenly, she was at a distance. She had slipped away so I would come to her. Her arms reached out to me, but there was a vast expanse of water to cross, water that was pale green, jam-thick and hard to move through. “Do the same thing you did before; just kick. That’s all you have to do, kick and come to me.” The force of her eyes held me; she was smiling, laughing. She was an island rippled round with rings of aqua light; she rose firm from the invisible floor of the pool on mysterious tall white legs. I kicked, and I arrived back in her arms. “Strong girl,” she said; “brave girl,” she said. “Now, try it again.”
I LAY on my narrow berth on the St. Sunniva, as the ship rolled and rumbled under me and around me, reading Walter Traill Dennison’s book of Orkney folklore about the sea. The story of Annie Norn intrigued me; she was so lively and real in the midst of the fairy tale, an accomplished sailor who rescued men at sea, much like Janet Forsyth. Her tart rebuke to the crew of the becalmed ship, “Ye muckle feuls! why stand ye gaping an’ glowering at me as gin I war a warlock? Gae veer your vessel aboot,” is something that it’s easy to imagine Grace O’Malley shouting as well. Yet Annie’s last name of “Norn” connects her with the Three Fates, or Norns, and with Norna of Fitful-head. She was a Fin Wife, and thus something of a sorceress.
In Orkney lore, it was wedlock that turned a mermaid into a haggard witch. Dennison tells us, “During the first seven years of married life she gradually lost her exquisite loveliness; during the second seven years she was no fairer than women on earth; and in the third seven years of married life the mermaid became ugly and repulsive.” The Fin Wife, after losing her youth and beauty, “was often sent on shore to collect white money [silver] by the practice of witchcraft among men.”
Although a mermaid is one of the most ancient of images—some of the earliest goddesses are Semitic moon deities with fishy tails—she has become sadly reduced in the last hundred or so years, first through Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Little Mermaid” and then by the Disney version of the same, to a pathetic, silent love martyr wearing a bikini top. In ancient cultures the fish tail was a symbol of the Goddess’s power, not an impediment to dancing; the mirror is a symbol of the sea, not a sign of the mermaid’s golden-haired vanity.
Along the shores of Scotland and Orkney there are many old tales of sightings of mermaids on the rocks and skerries. Sometimes she’s called Maid-of-the-Wave. She is always lovely, and alluring. She’s the kind of woman you don’t mind following below the ocean’s surface. The songs she sings will make you forget everything you ever knew and wanted. The tales evoke the longing for beauty and intimacy with some other creature, perhaps with the unconscious, the mother as giver of both life and death, the all encompassing, the irrational, the beloved.
Like tales of mermaids who take off their scaly nether parts and walk on land, the better to lure unwitting men to their
watery kingdoms, transformative stories of the seal folk abound in the northern islands. But seals embody an old animism, when animals were regarded as powerful and numinous, and when humans would mimic them and wear their skins to take on their power. So many stories of the seal folk, selkie or silkie in the local tongue, seem to be about humans trying to capture the spirit of the selkie. One common version begins when a man spies a group of girls sunbathing naked on a beach or rocky shore. When he approaches, most of the girls get away, but one doesn’t, for he steals her spotted skin and hides it somewhere secret in his house. He takes her home, and she tries to be a good wife to him. But always in the story comes the time when she finds, or one of her children tells her where to find, the box or the chest with the skin inside. As soon as she finds it, she’s gone. Although the tales often seem to be about love, they are never about renunciation. The choice of Andersen’s Little Mermaid, to become human and to suffer, is not for the selkie wife. No, she’s tricked into living in a human body for a time, but she always escapes back to her true element at the end.
Seal folk listening to a mermaid’s song
The many stories of seal folk aren’t all about capturing seals for wives. Some are about seal men seducing women (an explanation for out-of-wedlock pregnancy, perhaps) and about crossing a boundary between human and animal, about understanding the connection across species. Sometimes men who are great hunters of seals are taken below and shown the wounds of their prey, after which the hunters hunt no more. But many of the stories are about shape shifting, about changing from animal to human and back. The appeal of the selkie, and indeed the seal, is its amphibious nature. That possibility of living in both worlds is what humans hold to, especially seafarers, fishers, coast dwellers. What if drowning were only a dream from which you woke into a beautiful marine world filled with lavish meals and luxurious houses? What if the fathers and brothers who never came back from fishing were safe and sound under the waves? What if the large gray seal lifting his curious head from the sea to look at you were a relative? How comforting that would be.
An intriguing book I picked up in Stromness, Seal-Folk and Ocean Paddlers by John MacAulay, proposes that old and recurring tales of selkies and mermaids might have some historical truth. Lapps from northern Scandinavia, sometimes called Finns, may have accidentally or deliberately come south in seal-skin-covered kayaks, he says. From shore, it may have looked as if the body sticking out of the water were half-person, half-fish. From the outer islands of the Hebrides, as well as from Orkney, come stories of families who claim to be descended from seals. Sliochd nan ròn, “the race of seals,” they’re called. They were known for dark liquid eyes with a touch of pathos, for their love of music, and sometimes for particularly horny feet with a little webbing between the toes. For MacAulay this identification with seals would make most sense if the islanders had intermarried with the amphibious men, or women, who arrived by kayak.
Folktales about the seal people seem, to me, to be more haunting than those of mermaids and Finfolk, but all of them speak of loss and rebirth, transformation, and love beyond death. More importantly, they offer a rich and imaginative way to cope with drowning, so frequent in these rough seas. Throughout history the sea has been divided in two: the surface and the deep. Very often sailors and captains, mostly men and a few women, have seen the sea as road, as a watery thoroughfare between ports of arrival and departure. In these stories of sea as road, we hear of exploration, navigation, settlement—of battles and trade. But there’s another, vaster marine world, and since the beginning of our collective memory of it, it has been populated by dangerous beasts and monsters, Sea Trows, Finfolk, mermaids, and seal folk, as well as underwater goddesses like Sedna, the Inuit seawoman of the deep, or Ran of Norse legend. When praying to Aphrodite or the Virgin Mary doesn’t work, when our ships founder and sink, we humans have needed to rely on some deeper wisdom, that the sea will return us to our origins, that the sea means, as Mer does in the old Egyptian, both “waters” and “mother-love.”
WHEN I dream about my mother—when I allow myself to remember those dreams—I dream, not so much that she is dead, but that she’s across the water. She’s on a ferry that is just departing (there’s still time to step aboard); she is on a raft in the river, a raft that has just gone downstream ahead of me. Or I dream that she’s swimming or flying, somehow moving around me, a liquid shifting presence, not close, but near. She doesn’t always look like herself, but I know her in my body, in every molecule.
Sometimes she calls to me. She wants me to follow. But I don’t follow. What would happen if I went toward her?
Once, during a dream in which she was leaving on a big car ferry, I knew I had to get hold of her. I ran to a phone booth on the dock, frantic with anxiety, and flipped through the phone book. I paged and paged but I couldn’t find Wilson, nor could I recall the street where our family lived. It was night in this dream, and there were hot white beams spotlighting the ferry. I heard engines roar, the water churn hugely as the ferry pushed away from the dock. I stood there in the lit phone booth and I knew she had a different name now than what I remembered, and a different address, too.
It has been dreams of parting that have haunted me, not dreams of drowning. I was quite a young child when I had my first dream of drowning. How well I recall the first moment of panic, followed by the knowledge that here, underwater, I could breathe.
Now, on the St. Sunniva, I fell asleep to the seesaw of the ship, and I had a dream, darker in color than the light aqua nightmares of childhood, of falling off the ship and down through the ocean. I would have many drowning dreams on this trip. This was the first, but all it was, was falling. I fell a long time and it was cold and leaden.
WHEN I awoke it was dim in my cabin; outside, through the porthole, spattered with rain, I saw misty cliffs and raw, rocky shores. This must be the Shetland Islands, I thought, and was afraid for a moment. How dark everything looked out there, how gray and wet and inhospitable. I’d read that in olden times the Shetlanders would not rescue a drowning person, even when it was safe and easy. For they believed that the sea demanded a sacrifice. If you took away the sea’s victim, someone else, perhaps you yourself, would be taken instead.
I curled back into sleep, held to the beating heart of the ship and rocked by the waves. Now I was enveloped and safe and warm in my berth, in my cabin. When I next woke up, the St. Sunniva was docking in Lerwick. The magic eggshell had broken, with earth at the bottom and sky at the top. Sun shone into the space between. The thick gray mist was lifting and for an instant Shetland, green and bright, looked like Hilda-land. I rushed to pack my things and disembark.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LONELY VOYAGE OF BETTY MOUAT
Sumburgh Head, the Shetland Islands
IT WAS a bitter cold day at the end of January 1886, when Betty Mouat took passage on a ship bound for Lerwick. Some might wonder why Betty didn’t just walk the twenty-four miles from her home at the southernmost tip of the Shetland Islands to the capitol. Walking was common at a time when the roads were bad and few had money for horse travel. It was winter, after all, and the seas were notoriously rough. But Betty Mouat didn’t walk. She’d been born with one leg shorter than the other. She was also, by the standards of the day, old and rather frail. She was fifty-nine.
Betty Mouat had traveled to Lerwick by ship many times before, carrying shawls and other knitting to sell in town. The morning she embarked on the Columbine, she had a bundle of forty shawls, as well as a bottle of milk and two halfpenny biscuits for sustenance on the journey. The voyage was expected to last two or three hours, and Betty was the only passenger.
Eight days later the Columbine smashed into the Norwegian coast, three hundred miles to the northeast. Betty was still the only passenger; she was also the only person on the ship.
IN ORDER to find the house where Betty Mouat had lived, I’d come by bus from Lerwick down to Sumburgh Head, a journey that now takes about half an hour. Sumburgh is
the longer of two pincher-shaped peninsulas that seem to reach out after Fair Isle, which can just be seen on the horizon. Sumburgh is the site of the Bronze and Iron Age ruins of Jarlshof and the Victorian hotel that was once the home of the Laird of Sumburgh. In Betty’s day the land was inhabited by crofters, tenants of the laird, who fished and farmed in a limited way. Now much of it is home to Shetland’s main airport. Betty lived with her half-brother and his family in a small stone house on the shorter of the two pinchers, known as Scatness.
Betty Mouat on the Columbine
One of the many things I liked about Shetland was the place names: Spiggie, Bigton, Brig o’ Waas, Busta, Symbister, Quarff, Mid Yell, Gloup, Funzie, Muckle Flugga. Fitful Head was another. You could see the massive headland of Fitful Head from Sumburgh. It was the fictional home of Norna, the prophetess in Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Pirate, and as I looked at its bulky outline across the bay, I could almost hear Norna’s runic incantations and her weird cry, “Do not provoke Norna of Fitful-head!” Many of the Shetland place names are of Norse origin as, from sometime in the ninth century, Shetland had been a Norwegian province. Only in 1469 were the islands forfeited to Scotland in lieu of an unpaid royal dowry.
I had lunch at the Sumburgh Hotel and strolled through dunes covered in marram grass to a glittering white beach. The sky was a very pale blue and the clouds moved fast, in long wispy streamers, as if they were being sucked in the direction of Fair Isle twenty-five miles to the south. Behind me, to the north, thunderclouds were stacked like giant bundles of indigo and black velvet with gold piping. Earlier, in Lerwick this morning, it had been raining; now, on the beach, between Sumburgh and Scatness, the light was clear, almost silvery. From time to time there was the sound of a small jet landing or departing, and then silence, punctuated by the cries of oystercatchers and gulls. I had my bird book with me and was trying to identify the gulls. I thought a black-backed gull sounded like a dog snarfling in a dream. The bird book called it an angry kuk-kuk-kuk. The common gull was meant to have a more “benign” expression than the herring gull, but so far I had only distinguished them by the color of their legs: yellow and pink.
The Pirate Queen Page 12