The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  The discovery of the Oseberg ship marked the richest Viking burial mound ever found. With its refined lines and exquisitely carved dragon prow, the ship was preserved for approximately eleven hundred years in a bed of blue clay. Archaeologists were able to rebuild it using ninety percent of the original wood, and it now stands in a specially built museum in Oslo, along with a wealth of intricately carved objects also discovered in the mound—a large bed, an oak chest, a cart with wooden wheels—as well as pots, dishes, and textiles. I had seen the ship in Oslo and an unguarded replica of it outside the Tønsberg Museum.

  Ships have long had connotations of death and rebirth in many cultures. The word ship, or skip in Norwegian, comes from the Old Norse word skop, meaning fate. The ship was a symbol of the goddess Frigga; she was connected to the ship-shaped graves of the Norse. The English word frigate probably comes from Frigga. Some scholars trace the shape of Norman churches to the Viking burial mounds, which were laid out in the form of a ship. Churches always have a nave, from the Latin navis, or “ship,” also the origin of the word naval. It’s curious that our umbilical cords are tied off in a word that conjures the sea.

  The ancient Welsh sent their dead back to the waters, and sang dirges known as “Giving-back-to-the-sea Mother.” A Norse expression for death was “to return to the mother’s womb.” There are other etymological associations with the special vessel used for Viking funerals. It was called ludr, which meant boat, coffin, and cradle (probably coincidentally, ludder in contemporary Norwegian now refers to a whore). This vessel of death and rebirth was a feminine noun, a teasing reminder, perhaps, of why, when so many gendered nouns have gone by the board, sailors cling to calling a ship a she. Perhaps it’s a crucial recognition that ships are the daughters of the mother, the sea.

  GERD AND I reclined on towels most afternoons on the smooth granite outcroppings above the water, which bloomed with pink and violet jellyfish, and periodically Gerd jumped in naked and came out much refreshed and ready for a Marlboro. She rowed off by herself and returned. She told me more stories of her life, and also bits of natural history. She had come to know all the birds coming through the islands, and what the plants were called. The hundreds of islands, holms, and hummocks of the Oslofjord were called a skjærgård, or “garden of skerries.” Together we waited for Tove, and Gerd pointed out the millionaires. “It’s their favorite thing, to cruise around all summer with the wife and kids and visit different islands on the Oslofjord. I’ve heard the wives don’t like it much. They never get to do anything, never get to steer, only get to cook and wash up. Some holiday, huh?”

  Other than the rowboat and a leaking kayak, Gerd didn’t have a ship. She said she’d once wanted very much to learn to sail.

  “I was eighteen, living at home in Fredrikstad. A friend and I saw a very inspiring film called Windjammer, about a sailing school in Oslo. My friend and I hitchhiked to Oslo to see if we could get on the Christian Radich, which was the name of the clipper ship where they taught sailing. We stood on the dock and called up, ‘Halloo,’ to the bridge. Finally the first mate came to the bridge’s little porthole. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘the school isn’t for girls. We can’t have girls onboard.’

  “‘Why not?’ we called back up. It was 1959. We stood on the dock, strong, young, and eager.

  “There was a silence and then he said, slowly, ‘You see, we sleep in hammocks.’”

  Of such rejections are satiric novels born. But Egalia’s Daughters is far more than a revenge fantasy, though there is an aspect of “Now see how it feels!” to it. The blustery control of the wim is delicious fun at first (When Bram gives birth, she does it in the birth palace with a full musical chorus urging her on), but becomes oppressive. Why can’t the menwim go to sea? Why can’t they dream and realize their dreams? There’s nothing physical to hold them back, only family expectations and social punishment. When the menwim begin to ask questions, to step out of line and to organize, we cheer them on.

  MY LAST afternoon in Tjøme Gerd had to drive to Tønsberg to get her computer fixed, and I elected not to go but to sit on the rocks with a book. I went down to the little beach where the sand was chunky with half-digested rocks and the rubble of shells. The ebb tide had exposed the rounded shapes of boulders in the cove. Those farther out wore rockweed like shiny brown toupees; the tide had turned and was beginning to cover them again. I lay on my stomach on a smoothly polished warm stone close to the shore. In high tide it was submerged, but now the green water only lapped at my toes. I turned my head to the Oslofjord, eye-level with the water. I was still looking for Tove, that salty old queen of the sea, even though Gerd thought it was increasingly unlikely she would arrive before I left for my voyage north.

  The smell of salt and sea wrack was strong in the sun. I trailed my hand in the water, which was coming closer, and touched something pleasingly slippery, a length of kelp with air sacs. Some bladderwracks are called sea bottle or sea whistle. This length was like a brown rope with hard bubbles. I explored it with my fingers, trying to squeeze the bubbles to make them pop as I did so often as a child on the sands of the Pacific, but these sacs had thicker walls. How did the air get in them anyway? I tugged at the rope, but it must have been long and attached somewhere I couldn’t see. I still had the fuzzyheadedness of illness, but the worst of it had subsided as long as I didn’t strain myself and start coughing. My nose was stuffed up, but I could smell the sea, and other senses seemed enhanced. The water shimmered and shapes formed on the horizon. Somewhere in the Oslofjord a woman with streaming black hair and bronze skin was standing at the helm of her ship. She could have been Grace O’Malley heading for Clew Bay, a rambling garden of skerries, holms, and hummocks much like this. She could have been Queen Åsa, taking a cruise in the dragon ship that would become her coffin.

  I was lying on the rock with my head turned toward the water. The granite was warm beneath me, like the smooth back of a seal, or a stone hill. Gradually I felt lifted, upward. The tide was coming in. I could just stay here, a limpet on the rock, and be washed over, an island that emerged and disappeared with the tides. Or I could float and move with the current. I could drift or paddle right out to sea. The other day Gerd had told me the poetic Norwegian expression for drowning: Han ble med sjøen, or simply Han ble. “He stayed with the sea. He stayed.” I had no intention of drowning, but I liked the idea of being one with salt water, of staying with the sea. The word sjø, or “sea,” with its soft “sh” beginning, its open vowel, as in beurre or bleu, was a long drawn-out three letters. It sounded like the tide coming in, going out, the inhalation and exhalation of the vast deep ocean.

  CHAPTER XVII

  TROUSER-BERET

  Drag, Norway

  THE DRAG Guesthouse did not look promising. For one thing, it was closed. And for another, it had a sign on the door announcing that a band called Absolut Vodka would be performing tonight, and that they were “guaranteed to play 60% of the evening.” I could see through the windows that my prospective room was down a very short corridor off the bar.

  I’d traveled up to this hamlet, on one of the octopus-armed fjords of a very convoluted coastline above the Arctic Circle, on perhaps the most quixotic search of my entire four-month journey. I was looking for stories, for any traces at all, of a Sami woman nicknamed Buks-Beret, or Trouser-Beret, who had been the renowned skipper of a fishing boat in the first half of the nineteenth century. If I could find anything out about her, it would be in Drag, or around the Tysfjord, where a sizeable Sami population still lived, and where the Árran Center, a Sami museum and cultural gathering place had recently been erected. Once called Lapps or Laplanders, the Sami had begun to reclaim their language, history and culture in the last thirty years, if not their ancestral land.

  Back in Seattle, it had amused me to tell friends I’d be looking for Beret “in Drag,” for Beret had received her nickname, of course, for her habit of wearing men’s clothing when she went out fishing. Now, as I stood in front of th
e guesthouse, marooned so unpicturesquely at the edge of an asphalt parking lot leading to the small ferry dock, I thought of another, more unfortunate meaning for drag.

  To get here, I’d traveled this morning by bus across the island of Hamarøy, called in tourist literature “Hamsun’s Kingdom.” For it was here that an uneducated adolescent Knut Pedersen began his lengthy transformation from farm boy into modernist European writer. He took the name Hamsund from the farm where he worked, and later dropped the d to create his new name. This taking of a farm or place name was common in a country that abounded in Jón Jonsens and Jens Jenssens. In Iceland the patronymic system had remained fresh with each generation, while in Norway it had stultified, so that sometime in the late 1880s, people began using hereditary names and women began taking their husband’s name. A 1923 law required everyone in a family to have just one last name, and for that to be a hereditary name, the father’s. The result was an even greater abundance of Hansens, Olsens, and Nilsens.

  But there was an earlier naming pattern that intrigued me, and this was the custom of adding the farm “address” to the patronymic, so that a woman who lived on a farm called Vik might be called Ellen Andersdatter Vik. If she moved to another farm or place called Holm, she’d be called Ellen Andersdatter Holm. In this system, as in Iceland, the first name was primary; the second name gave your ancestry and the last name placed you.

  It might be nice, I’d thought, leaning against the bus window, taking in a landscape of marsh and stunted white birch, shallow bays dotted with shore birds, to take the name of a place as my name. Should I call myself Greenwood, after the neighborhood in Seattle where I lived? Barbara Wilson Greenwood? Did the place you came from have to be a real place, or could it be imaginary? What about taking a name that was from a language not your own? I’d read about Chinese students in English-language classes adopting all manner of fanciful English names, from Magic Johnson to Medusa to Satan. “Satan” was adopted by a Ms. Zhou, who said she liked the name for both its sound and its supernatural connotations.

  I was Irish, but I was also Swedish. My father’s grandparents had left Stockholm with their two young daughters in the first years of the twentieth century and had ended up on a farm in Illinois. I never knew my grandmother Gladys, nor did my father; she died when he was only two. But because I looked so much like her, I always had a feeling of closeness to her. Why not take a Scandinavian name? I could call myself something to do with the sea: sjö in Swedish, sjø in Norwegian. Sjo, sheu, shoe, I tried out quietly, practicing English pronunciations. It had a nice sound, but an unfinished one.

  I LEFT my backpack leaning against the door of the guesthouse and walked toward a large wooden tent-shaped building on a hillside above the ferry parking lot. To my great relief Lars Børge Myklevoll, the director of the Árran Center, had heard of my interest in Trouser-Beret and was expecting me. I followed him downstairs through the museum to his office with more gratitude than he could probably realize. Although I’d gotten used to a fair share of blank stares and disavowals of any knowledge on the subject of women and the sea all through my journey, it had been in Norway and with Norwegians that I’d felt most snubbed. The curator of the Nordland Museum in Bodø had said firmly, “A man would rather take a twelve-year-old boy fishing than a woman. There were no women fishers in northern Norway. The taboo was too strong against them.” I’d also had email brushoffs from several prominent academics in Tromsø, one of whom was a specialist in Sami studies. “Of course I know the story about Buks-Beret,” he responded crisply when I wrote asking for information. “But my impression is that the sea and its activities were man’s domain.”

  A friend in Tromsø had put me on to Buks-Beret in the first place by sending me an article from the 1970s that mentioned her briefly in the context of gender-role patterns in northern Norway. What had intrigued me about the article was its contention that in Sami communities, unlike in rural Norwegian fishing and farming society, men’s and women’s roles had been more egalitarian. Men did the cooking so that the women could weave, and women often participated in hunting and fishing. It wasn’t usual for a woman to captain a Lofoten fishing boat, but it was something that could happen in the sjøsame culture. The sjøsamer were the Sea Sami, or Sea-Finns as the Norwegians called them. They were, unlike the Sami who still owned reindeer in the far northern interior of the Scandinavian countries, mostly assimilated by now.

  Lars, whose grandfather was Sami, had trained as an archaeologist, but he clearly had gotten some exposure to feminist and progressive social anthropology. To my surprise and delight, he soon began to talk about the taboos and prestige surrounding fishing in the North. “Myths have a function whether people are aware of it or not. Myths strengthen the roles between the sexes, and emphasize what is prestigious and what is not. Taboos keep women in their place. Taboos also disguise reality. There were men who did not have sons, who took their daughters fishing. The taboo made it seem as if that was not happening.” As for Trouser-Beret, he knew little about her, but was fascinated. “The Native Americans have a tradition of cross-dressing,” he said cheerfully. “Berdache acknowledges that not everyone can be confined to gender roles, and that there is a place for a third sex.”

  Women carrying fish from boats, northern Norway, late 1800s

  Male transgressions against gender roles, Lars reminded me, were actually punished more heavily than female boundary blurring. Men whose wives were ill or dead were permitted to do housekeeping, childcare, and other women’s work. But if a man stayed unmarried or chose farm work over the sea, he became a laughingstock, was called an old maid, a weakling, a good-for-nothing who should wear a skirt. Women were less punished by social sanctions and verbal scorn, which only underlines the fact that labor traditionally associated with men has much more prestige, no matter who does it.

  Lars and I compared notes on Beret. At the University of Bergen library I’d tracked down an oversize travel book with engravings of dramatic cliffs and fjords published in 1882, at a time when Norway was drawing tourists the way Alaska does now. The author, traveling by ship up north, mentions the Lapp community of Tysfjord, and a remarkable woman who belonged to that group, twenty or thirty years prior. The author writes that he heard she was the skipper of her own boat, with her husband as first mate, and that she was accustomed to wear men’s clothing, hence her name, Buks-Beret, or Trouser-Beret. A later reference in a Norwegian encyclopedia of the 1920s refers to Buks-Beret as “the pride of the Lapps.”

  I’d also discovered that in the early part of this century a young woman named Inga Bjørnson, the niece of one of Norway’s most famous authors, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, used to come and stay with her mother’s sister and her pastor husband at the parish Evenes, one or two fjords from Drag. Inga, an adventurous girl, became interested in collecting stories about the local Sami people and in 1916 published a small book called Dundor-Heikka, or Tales of the Lapps in Their Own Words. It was mostly written in dialect and I found it difficult to wade through, but I did find two chapters about an expedition Inga Bjørnson took in search of the descendants of the famous Trouser-Beret. Inga had heard the tales about Beret; she knew she was a boat captain who rowed to the Lofoten fishing. “It wasn’t difficult for Beret to find a crew to go with her,” she wrote, “because she was so lucky with the sea. She could make the waves go quiet.” After much searching, Inga tracked down the granddaughter of Beret, who told her many stories: how good-looking and strong Beret was, how she rode a white horse, how in addition to being a captain, she was also a peddler, a midwife, a butcher, and a shooter of bears. “She was better than a man,” said Beret’s granddaughter, adding that Beret lived in a loving relationship with her husband and six children.

  “I have good news for you,” said Lars, after we’d been talking hard for an hour or two. “I discovered that the great-great-grandniece of Beret lives just across the fjord, in Kjøpsvik. Her name is Hilgunn Pedersen and she’s the town’s local historian. I called her and told
her about you, and she said that if you wanted to come over to Kjøpsvik, she’d tell you all she knows about Buks-Beret. And if you want, she’ll take you to the place Beret lived.”

  I immediately agreed. Not only was I delighted by the chance to talk to a relative of Beret, but leaving Drag also meant I wouldn’t have to listen to Absolut Vodka for sixty percent of the evening.

  “WELL, THE first thing to understand is that Buks-Beret didn’t live on the Tysfjord at all,” said Hilgunn Pedersen. “She lived on the Efjord and that’s where my father and his father were born, and I was born there, too.” To many of us, one fjord above the Arctic Circle may be just like another, but to a historian with Hilgunn’s love of facts, not to mention family pride, such a mistake was grave. That Trouser-Beret had been claimed by the Tysfjord Sami had opened the way for other serious errors about the legendary character to creep in, for instance, that Beret’s husband went fishing with her, as her first mate.

  “He never went to sea,” said Hilgunn. “He was from inland Sweden, a carpenter who learned to be a boat builder. He wasn’t used to the sea. Besides, he had to stay home and take care of the children while she was out fishing for months at a time.”

  We were sitting around a low table in Hilgunn’s living room, with a pot of coffee, papers, and books spread out before us. Sven, Hilgunn’s housemate, eighty years old, leathery brown, and silent, sat watching TV in a recliner nearby. On the way from the ferry Hilgunn had managed to tell me some of their story. Sven and Hilgunn’s late husband had worked together in the cement factory nearby. Sven had nursed his ailing wife for six years; after she’d died, he started to help Hilgunn nurse her bedridden husband, who was ill for eleven years. Now Hilgunn and Sven lived together, and were planning to move this fall to the Canary Islands.