The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  But taking control in a crisis was not the same as being the captain. The striking thing about Grace O’Malley was not just her seamanship, but her role as commander at sea. Her circumstances were unusual: encouragement from her father and clan, and unsettled times in Ireland, along with obviously charismatic powers of leadership. One had to look far back in history, to stories of the exploits of Queen Tomyris, who in 529 B.C. battled Cyrus the Great off the Caspian Sea, and Queen Artemesia, who led five ships into battle with Xerxes of Persia in 480 B.C., to find comparisons to Grace.

  All through my travels I’d been keeping an eye out for stories of women captains and commanders. Here in Shetland I’d encountered mainly doubt as to whether women had even gone to sea at all, except to drift. Drifting was, of course, the very antithesis of commanding. Shetland was no different than most maritime countries. I found no hidden histories, hard as I looked, of sea captains who were women. Yet in a curious way I did come closer to understanding how the dreams of girls who longed to run away to sea were converted into more traditional and respectable roles.

  “I’VE BEEN up all night! I’ve been writing poetry!”

  It was about seven in the morning and I was having a solitary cup of coffee in a glass room off the main body of the youth hostel at Uyeasound on Unst, the northernmost island of Shetland. This warm, slightly steamy little conservatory with its shabby chintz armchairs and ivy trailing up the inner glass walls was my secret. I’d found it a perfect place to sketch and write, snug when it rained and brilliant when the sun burst out. Since these two phenomena alternated on Shetland at ten-minute intervals, the glass room was also a watertight refuge.

  “I couldn’t sleep! I’m in a state of grace. I’m in love with life!” A vigorous woman of sixty suddenly materialized before me, wearing bright red-and-blue floral leggings and a red sweater tunic. She had a matching floral scarf tied gypsylike around her head, with the ends falling over her shoulders. A large rhinestone cross rested on her ample bosom, and a tattoo of a swallowtail butterfly decorated her inner forearm.

  She had a pack of cigarettes in one hand and a pen in the other. She grabbed a pad of paper from one of the armchairs. “Sometimes poetry is the only way to say what you feel, isn’t it?” she called back as she left the room.

  A few moments later I could hear her having an animated conversation with someone on the phone in the hallway. I walked past her to get another cup of coffee from the kitchen, and asked Bob who she was. Bob was retired from the merchant navy and running a leadership retreat for boys here at the hostel.

  “Dorothy Thomson? She’s the sister-in-law of the warden,” he said. “She used to live up here on Unst—divorced now. She was in the merchant navy, too.”

  “The merchant navy! What did she do?” I asked excitedly.

  “She worked on one of the ships that went back and forth to New Zealand. After the war, in the fifties and sixties, a good many people decided to leave Britain for the colonies. I believe she was a child minder, or some such thing.”

  Dorothy vanished before I could talk to her, but the next morning, as I was setting my backpack out by the bus stop, the hostel warden appeared and right behind her, Dorothy, again wearing bright red, with a scarf tied dashingly around her short, streaked blond hair, and a great deal of gold jewelry. Her pumps were big and white and her manicured fingernails long and red. She was driving back to Lerwick today, she said. She didn’t live there, but she had some errands. She’d be glad to take me, no, she insisted; the company would be grand, and she could show me more of Shetland. I had to excuse her for yesterday—she’d been in such a state of bliss. She’d just been substitute teaching on the remote island of Foula, off the west coast, and felt transformed. The children in her class—all two of them—the people on the island, getting to and from the island, especially when the weather was so terrible, then driving up to Unst to see her son’s soccer team, oh, all of it made her heart so full that poetry was her only response!

  She laughed and lit a cigarette, and opened the door for me. “Don’t worry, I won’t quote you any on the drive. Though I may sing you a song or two.”

  THERE ARE lots of jokes about the name of the island of Yell, which so easily rhymes with hell. It has no trees and not much of a population. But on an intermittently sunny day, as this turned out to be, one could almost be south as well as north, in Baja California or some other barren landscape that is mostly rock and water. Yell isn’t as green as some of the other islands. It’s brown and soft like a long cat that continually changes position; a cold bright wind blows over the hills. A hundred inlets, or voes, invite the sea into the island. The clouds billow and unfurl and pile on top of each other like sumo wrestlers. Every turn in the road is a different vista, the Atlantic one way, the North Sea the other.

  The Northern Star had been Dorothy’s ship, she told me, as we careened around the narrow roads that cut around the hills of Yell. It was the newer of two sister ships built in the fifties by the British Shaw Savill line. The Northern Star and the Southern Cross were, at the time, the very model of comfortable postwar ocean travel. They carried no cargo, so they were always on schedule, and without a hold, the engines could be placed aft, creating more room for cabins and decks. They sailed from Southampton to Wellington, New Zealand, and back, about seventy-five days round trip.

  Dorothy first went aboard the Northern Star in May of 1968, when she was twenty-seven. She was one of only fifteen women out of a crew of five hundred; five of the women were officers—two “nursing sisters,” the assistant purserette, the social hostess, and the children’s hostess. “Yes, I was a chili ho,” said Dorothy, “for three years on the Northern Star. I went around the world nine times, and once to Japan and Hong Kong on the Cherry Blossom Tour.” Dorothy’s father had been a ship’s engineer. She was born in Orkney, and after finishing at the University of Edinburgh, she married her childhood sweetheart. He was going to be a captain and she would be his wife and travel the world with him. He drowned three months after they were married. “I had a strong Orkney accent,” she said. “They claimed they hired me because of that. Because there were so many Orcadians on board, going to the colonies, they wanted someone to make the children feel at home. You had to have a teaching certificate to be a children’s hostess, and be at least twenty-four.”

  The Northern Star carried fourteen hundred passengers, of which about two hundred were children. Dorothy had two assistants to help her keep them amused. There were also a few hairdressers and stewardesses on the ship and two laundresses, nicknamed “steam queens.” Their quarters were variously called Fluff Alley or Quality Street. The children’s hostess and social hostess were on call seven days a week; their only free time came when they were in port. The women who worked onboard were expected to act like ladies and represent the ship. “I took a course called Seagoing Charm School,” said Dorothy. “It was all about deportment, manners, manicures. They gave me a certificate. I remembered the manicure lessons anyway.” She laughed and waggled her long red fingernails. “Our wages were very low. They held them back until the end of the voyage, but you had an account. Sometimes at the end, you had nothing.”

  As she drove, she waved at people we passed, and told me a story about each of them. He’d divorced. She had a cranky mother. Dorothy had worked with him as a teacher. I kept returning to her sailing days, however. “You’re really interested in all this ship business?” she asked.

  “I worked on a ship, too, the summer I was twenty-two. It was the Kong Olav, one of the coastal steamers, in Norway. I loved it, though not the work. I was a dishwasher, at the very bottom of the heap.”

  “Then you know all about the social stratification of a ship,” Dorothy said. “The captain at the top, descending all the way down. Oh, we did have fun though. We weren’t supposed to fraternize with the crew, but of course we did. The engineers traditionally did not get on with the mates. Oil and water don’t mix, we always heard. That never bothered me. A lot of the stewar
ds were gay. Management liked them because they were so neat. Every voyage they’d put on a drag show for the crew called ‘The Sod’s Opera.’ Do you like to sing?”

  “Yes, but I can’t hold a tune.”

  “I love to sing. I’m in a singing group and we’re going to Norway next week on an exchange. Look, there’s a little church down that road, a Methodist one. Let’s stop and I’ll sing you some songs on the organ.”

  We pulled alongside the tiny white church. Its door was open and it was neat as a pin inside, with children’s artwork on the bulletin board. There were about ten pews and a dazzling view of the water. Dorothy flung open the small organ and played me a funny song about being seasick on the Pentland Firth. Then a religious tune or two. By the end she was wiping away tears. “Are you religious at all?”

  “I had a religious childhood,” I said.

  “I’m a believer,” she said, fingering her rhinestone cross. “God saved my life. My second husband was an alcoholic. I’ve had such tough times, such up-and-down times that I couldn’t have survived without my faith.”

  We got back in the car and Dorothy sang some more. “Now I hope you’re not in a hurry,” she said. “It’s not raining and I want to show you something else.”

  She set off again, down a winding road. “I haven’t been here in a long time, but I know it’s here. ‘The White Lady,’ it’s called.”

  We parked by a farm and started a steep descent through sheepy pastures. The wind was frisky. I had on my hiking boots, but Dorothy was wearing big boatlike white pumps that didn’t make the descent easy. “It’s somewhere. It’s somewhere . . .”

  Then, lower on the slope, we saw it. A woman’s figure, painted white, slanted to fit the prow of a ship with the long skirt sweeping behind and her chest proudly angled forward. She wasn’t a bare-breasted beauty, but a sedate, high-collared matron with a book clasped in her hands over her heart. The White Lady came from a German clipper that was wrecked off this point last century. A farmer had rescued her and planted her here, forever looking out to sea. She was twice as big as Dorothy, but there was something of the same attitude in them as they faced each other on the promontory.

  We climbed back up the hill, negotiating marshy bits and a fence with barbed wire that had popped out of nowhere. It was bright, very bright, but the wind took your breath away. We threw ourselves back inside the car and panted.

  “I guess I’m still giddy from Foula,” said Dorothy. “Or the sunshine. I feel like I could just wander around Shetland all day.”

  This worried me slightly. “Eventually I have to get to Lerwick,” I said. “I have some more work to do at the library.”

  “We’ll go by my house first,” decided Dorothy. “I haven’t been home for over a week. I need to check my mail and messages, take a bath. Then we’ll drive straight on to Lerwick. You’ll be there by lunchtime!”

  Since it was already noon, I suspected not, but a delay of an hour or two couldn’t hurt. The landscape grew more and more beautiful to me. We passed signs that said Hill of Vatsie, Ness of Queyon, Otterswick, Saddle of Swarister. We came to the ferry landing at Ulsta and crossed to Toft. We drove another twenty minutes or so to Brae, where Dorothy lived in a terrace house that, she told me, had been hastily constructed when the workers were building the oil terminal and airport at Sullom Voe, not far away.

  “Just be a tick,” she said. “Make yourself at home. Have a cup of tea, a biscuit. Wander around. See my collection of Japanese dolls upstairs. I’m just going to ring a friend, then I’ll have a bath.” I sat at the kitchen table and had a cup of tea and toast. By a strange coincidence Dorothy’s Seaman’s Record Book and Certificate of Discharge were sitting on the table among piles of paper. An authority had declared that “the person to whom this Discharge Book relates has satisfied me that he (she) is a seaman. . . .” There was a photograph of Dorothy Cogle, as she was called then, in the faded blue book. She already had the blue swallowtail butterfly on her arm.

  I heard Dorothy animatedly talking on the phone, while the water ran into the tub across the hall. She came downstairs with a book, a newspaper clip, and a sheaf of notebook paper. “I wondered if you might be interested in some notes that one of the social hostesses gave me. We had a get-together a while back.” She rushed into the bath to turn off the water and soon was splashing noisily. She’d brought her phone in with her and was talking as she bathed: “You’ll never guess! I have a writer here with me. I found her in Unst when I was up visiting my son. Now she’s at my kitchen table. She’s writing a book and I’m telling her about the Northern Star. Yes, my old ship.”

  I read the newspaper clipping first. It was an interview with Dorothy in a q-and-a format in the Shetland Times. One of the questions was “What’s your greatest ambition?”

  “I’d like to be the first female Pope,” Dorothy had responded. “Just to be called el Mama.”

  The book Dorothy had handed me was Splendid Sisters, a history of the Southern Cross and the Northern Star, published in 1966. The fourteen pages of handwritten notes were a copy of “Instructions to Hostesses,” originally compiled by one of the Northern Star’s first social hostesses, a woman named Jeanne. At the top of the first page, in caps, was written: KEEP YOUR SENSE OF HUMOUR AT ALL TIMES.

  The writer of the instructions obviously had, because her detailing of what was expected of the hostess—bridge, Woman’s Hour, cocktail parties, the Children’s Fancy Dress Ball, and organizing PR for the important passengers in different ports—was laced with wit: “Never say no to any (reasonable) passenger request—i.e. for a ‘jugglers’ get-together,’ or ‘discussion into psychic research,’ etc.”

  The Northern Star sailed from Southampton to Las Palmas and down the African coast to Cape Town and Durban, and from there to Perth in Western Australia. There was a week in Melbourne and Sydney, then it was over to Wellington, where the ship was completely cleaned, and all the passengers, except those few who were round-the-world voyagers, finally disembarked. Some of the passengers were emigrating to South Africa, Australia, or New Zealand, about to begin new lives; some were returning home for visits. The return journey crossed the Pacific to Fiji and Tahiti, then passed through the Panama Canal to Curaçao and Trinidad (Note to hostesses: “Get to a Caribbean nightclub!”), before returning to Southampton.

  READING ABOUT the voyages, I felt my old, seafaring wanderlust. I had imagined, after the summer on the Kong Olav, that I’d try to find a job on another ship, perhaps one going around the world. I had my Norwegian seaman’s papers and a work permit. I could have even tried to go to a maritime academy. Instead, I’d used the money I’d earned to make my way to Seattle. Although I’d still fantasized, from time to time, of going to San Francisco and sitting in the Scandinavian hiring hall, within a year I was working at an alternative newspaper and soon after that started a publishing company. Why had I given it up? I wondered. I could have seen Japan; I could have seen the Caribbean.

  Dorothy came out of the bathroom, wearing nothing but a big towel.

  “Can I get a copy of these notes?”

  “Of course. You’ll need that for your research, won’t you? We’ll go to the high school where I used to teach; they have a copy machine.”

  But first the post arrived, and the postman, who was something of a writer himself, came in and was introduced; the post must be read and more calls made, and then Dorothy had to put on her face. As I read again through the notes, I began to recall a television comedy I saw as a child in the late fifties, The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna. Gale Storm, a former B-movie actress who had become one of television’s first sitcom stars in My Little Margie, played Susanna Pomeroy, the social director of a cruise ship. Her roommate on the USS Ocean Queen was the dithery ship’s beautician, Esmerelda Nugent, “Nugey,” played by sixty-year-old ZaSu Pitts. The script called for the sort of madcap antics and zany impersonations that Lucy and Ethel, and Margie herself, had engaged in so successfully. I remember lots of heads popping th
rough portholes. To capitalize on Gale Storm’s singing career, every third episode featured a big production number, as part of the ship’s entertainment.

  I loved Gale Storm’s impersonations of duchesses and southern belles, the “doubling” acts she carried off so well, but it was the notion of a woman working at sea that left its mark on my imagination. She seemed to go her own way on the ship, getting around authority figures and constantly cooking up mischief with the scatterbrained Nugey. I never thought of her as Susanna, but always as Gale Storm, and to my young mind, it seemed a strange and magnificent coincidence that a woman aboard a ship would be called Gale Storm. In reality, someone at RKO studios thought up the name first, then handed it to the young Texas girl named Josephine Cottle who won their contest to go to Hollywood.

  I hadn’t thought of Gale Storm for years; yet now, at Dorothy’s cluttered kitchen table, I marveled at how the imagination of a young girl subverts what it is given. To me, Gale Storm and Nugey ran the ship, and were the most important people on it.