The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  “I came for curiosity’s sake,” she said. “But I am having trouble liking it. In Denmark we were having a nice hot summer when I left last week. Here I’ve been cold every day, all the time. There’s not very much to do. The people are not very friendly.”

  THAT WAS not Elizabeth Taylor’s experience during her first extended stay in the Faroes, from 1900 to 1905. Elizabeth Taylor liked the Faroese very much. Even on her brief visit half a decade earlier she had noticed the men, describing them as “ruddy blond with thick half-curling hair and very thick soft beards.” They put her in mind of the old Vikings in the sagas. Five years later, she was back to stay. “I am going up to the Faroes, & even to think of it gives me a feeling of strength & enthusiasm,” she wrote to a friend. She was forty-four then, a self-taught botanist, ornithologist, and ethnologist. She planned to draw, to take notes, to gather specimens for the British Museum, the Smithsonian, for collections at Harvard and Oxford. “In order to secure material, I must see different islands and have certain experiences. . . . I must write about trout fishing, bird cliffs, whales, etc.”

  Elizabeth had grown up in St. Paul, Minnesota; her father was appointed the American consul to Winnipeg when she was fourteen. She was close to him and made visits over the years to Canada; he encouraged her explorations. Middle-class women rarely went to college in those days. Most professions were closed to them. If they didn’t immediately marry, their choices were few. They could be nurses or teachers. They could live with their families. For many women, of course, a life with such prospects was stultifying. Elizabeth first sought an identity as an artist. She studied at the Art Students League in New York for several summers; she went to Paris and took lessons at Colarossi and Académie Julian. She spent a winter in Venice. Like many Americans, she found that a small income went further in Europe. She did not think she was particularly talented as an artist; she turned instead to writing. Yet even though she published many articles, she felt undereducated. She did not want to be an amateur; she thought that if she settled in one place and thoroughly investigated it, the book that resulted would make a contribution to world knowledge. The Faroes appealed to her for their remoteness, and for the fact that no one else seemed to have written much about them.

  She tramped, she painted, she botanized and collected specimens; she was rowed about by eight strong men in a boat.

  So I climbed down and waited on the rocks for a lull, while the men kept the boat in a quiet spot under some cliffs across the inlet. “Now!” cried a man who was watching the sea. The boat shot forward to where I stood, I tumbled in anyhow, waved a farewell to those on shore, and in an instant we were tossing high in a whirl of white water between the reefs, cutting through masses of foam, and reaching the open sea just before the next big wave broke. There we were safe; there was little wind, and the great waves swept shoreward in unbroken lines. We could easily climb them and race down their outer slopes. It was a glorious day.

  Pastor Peter Lorentz Heilmann and wife Flora are joined by Elizabeth Taylor (wrapped in a blanket) in 1901

  In spite of the effervescence in many of her descriptions, Elizabeth’s time in the Faroes was not completely euphoric. Dependent on her writing for income, she was forced to be the guest of various Faroese. The winter she spent with the governor of Tórshavn was long and difficult. There were nine children, five of them babies; they suffered that winter from whooping cough, chicken pox, and meningitis. The youngest baby died. The servants were “disorganized.” Another winter found her with a pastor’s family on the northernmost island. Although she buoyed herself with thoughts that here were the essentials: salt-of-the-earth peasantry, lots of fresh air, and the opportunity for good walking (“As to society, who wants it? I don’t.”), her spirits understandably flagged. “The surf is so bad that in winter no visitors can come. . . . There are but two shops & all the people except one shopkeeper & the schoolmaster are peasant fisherman.” But soon she chided herself, “Do not look melancholy about the cold & make folks regret you are in the house.”

  She made friends, but not many were women. Educated, Danish-speaking men—the schoolteachers, governors, consuls, and pastors of the island—were her preferred companions. Elizabeth had wished to be a boy when growing up; all her life she envied male freedom. Like many Victorian women travelers, she achieved a kind of genderless authority by coming to a new country in the persona of an independent adventurer. Her foreignness made freedom possible; her announced occupation, to gather as much material on the Faroes as possible in order to write a book, gave her a reason for living in a remote island archipelago in the Atlantic.

  She found romance in wondering, “Am I or am I not a Kalvakona?”

  That means a halibut woman, one who possesses mysterious powers that can charm a big halibut to the hook of a fisherman. But the fisherman must have promised her verbally, or in his thoughts at sea, the beita—a choice bit cut from the fish between the forefins. . . . Last week, a man on the fishing bank promised me the beita, and a few minutes later he was having a sharp fight with a halibut that weighed almost two hundred pounds. . . . Two days later, another man promised me the beita, and caught nothing. So what is one to think?

  Faroese women grading cod on the docks

  Old photographs of the Faroes show dozens of women working in the fishing industry, as they worked all over the North Atlantic, particularly in Iceland and Norway, laying the split cod out to dry on the rocks and gathering them up if rain threatened. The women wear shawls and long dresses in the photographs; they stand next to great piles of dried cod, which were sold primarily in the Mediterranean for baccalao. But these women were invisible to Taylor; she did not describe them in her writing. She would rather be at a remove from everyday working life; she would rather be an outsider, a traveler, a halibut woman.

  “WHAT ABOUT you?” asked my Danish companion. She had just taken a photo of me (months later the photograph would be held by a magnet to my refrigerator at home: I’m wearing the perpetual green rain jacket; my hair is flying. I look staunch and farseeing rather than very cheerful), and we were strolling back through the little village. “Why would you come to the Faroes? Do you like it here?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer. Back in Tórshavn, things were not going well. My landlady seemed to have taken a dislike to me. Two months earlier I’d faxed a request to stay three days; once here, I’d asked to change it to five, which she’d agreed to—I thought. Then last night, the evening of my third day, she’d knocked forcefully on my door and demanded to know how long I thought I was staying. “Two more nights,” I said. “We agreed.”

  “HVA?!?”

  “TWO MORE DAYS.”

  “Impossible. I have other people coming. You must leave.”

  “I’m not leaving. We agreed.”

  “HVA?”

  Yesterday morning I’d taken my clothes to the woman who was said to do laundry, and nearly had a tussle with her when she attempted to put them into a large bag full of other people’s clothes. I said in both English and Norwegian, “How will you tell my clothes from anybody else’s?” Finally her son came to the rescue and explained that his mother thought I was the same lady from England who had been by earlier and dropped off some clothes.

  I bought a new watch, at a vastly inflated price. I went to the tourist office to arrange this trip to Eysturoy, and found my young friend in a puzzled mood. He had been an exchange student in America, he confided, and although he had asked his friends to come visit him, nobody would ever come to the Faroes. Why was that? I was American, could I tell him? I went to the post office several times looking for my Lonely Planet guide, to no avail. I collected quite a few stamps that showed an unfriendly sheep’s head.

  Back on the bus, leaving Gjógv for Eidi, another remote village in the north of Eysturoy, where Elizabeth Taylor had spent five years, our tour guide came back and sat by me to practice her English. She pointed out the “cheeps” on the hillside, and rehearsed what to say about the pilot
whale hunting, the famous grindadráp. She thought the two Germans might disapprove and wanted to explain that it was a long tradition in the Faroes. The people waited months for the pilot whales to blunder into shore. The resultant killing supplied the natives with necessary nourishment.

  “What is the word for whale fat in English?”

  “Blubber,” I said.

  “It’s not spekk?”

  “No, that’s Norwegian.”

  “Blubber,” she sounded it out. “Blubber, blubber, blubber. Are you in Greenpeace?”

  I changed the subject. “Eidi,” I said. “Isn’t that where Elizabeth Taylor, the American traveler, had to live throughout the First World War?”

  “I do not know her.”

  Elizabeth Taylor left the Faroes in 1906, after spending six years gathering information and specimens. She lived for a while in England, then returned to the U.S. but did not progress with her book, though she did manage to place a few articles and organize illustrated talks on the Faroes. She continued her restless ways, settling nowhere in America, visiting Europe again, living a time in Scotland. She made another appearance in the Faroes in 1913, and again, unluckily, in 1914. The First World War broke out and few ships came into or out of the Tórshavn harbor from abroad for five years. What was it like for her, without mail, on short rations, a perpetual guest? She was in her sixties by then; her vigorous cheerfulness must have been fading slightly. She discovered she did not like the cold, after all. Botanizing, painting, birding seemed less important. She pottered stoically in a borrowed garden, taught a local boy to paint. It would have been a good time to work on her book, perhaps to finish it. Instead, she brooded over her perfectionism, her procrastination. “Everyone seems to be dreadfully clever nowadays and the public wants things that are striking, and a trifle sensational and picturesque, and I fear that is all beyond me.” She published only two articles from this second long stay. One is called wearily, “Five Years in a Faroe Attic.”

  I wouldn’t have liked to be stuck in Eidi for five years. Taylor called it a “dirty disagreeable little village.” It was not as picturesque as Gjógv, though it was larger, ranged along two roads overlooking a beautiful wide bay, just the sort of bay an unlucky pod of pilot whales might mistakenly swim into. On a windy viewpoint where we stopped to use the toilets, our guide gave us an enthusiastic talk in English and Scandinavian about the grindadráp. The Germans, contrary to expectations, were not Green at all, but seemed very respectful of the need of the Faroese for all that blubber. The Norwegians, longtime whale hunters, also remained composed. Only the Danes seemed grossed out. The Danish woman asked me to take a picture of her. “I really don’t want to hear what these people do to the poor whales,” she said, gesturing me away from the group. She smiled into the camera, bravely, I thought. She’d said she was a schoolteacher. This wasn’t her first trip away from Denmark, but it was the first time she’d traveled alone. “I return to Denmark tomorrow,” she said. “I can hardly wait.”

  BACK IN Tórshavn, I sneaked into the guesthouse while the landlady was in the kitchen. I had half-expected my room to have been cleaned out while I was gone, but everything was as I’d left it. In fact, she hadn’t dusted a single day since I’d been here. What was I so desperately hanging on to? Some futile desire for control in a foreign place. My own things, arranged my own way, my own place, if even for a few nights.

  But travel is about letting go; there’s no other way to experience it. I knew that it’s only when you let go that the best things happen. That’s why I traveled, and why I found it so hard sometimes.

  I was about seven years old when I first realized that a girl, a woman, could go off by herself to see the world. One day my mother and some friends took me along to the Port of Los Angeles. From the dock we went up the gangplank of an ocean liner and down the corridor to a small stateroom. The voyager, my mother’s friend, was a middle-aged lady whose name I don’t remember, a teacher who had the summer off. She was going by ship around the whole world, and she took me on her knee and said, “I’ll send you some post cards,” which she later did, of Japan, and India, and Paris. Then there was a warning blast, and we all rushed off. We stood on the dock while colored streamers flew out and over the sides of the ship. The lady looked very small up there at the railing, wearing a hat and a corsage pinned to her jacket. “Goodbye!” she called. “Goodbye,” we called back. “Don’t forget to write!”

  The idea of her sea voyage was enormous to me, and all the way home in the car I thought about it, and laid my plans. My first trip around the world would have to be via the cardboard globe, which I spun and spun, letting my finger touch the countries under it. “I’m in Japan now,” I announced to my brother. He spun the globe and ended in the Pacific. “I’m drowned,” he said. I organized a game in the backyard of me on the picnic table throwing down some colored streamers to the mystified dog. I waved to my mother at the window: “Goodbye! Goodbye!”

  “Goodbye!” she waved back from the kitchen. “Don’t forget to write!”

  I lay on my bed in Tórshavn and thought about women traveling, about all those ladies without proper professions who wrote books. I was hardly any different from them. I’d come to the Faroe Islands because they sounded adventurous, because they were wildly remote, because no one I knew had ever been here. I was a lady who had sailed off on a boat and had come to an island in the middle of nowhere precisely to write about it. Elizabeth Taylor and her failure to finish her book haunted me. Who has the right to say another person’s life is futile? Yet I mourned for women of the past, whose wildest adventures, most passionate and courageous acts had been reduced to anecdotes about “intrepid Victorian lady travelers.” Intrepid: Well, that was one word I refused to use, about myself or any other unfortunate soul who found herself far away from home, having to depend on strangers.

  I was so tired that I didn’t eat dinner. I read a mystery and listened to a tape on compassion by Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, kept in my bag for just such self-pitying moods. I waited for the whiskery landlady to bang on my door and demand I leave instantly, but she didn’t. Gradually I grew more peaceful; all the same, I fell asleep in my clothes, afraid of a nocturnal rousting.

  The next morning I found I’d had a change of heart. Travel is the state of being homeless; we should welcome the opportunity it gives us to live nowhere. I wrote a note to the landlady in Norwegian, saying that I had thought about it, and that I would be leaving this morning.

  She looked astonished, and then grateful, when I handed the slip of paper to her. She said, smiling somewhat ruefully, “I believe we had a misunderstanding. I am a little deaf, you know. Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I will call the Seaman’s Hotel. They have reasonable rooms. I will drive you there.”

  Perhaps she just wanted to make sure I was really leaving. She called and there was a room at the Seaman’s Hotel. I packed up quickly, suddenly lighthearted. I let her drive me the few short blocks; on the way we talked about the weather, whether it would rain or not today. We parted cordially. She apologized again, and I marveled that I had ever been afraid of her.

  CHAPTER XI

  AUD THE DEEP-MINDED

  From the Faroe Islands to Iceland

  I AWOKE one morning in Tórshavn to find the red-and-black wooden houses wrapped in fog, green turf roofs dripping. In the harbor, masts poked out of the mist like knitting needles from white cotton batting. The gulls swooped over the glassy water and perched watchfully on boats. Leaving the Seaman’s Hotel after breakfast, I could feel the cobblestones of the old town under my feet, but I couldn’t see my legs. I imagined that the islands might well have drifted overnight even farther away from the rest of the world.

  That morning I left Tórshavn by bus for the island of Sandoy to the south. I’d decided to visit the village of Húsavík overnight and to see the ruins of a medieval farm once owned by the “Lady of Húsavík.” Gudrún Sjúrdardóttir, a ship own
er and merchant, was once counted as one of the wealthiest women of the North. She was born in Bergen, Norway, in the mid-fourteenth century; her father was Sjurdur Hjalt, Hjalt meaning that he came from Shetland. When he died, Gudrún inherited his considerable wealth and property: many houses in Bergen and some twenty farms along the west coast of Norway, as well as land in Shetland. She came to Húsavík with her husband, Arnbjørn Gudleiksson, who persuaded her to return to his home in the Faroes to rebuild the farm after the Black Death carried away much of the valley’s population. She moved to the Faroes and still maintained ties with Bergen and Shetland through trading interests. How many ships she had, we don’t know, but one of them went down in the North Sea in 1403 with her husband on it.

  In medieval times, strangely, the Faroes would have seemed no more remote than most places in the maritime countries of the north. These islands may even have seemed more accessible than Ireland or England, which were still forested and populated by hidden, hostile inhabitants. The Norse who settled the northern isles were seafaring folk. Shetland was two days’ sail from Norway, the Faroes another two or three from Shetland. Nowadays, when we get into our cars to go from place to place, cities seem close and islands distant. Yet, until a century or two ago, traveling overland was far more onerous and dangerous than a sea voyage. Especially important to the Vikings and their descendents was the fact that you could see your enemies coming out at sea.