The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  Although I’d been hearing about Skipper Thurídur ever since I arrived in Iceland, I didn’t expect much in the way of a memorial. In fact, I was prepared for a few stones to mark the foundation of her fishing shack. Instead, along the road that ran through the village, we found a tiny, well-tended house that one of Beatrix Potter’s characters could have inhabited, constructed of dry-wall volcanic rock with a steeply angled turf roof that fit snugly over the walls. There was a small window set into the wall, and a black-painted door with a high sill. Above the door was a wooden sign with the words carved into it by hand: “Thurídur’s Cabin.” The door was only about four and a half feet tall; you had to duck to enter. Inside were three beds, one after the next, on each side, with a little ventilating hole in the center of the roof. In olden times, I knew from having visited Gudríd’s farm at Glaumbær, Icelanders didn’t have tables or chairs, because of the lack of wood. They sat, slept, and even ate meals in their beds. Very frequently two people shared a mattress.

  Around the back of the little house was a sod wall, and to the side was a stone bench near a weather-proof plaque with a drawing of Thurídur, wearing a jacket and top hat, carrying a riding whip and looking like a young George Sand. Under the drawing was what seemed to be a short biography and a history of fishing off the south coast. My grasp of written Icelandic was improving slightly; I could make out the fact that in 1890 there were forty-six cabins like this in Stokkseyri. This was the only one remaining; it had been refurbished and maintained as both an example of how fisher folk lived in the old days, but also as a monument to Skipper Thurídur.

  Thurídur’s cabin

  Sitting outside on the bench, I began to draw a picture of the little house. Out at sea the waves whipped up a froth. You’d have to be a good sailor, not just lucky, to navigate these shores and bring a boat in through these black, knife-sharp reefs. You’d have to have been a good sailor, too, to fish in the Breidafjord, which was no protected narrow inlet, but a great, rough sound.

  Could a woman be recognized as a good sailor? “Devillish” is what the Orcadians called Janet Forsyth, while Annie Norn was bewitched. Some of the Irish—not her victims—may have praised Grace O’Malley; the English were more ambivalent: She was called “a woman that hath impudently passed the part of womanhood,” but also “a most famous femynyne sea capten.” Icelanders seemed far more accepting of their seafaring women. Of Gunna the Footless who became a boat builder, of Halldóra Ólafsdóttir, who competed against her brothers and would only have women on her crew, of Rósamunda Sigmundsdóttir, well-formed and amazingly strong, who could really haul in the catch, of Gudrún Jónsdóttir, who thrived on rough seas and used to say, “I’ll take the rudder, boys,” and of Skipper Thurídur, the greatest of them all—of all these women they said, “They’re Icelanders, they’re ancestors; they are my family.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  SEAWIM

  Tjøme, Norway

  The romance of the sea, that’s what you’re suffering from. You’ll have to stop reading all those adventure stories about the exploits of seawim and stick to books for boys instead. Then your dreams will be more realistic. No real menwim want to go to sea.

  —Gerd Brantenberg, Egalia’s Daughters

  IN 1864 Sven Foyn invented the automatic harpoon gun. He was a Tønsberg boy, and so it wasn’t surprising that much of the basement floor of the Tønsberg Museum was devoted to the full arsenal of lethal weapons used to slaughter and process whales. From primitive spears to stationary harpoon guns with a powerful charge, from flensing knives to old pots used for boiling the blubber, everything was here except the whale.

  I was visiting the museum with Gerd Brantenberg, a Norwegian writer and old friend, who had a house nearby, on the island of Tjøme in the Oslofjord. I’d flown to Oslo from Reykjavík, and had taken the train to Tønsberg, looking forward to some days of rest at Gerd’s house, where I could swim and sail, before heading up the northern coast on the steamer for my final voyage.

  Tønsberg is one of Norway’s oldest towns; the famous Oseberg ship, from approximately 820 A.D., was excavated from a Viking burial mound nearby. For over a hundred years Tønsberg was a whaling port as well. In addition to the whaling exhibits (large and lovingly maintained, in contrast to the exhibit at the maritime museum in Oslo, which was modest and discreetly captioned only in Norwegian, in deference to the sensibilities of international visitors), the Tønsberg Museum had a floor called “The Seaman’s Life” full of colorful objects collected from the seven seas: carved curios of wood from the Far East, jade from China, ivory from Africa; conches; stuffed parrots, models of Chinese junks; Japanese dolls in kimonos, Kente cloth, balsawood rafts. Even through the glass of the display cases there was a faint tang of market haggle on the timbered wharves of exotic ports.

  Gerd’s father, a doctor, had shipped out on a whaling expedition to the southern ocean for a season in 1946. The war and the German occupation of Norway had just ended; he left behind a wife and two little girls. The doctor worked on the big ship, “the Cooker.” The smaller boats did the hunting and harpooning, and then would bring the whale back to the large ship to be boiled down. “When he came home,” Gerd said, “he had a suitcase full of presents. There was flowered cloth from Cape Town, I remember. My mother made the bolt into dresses and we always called them the African dresses.” The little girls could hardly believe what he told them about New York. “The lights were on there twenty-four hours. In the middle of the night it was as bright as day.”

  Gerd’s father had a friend who was a radio operator on a tanker. When the girls were growing up, he used to bring them presents from all over the globe. He was her father’s age, but he fell in love with Gerd. When she was twenty, he suggested that she go with him on his ship, a Swedish tanker, and help him with his work and see the world. Gerd’s father was incensed. “He said, ‘The only women who go to sea are whores,’” Gerd told me, leaning against a display of sextants and compasses. “That was enough for me. I slammed the door when I left.”

  Gerd was onboard for ten days. “There was nothing between us, though he would have liked to have married me. He was a gentleman. We were supposed to go to Venezuela, but at the last minute the orders were countermanded. We did get to Stockholm.”

  Gerd thought of going to school for a year to become a radio operator, one of the only things that women could do on a ship in the early sixties, but instead she went on to the University of Oslo to study English literature. She was an early and fiery spokeswoman in Scandinavia for women’s and gay liberation and published several amusingly didactic books before turning to serious fiction with a series of funny and wrenching semiautobiographical coming-of-age novels. In Norway she’s much admired for this trilogy, while elsewhere she’s mainly known for her razor-sharp satire of gender roles, Egalia’s Daughters.

  I’d first heard Gerd read from that book at the International Feminist Book Fair in London in 1984. Egalia’s Daughters is one of those rare feminist titles that hasn’t dated, perhaps because its subject is the justification of power, a theme that is always with us. It’s set in a mythical land called Egalia, where the wim have all the power and the menwim have very little. The only future that Petronius, the son of the director, Bram, sees before him is curling his beard, wearing a peho (the equivalent of a bra) and finding a wom who will provide for him and bear the children he will raise. There is a breathtaking brazenness to the manner in which the wim explain why they have always had freedom and money and the primary role in society. Their arguments are familiar. Men have used them the world over to justify their oppressive power over women. Reversed, the explanation for why wim are best suited to run the world makes hardly any more sense, but is just as convincing to those who spout it. Within pages we’re rooting for Petronius and his young menwim friends to overthrow the strictures that crush their dreams.

  I’d reread Egalia’s Daughters before beginning my journey and was struck, as I hadn’t been before, by all the seafarin
g references. Egalia is an island nation and all the wim go to sea as sailors or fishers. They laugh at the soft young menwim who dream of glory as spearfishers, and when Petronius is reluctantly taken aboard a fishing expedition, the captain, Liz Bareskerry, lectures him, “But you must understand, Petronius, that for a wom, the adventure is a reality. . . . Menwim always think that what wim do is full of sheroism and splendour.” The fishing trip ends badly, with the wim getting drunk and fighting over young Petronius, and declaring once they get back on land, “Menwim at sea are nothing but trouble.”

  “Where did you get the idea for the setting of Egalia?” I asked Gerd, on the drive back to Tjøme from Tønsberg. “Was it the islands and skerries around here?”

  “I was probably imagining Copenhagen. I was a teacher in Denmark during the early days of the women’s liberation movement there, when I was thinking about all the ideas that eventually went into my book. Copenhagen, Queen of the Sea—you know that song from the film Hans Christian Andersen with Danny Kaye? No?” She began to sing it for me:

  Wonderful wonderful COP-enhagen

  Salty old queen of the sea

  A more perfect summer afternoon there could hardly have been, and few places on earth can be as enchanting as the southern Norwegian coast in the summer. Construction has been restrained; the white wooden houses, each with their red, blue, and white Norwegian flag, cluster above coves of smoothly sloping granite. The air is crisp and clean, the evergreens dark and fragrant. Soaring over the span that connects Tjøme to the mainland, with a regatta of white sails crossing the channel below us, with Gerd singing ebulliently, “Salty old queen of the sea,” I should have been very happy. In fact, I was burdened with the realization that the sore throat I’d woken with this morning had not gone away, but was an indicator of something worse to come.

  One of Gerd’s neighbors recommended a tablet called Vekk i Morgen, “Gone Tomorrow,” which supposedly contained raw milk antibodies from cows nursing their young, but it hadn’t done the trick. As the day went by in Tønsberg I felt increasingly ill. My head was enlarging and my nose swelling and dripping. From time to time I gave a suspicious sneeze. After months of perfect health I suddenly had a head cold. I could hardly believe it. Gerd and I had big plans for the next four days. We were going to swim and take out the rowboat through the skerries and at some point her old friend Tove would show up in her yacht and take us out on a sail around the Oslofjord.

  I went to bed early, hoping to shake it, but awoke the next morning feeling as if aliens had pumped my head up to three times its size as an experiment. Fever made my skin tingle. I could hardly swallow.

  “You don’t want to go swimming?” demanded Gerd, whose maternal instinct was faint. “But this is perfect weather. You won’t find warmer water than now. And the rowboat—surely you can go out in the rowboat?”

  For a person who, as far as I could tell, lived on crispbread, cheese, Marlboros, tea, and beer, Gerd had a remarkable physical robustness. Almost sixty, she was nut-brown with hardly a gray hair, and scrambled over the rocks like a kid. I dragged myself after her to her family’s bathing place on some smooth granite boulders above the sea, but there I balked. I spread out my towel and looked at my anemically colored limbs. It had started raining in Seattle the previous November and had poured until the day I left home in May. Whereupon it had been rainy, foggy, windy, and cold two and a half out of every three days all summer. I had an excuse to be pale, but along with my cold, it made me feel subhuman and certainly not briskly, athletically Norwegian.

  Eventually Gerd gave up trying to coax me in for a dip. She stripped off her suit and plunged off the rock, swimming vigorously back and forth and shouting out, “You don’t know what you’re missing!”

  Tjøme is the Martha’s Vineyard of Norway. It’s been a summer residence for the bourgeoisie for several generations and more recently has become the home of choice for the Norwegian superrich. “He’s a shipping magnate. He’s a millionaire,” Gerd would point out tan, round-bellied men in bikini swimwear, negotiating their yachts through the channels off our bathing rock.

  Gerd was no millionaire, of course. Her grandfather had made money during prohibition as a pharmacist who had distilled spirits to spare for the thirsty. He had unaccountably bought up a farm and a great deal of property on Tjøme back when it was less known and much cheaper. Sales of this increasingly desirable real estate had kept Gerd and her younger sister in funds for years, which was good, since even a best-selling author in Norway can’t quite manage on royalties. Once Gerd just kept the large old farmhouse on Tjøme for summer holidays, but in recent years she’d decided to rent out her flat in Oslo and live full time on Tjøme. She clearly loved the place and relished her family’s standing as real estate moguls among the millionaires. Recently she and two other writers had been interviewing people on Tjøme for a collection of oral histories. Gerd had spoken with the queen of Norway, Sonja, who, like Gerd, had grown up spending holidays on the island and who now maintained a summer residence with the king not far from where we were.

  As the day ended, all I was hoping was that I could pull myself together sufficiently for the sail around the Oslofjord. When exactly was Tove arriving, anyway?

  “With sailing people, you never really know,” said Gerd. “The wind and so on. And then, well, Tove has always been very unreliable.”

  She showed me a photograph of her friend, black-haired and bronzed, with a bright white grin. “She looks like a gypsy, but she grew up very rich, very spoiled. She’s been sailing all her life; she’s always owned her own boats. She’s never married, though she’s had a hundred lovers. She’s sailed all around the Mediterranean, in Australia. She’s crewed in several transatlantic races. The men—the male sailors—are horrible, she says. She has to pick one and stick with him the whole voyage. Otherwise, it’s hell.”

  I was wild to meet Tove. I was set, to the point of childish eagerness, on the hope of going out into the fjord on a big sailboat with an experienced yachtswoman. I wanted to take a close look at a woman who had sailed across the Atlantic. I yearned to hoist sail with her in the Oslofjord. In my fevered state I was sure that my journey in search of seafaring women would be a complete failure if this did not happen.

  “We’ll see,” said Gerd.

  TWO DAYS passed. I could feel the cold gradually migrating out of my head and into my chest. I carried big wads of toilet paper from the outhouse, paper that took on a greenish tinge. Gerd tried to be sympathetic, but I was convinced she thought I was the dullest guest she’d ever tried to entertain. I sat around coughing up phlegm and went to bed at nine o’clock in broad daylight. She did not cook herself or ever eat anything that resembled a fruit or a vegetable (though she did swill down two tablespoons of cod liver oil every morning and had her whole life, which perhaps accounted for her sturdiness), but she took me shopping for orange juice and soup mix and carrots.

  She was eager to show me her island and took me on long walks where I gradually fell behind. I was weak and feverish, though I recognized I was in a kind of paradise. The skerries offshore were formed of granite, as was the larger island of Tjøme itself, but where enough soil had built up in Tjøme’s interior to make meadows and farms possible, the skerries had the arid look of partly submerged desert isles. All of them had lichen, orange and blood red, with seaweed at the waterline, but only a few had scrub oak or a tough, juniper-like thicket growing in their crevices. Most were bare: pale cool gray in the morning, becoming golden in late afternoon. The granite outcroppings on Tjøme were the same bare stone, not quite smooth, more like nubbled silk; you could clamber and slide over their slippery salt-and-pepper hides all along the outer shores of the island. Inland there were corridors of beech and birch, with stream-trickled meadows opening among the piles of boulders and outcroppings. Wild raspberries grew by the side of the paths, and finches and nuthatches rustled in the hazels.

  “Before the main road came to Tjøme, this is the way the cars would com
e,” said Gerd, showing me an overgrown lane with a natural pavement of granite. “When we came up the hill, my sister and I had to get out so the car would be lighter, and so we could open the cow gates for my father.” The interior of the island was full of such secret byways and magic groves. It had the old-fashioned Scandinavian summer magic of a Bergman film, like Wild Strawberries, a different feel from the beach huts and speedboats and huge yachts only a few hundred yards away. “When I interviewed Queen Sonja, she remembered all these places, too—the barn where we used to jump down from the hayloft, a swing that was set among the trees.” Perhaps because Gerd had so recently talked with Sonja, the queen came frequently into conversation. Had socialist Gerd become a monarchist? But then, most Norwegians are ardent monarchists, in their egalitarian way.

  All this talk of the queen set me thinking about the two women whose remains had been found not far from here, at Oseberg, in a ship grave from the Viking age. One woman was older and one much younger; no one knows for sure which one was the queen and which her servant. That at least one of them was a woman of great importance there is little doubt, for only the elite of Viking society were buried in ships of such splendor. Many scholars believe she was Queen Åsa, the grandmother of Harald Fine-Hair and probably a powerful woman in her own right, though nothing is now recalled of her life and deeds.