The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  I finished my soup and wandered about the ship for a while, before returning to the cabin. My bunkmate was already tucked away and the room smelled of night cream and fish cakes. I climbed up to my bunk and put on my headphones. What better time than now to listen again to a cassette of Shaun Davey’s The Brendan Voyage, an orchestral suite for uilleann pipes that I’d found in a music shop in Westport, on Clew Bay? Centuries ago one of my Irish ancestors could have been traveling (far less comfortably) on a hafskip as the slave of a Norse master or mistress. The great settlement of Iceland took place over the course of sixty years, from 870 to 930. As many as twenty thousand colonists took all the arable land, cut down all the trees and formed themselves into a culture that valued law but not central authority. Although this decentralized form of rule eventually led to family feuding among the medieval Icelanders, it was a noble experiment, and one that echoes, in all its idealism and tragedy, through the sagas.

  Aud was one of the early arrivals. She went first to her brother Helgi. But not meeting with as much hospitality as she had hoped, she left his household and sailed north and into the wide mouth of the Breidafjord to her other brother, Bjorn, who greeted her warmly and didn’t seem at all put off by the number of companions she had with her. Here she spent the winter. The following spring she went land hunting, and a thousand years later, there are still names that recall the places where Aud stopped and surveyed. The name of one headland can be translated as “Breakfast-ness”; another, where she dropped her hair comb, is “Comb-ness.”

  She “took possession of as much land as she pleased,” built a home and became the matriarch of a large family. As she approached old age, she began to free some of her slaves and to give land grants to her younger relatives. She put on a huge wedding feast for the youngest of her grandsons, and made a speech, leaving everything she owned to him.

  Thereupon she rose to her feet and said that she was now retiring to her bed-chamber; she urged them all to enjoy themselves in whatever way each thought best, and ordered ale to be served to the whole company. It is said that Unn was tall and stoutly-built. She walked briskly down the length of the hall, and those present remarked on how stately she still was.

  There was drinking all that evening until it was thought time to go to bed. Next morning Olaf Feilan went to his grandmother’s bedroom. When he entered, Unn was sitting propped up against the pillows; she was dead. Olaf went back into the hall and announced the news; everyone thought it most impressive how Unn had kept her dignity to her dying day.

  The wedding celebration became a funeral as well, and on the last day of the feast, Aud was buried, fittingly, inside a ship, and the ship laid in a mound with a treasure trove, and closed.

  The pagan Norwegians weren’t the only ones to colonize Iceland. First- and second-generation Norse born of marauders who had stayed to settle Orkney, the Hebrides, and Ireland also came. They brought with them Celtic thralls, Christians with a mythic history and oral literature far different from the Norse. The Celtic influence, many say, is why Iceland isn’t like the rest of Scandinavia, and why the preoccupation of the sagas with great deeds and revenge has an Irish flavor.

  Some believe that Iceland was first settled by Irish monks, who fled when the Vikings arrived. It’s the voyage of St. Brendan, the wandering monk, that Shaun Davey’s musical suite commemorates. I listened to the achingly sweet pipes floating on the swell of oceanic orchestration until I fell asleep. I awoke very early, around five. Wrapping up as warmly as I could, I went out on deck. We were about four hours from landing at Seydisfjördur, on the east coast of Iceland. But everything was so fog-curdled it was impossible to see beyond the railing.

  Hafvilla. Somewhere out there I seemed to hear the wet flapping of a woven wadmal sail, the eerie creak of a wooden ship on a glass sea. Everyone except the helmsman was asleep; they dreamed of forests they would never see again, and families who counted them as dead. Their skin was caked with salt; it thickened their hair, flaked into their eyes, roughened their breathing. They didn’t know it but they were close to the longed-for yet fearsome sound of waves slapping around half-submerged rocks, to breakers smashing on the rough Icelandic coast. Getting into shore was the true test of seamanship and luck. Many a ship had crossed the Atlantic only to break up in sight of land.

  Hafvilla. Had I lost my bearings on this trip or was I merely shifting direction? Perhaps I could never be Barbara the Deep-Minded or Barbara Wisdom-Slope, but it came to me, with a jolt of recognition, as I stood in the chill white mist with the vast bulk of unknown Iceland somewhere off the port bow, that an unexpected transformation had begun to work in me on this journey. More like a reverberation in my body than an actual voice, but with all the authority of a spoken annunciation, I now heard clearly what had been rumbling, in a joking way, for weeks.

  I wanted to change my name.

  Doubts would come later. This morning I felt as if I held a compass in my hand.

  CHAPTER XII

  CAUGHT IN THE NET

  Reykjavík and the Westmann Islands, Iceland

  AT THIRTY, she was a mother of a young child, living on the island of Heimaey off the south coast of Iceland, when the Algerian pirate ship appeared offshore. Like the other islanders, she lived in a sod house, smoky and dark, with earthen floors and only one exterior door. Heimaey was volcanic and farming was poor; the only water the islanders had came from rain. It was a bare and unforgiving landscape in a country fallen on hard times. Seventeenth-century Iceland was a colony of Denmark, and as with the Faroes, Denmark sent governors and pastors, but supplied little defense. The climate had turned colder since the 1500s, and the golden age of the Vikings in Iceland was long past. But the fishing around Heimaey had always been the best in Iceland; that’s what sustained the small population of the Westmann Islands.

  That morning Gudríd Símonardottír had said goodbye to her husband as he set out to sea. He may have seen the foreign ship set anchor in Heimaey’s bay, and known with a sinking heart that it wasn’t Danish. He may have seen the corsairs, in striped pantaloons and turbans, spilling from the rowboats onto shore, may have heard the screams of the women and children as they tried to flee. But if he had, he didn’t return and Gudríd never saw him again. She and her two-year-old son were hunted down that day in 1627 and kidnapped, along with 242 of the island’s population of five hundred, to be sold as slaves in the market of Algiers. Like the others, Gudríd ran, holding her child close. Some found shelter in caves; others were murdered on the spot. The island has no trees, and they had no ships in which to flee. Other Icelanders were kidnapped that week off the mainland—there were five corsair ships in all—and in Icelandic history the event has the same status as a cataclysmic volcanic eruption. The Turkish Raid, it’s usually called, because the Algerians lived under the Ottoman Empire, governed from Istanbul.

  Nine years later a handful of the captives found their way back to Iceland, ransomed through a combination of their own savings, collections from the Icelandic people, and a gift from the King of Denmark. Many died in captivity, others converted to Islam, but some managed to hold on to their Christian faith and hopes of being rescued.

  For all that I was enchanted by Grace O’Malley’s long career as a pirate queen, my blood ran cold to think of being hunted down outside my home and carried off in a ship to a distant land, the fearsome Barbary Coast. That was the other side of piracy. As a woman, it’s more likely I would have been the victim of a pirate than a pirate myself. Unlike Grace, though, the Algerian corsairs were less interested in plunder than in people. They attacked ships, but most of their prey came from villages along the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts (Grace O’Malley fought off Algerians herself in the memorable battle just after giving birth to her son). They killed all who resisted and subdued and kidnapped the rest to sell as slaves or hold for ransom. Jesuit priests often acted as the intermediaries; sometimes governments collected money and sent emissaries to buy the freedom of their citizens. These c
orsairs weren’t all Algerians; in some cases, the pirate ships had foreign captains, renegade Christians. The captain of the ship that took Gudríd and many others that year from Iceland was a Dutchman named Jan Jantzen, alias Mourat Rais. Like the well-known Simon Danser, another renegade European called “Captain Devil,” Jantzen captured ship passengers and kidnapped villagers, bringing them back to Algiers to be enslaved. Gudríd Símonardottír was one of them.

  REYKJAVÍK WASN’T what I’d expected. Neighborly and hip, the center of the city was concentrated around a dozen charming streets, always crowded with well-dressed blond people on cell phones. There were music stores, hair salons, vegetarian restaurants, cafés, bookstores, galleries, and antique shops. Clad in corrugated metal and painted bright yellows, reds, and blues, the houses flowered with window boxes and pocket gardens and offered glimpses into tiny courtyards. But this miniature Copenhagen soon flowed out into broad highways, industrial parks, subdivisions, and apartment blocks, looking for all the world like any medium-sized city in North America, complete with SUVs parked in supermarket parking lots.

  I’d been given the use of a spacious basement apartment in the house belonging to the Writers’ Union of Iceland. The staff was on vacation and the offices upstairs were closed, so I had the complete run of the place. What a luxury to have a kitchen, washer and dryer, phone, fax, and computer. Fortunately the director was still available to put me in touch with people to help me with my research, and it was in this way I came to be invited for lunch at the house of Steinunn Jóhannesdóttir, an actress turned playwright, who was now researching and writing a historical novel about Gudríd Símonardottír, or Turkish Gudda, as she came to be called.

  Steinunn had played the part of young Gudríd for the National Theater of Iceland years ago. A playbill showing Steinunn, ethereal and earnest, was framed on the wall of the living room. At fifty, Steinunn was still a bit ethereal, with shoulder-length brown hair, lightly freckled skin and the considered movements of someone trained for the stage. “The part of Gudríd had a big effect on me, but I didn’t feel the play did justice to her. When I wrote my own play about her, Gudríd’s World, I made Gudríd an old woman, looking back on her life.” Since that play was produced, five years ago, Steinunn had delved deeper into the subject, traveling to North Africa, Paris, and Amsterdam, digging into archives, writing her back into history.

  Outside the window, the afternoon sky was the opaque gray of a newly painted battleship, a typical Reykjavík summer’s day. Rain occasionally spattered the glass ill-naturedly, as if trying to punish the potted geraniums inside for daring to be red. In front of us, on the dining room table, the lunch plates of cheese and sliced, dried mutton had been pushed away, and photo albums were open to scenes of minarets and courtyards, to yellow and cobalt-blue tiled interiors and to fountains splashing in the midst of jasmine-draped gardens. You could almost hear the fountains echoing the cry of the muezzin.

  Gudríd spent nine years as a captive in Algiers, at a time when that city was at its peak as a Mediterranean power. Before the advent of the Ottoman Empire, Algiers was only a small town on the coast of North Africa. But under Turkish military rule, it had grown to a city of between 100,000 and 130,000 people, a polyglot community of Turks, Maghrib natives, Moriscos (expelled Spanish Moors), Jews, renegade Christians, and captives from every corner of the world. Society was ruled strictly, from the top down, with a bureaucracy that encompassed every aspect of life. There were hundreds of titles, from “Sequestrator of unclaimed property and supervisor of cemeteries” (one job) to “collector of the tax on mulberries.”

  Christian slaves in Algiers

  At the top of the heap was the Ottoman ruler called the dey or regent. According to Steinunn, Gudríd ended up in the dey’s household. There she worked, without pay, of course, but still managing—perhaps with extra services—to accumulate, very slowly, money toward her release. For the Algerians had no objection to allowing their captives their freedom if they or someone else could pay for it. The slaves in Algiers made up from fifteen to twenty percent of the population. Between 1621 and 1627, there were twenty thousand Christian captives in the city.

  A pastor from Heimaey had been released within the first year, in order to arrange with the Danish king for ransom money. Gudríd, being related to clergymen in Iceland and one of the few Icelandic captives who could read and write, eventually managed to get one of her letters delivered back to Iceland. The story of a Christian woman trapped on the heathen Barbary Coast launched a belated effort at redemption from the Danish government. The Danes collected taxes from the Icelander’s fish catch and farm assets; the king contributed money as well, and eventually several dozen of the Icelanders were ransomed and taken back to Copenhagen by ship. About half of that number, nineteen, eventually returned to Iceland. Gudríd handed over all the money she’d saved over nine years; it wasn’t enough to free her son, however, and at the last minute she had to leave him behind when the ship sailed for Copenhagen in 1636.

  Steinunn and her daughter cleared away the lunch plates, and Elin went off to meet friends while Steinunn and I looked through photo albums that charted the travels she’d undertaken in search of more information about Gudríd. Given that the Islamic Salvation Front and its terrorist splinter groups had begun targeting foreign tourists who visited Algeria in the nineties, Steinunn and her husband decided to travel to Algeria’s neighbor Morocco to get a feel for the old North African cities. In Rabat they happened across an antiquarian bookshop with many arcane and beautiful books in French. In one volume, Steinunn found exactly the illustrations she was looking for of seventeenth-century Algiers.

  From the sea, Algiers looked, as it was meant to, like an impregnable fortress, a tight geometry of white, able to withstand siege and shelling. But behind the harbor defenses and fortifications it was a place of fountains and baths, markets and bake houses, “very like an egg in its fullness of houses and people,” as one observer wrote. The houses, washed thickly with lime, were built close upon each other, walls sloping inward as they rose from ground level, so the roofs were almost joined. The streets were narrow and sloped inward as well, toward a central drain; a man on horseback could barely get through most of the streets; it was difficult to walk two abreast. These streets had no names and no obvious directions; you’d need a good memory to find your way.

  Women, of course, didn’t move freely around the city. The institution of the harem had come from Turkey, where the Ottoman rulers kept thousands of women odalisques, their children, and servants sequestered in luxurious rooms with no exit to the outside city. Every other harem was modeled on the Grand Harem in Istanbul. The women had nowhere to go except from room to room or up and down stairs. Sometimes they climbed to the rooftop terraces for a view, and from there they could jump or climb ladders to neighboring households. The enforced confinement of these women has been glamorized in hundreds of British and French Orientalist paintings.

  For art books, too, sprawled open on Steinunn’s table; they showed lushly patterned paintings of women reclining, half-dressed in silk harem pants and embroidered vests, a cheroot or hookah in hand. Some of the paintings were of the baths, or hammams, where men and women could spend the day, separately, washing and steaming, being scrubbed and pummeled, oiled and perfumed. Scenes of voluptuous women half-veiled in water or steam, and lounging all over each other, while black servants scrub them or feed them sweetmeats, are staples of such painters as John Frederick Lewis and Jean-Léon Gérome.

  We looked at the paintings with a mixture of fascination and revulsion, then turned back to the photo albums. Steinunn’s photographs of Rabat and Tangiers began to merge with those of Paris, where she had lived for two months, spending every day at the museum at L’Institut du Monde Arabe. Steinunn’s long fingers lingered over the photographs of Paris; she was clearly back in a warmer climate that smelled of oranges and coffee. Her last trip had been to Amsterdam, to look in the archives of the maritime museum there for evi
dence of the renegade Dutch captain, Jan Jantzen. When I asked her how soon she planned to finish her book, I had the sense that she was in no hurry to leave the magic places she was remembering and conjuring up in fiction. “Oh, it will take a long time,” she said, with a writer’s sigh, but she didn’t seem unhappy about it. “I keep uncovering more of the story. I’ve found records of the amounts all the Icelanders paid in ransom; I’ve found material on Jantzen and his family life. I know I’m going to have to write another volume of my novel about what happened to Gudríd after she left Algiers.”

  The second half of Gudríd’s life was as extraordinary as the first. At the age of thirty-nine she arrived in Copenhagen, there to be “reindoctrinated” as a Christian after her years with the infidels. A young Icelander, a ministerial student named Hallgrím Pétursson, was put in charge of the released captives. Within a short time he and Gudríd had formed a passionate relationship and she was pregnant. Since, as far as anyone knew, Gudríd still had a husband in the Westmann Islands, this was fornication, pure and simple. The two of them were packed off to Iceland under a cloud. They soon found out that Gudríd’s husband had drowned some time ago, and they quickly married. Hallgrím began a career as a minister in a settlement to the north of Reykjavík, on the Hvalfjord.

  There Hallgrím began to write religious poetry and songs. In years to come he would be revered as Iceland’s greatest spiritual poet. Hallgrím Pétursson is the John Donne of Icelandic literature, the author of the great cycle The Passion Psalms, often put to music and sung in choirs all over the world. One of the psalms is sung at every Icelandic funeral.

  “It’s said, however,” Steinunn told me, “that when he gave a sermon, Gudríd would go outside the church and sit looking at the fjord. They said she never really readjusted to life in Iceland after all those years in Algiers. Many people believed she must have converted to Islam and wasn’t really a Christian. And then, of course, she had been a slave in the dey’s house, and a slave, well . . .”