The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  Books on learning Spanish lay here and there around the room, and a computer sat in the midst of piles of genealogical records and papers. Hilgunn was in her sixties, blond and lively, with wide cheekbones and curious eyes. Hilgunn’s grandfather was full Sami; she hadn’t realized she had Sami blood until she eventually went to school. It wasn’t, in the fifties in Norway, something of which to be particularly proud. Now Hilgunn is the unofficial local historian and genealogist, who knows an enormous amount about how the Sami lived and who was related to whom. Like Thorúnn Magnúsdóttir in Iceland, she based her research on old tax and property records, the bound volumes of marriages and christenings. She’d become a pro at reading wavery old script, which is how Lars Børge Myklevoll at the Árran Center had first come to know her.

  “People just repeat the same old stories. If they bothered to look, they’d easily find out the truth. The records are there. People just don’t want to do the research,” she complained good-naturedly.

  She spoke English very well, and I was glad, for the stream of history pouring out would have been a chore to get down fast enough while translating from Norwegian to my language. Although I’d learned Norwegian in my twenties and could read it well, it always took some time to get up to speed when I visited the country.

  According to Hilgunn, Trouser-Beret was born Beret Johanna Paulsdatter in 1794 in Kvæfjord, not far from Harstad. Her father was a nomad reindeer herder, who had followed the traditional yearly migration of the reindeer over the mountains from Sweden to the fjords and islands of Norway and back again. At some point, he decided to stay in Norway and raise his family there. Beret came to the Efjord with Peder Thomassen in 1824, and she died there in 1868. She had seven children (one died very young).

  Every winter she went fishing with a Sami crew, and apparently everyone was eager to row with her, for it seemed she was able to quell the waves with a look. They said she was the most capable in the whole fjord and gave orders in a way that they all felt scared of her, with one hand on the tiller and the other on an oar, rowing backward. She wore a full suit of skins. When she traveled as a peddler, she wore Sami dress and mounted a white horse. She helped at many births, both animal and human. She owned a mill for grinding as well. “She was said to be clean and reliable, and to always keep her word. What she said was akin to Amen,” Hilgunn finished up.

  “There were other women who fished around her, who supported themselves by fishing,” Hilgunn added. “I’ve run across them in the records. There was another one they called a Buks-Beret around here. She was Birgit Pedersen, a widow with a daughter. It was a derogatory name of course; all around the north of Norway, if a girl got out of line, was too tomboyish, that’s what they called her: Trouser-Beret. I was called that myself. But let’s go out for a drive; we’ll look at where Birgit Pedersen lived.”

  It was about eight at night, still full daylight, but with the look of light filtered through ice cubes. The granite mountains around us slipped iron toes into the blue-gray fjord waters, and everything shivered. The landscape was alive. Hilgunn knew the history, and the geology, and the culture of the Sami, how they spent the winters in the outer fjords and summers at the fjord bottoms. They didn’t have a concept of owning land, and for a long time coexisted with the Norwegians without sharing their values. The Sami continued to dress as before, to speak Sami and to make by hand many of their possessions. Because of their nomadism, the Sami were often doubly taxed, by the Norwegians and the Swedish governments. The earliest written reference to the Sea Sami is from 1584. It’s an account of driving off a Swedish tax collector. Their nomadic life didn’t fit with the tightening of the borders and with the eventual divisions of the North into separate countries. The reasons for suppressing the language and culture of the Sami came to be ideological, but for centuries the two peoples, Scandinavians and Sami, had lived side by side.

  Hilgunn had me in the front seat; she spoke nonstop. Sven sat in back, preoccupied with his own thoughts. He hadn’t said a word since I’d met him more than three hours earlier. The landscape was pearl gray and pewter blue in the lingering twilight. The white of the stunted birches was unearthly. Without sunshine, the North is dreamy, refrigerated, ancient. We stopped at a small bay where Birgit Pedersen had lived and fished with her daughter Benedikte. “Of course there were women fishing all along the coast,” said Hilgunn as we got out of the car and looked across to the house where the women had lived. “They’re in the tax records. If you were a widow—and many women were—you had to live somehow. There were other women who lived alone, or never married, or who fished with their husbands.”

  We got back into the car, Sven still inscrutable. He had a large, beautiful hooked nose that, with his very brown skin, wrinkled yet also drawn tight over his face, made him look like an American Indian. I said to Hilgunn, “You said you fished as a girl. Who taught you?”

  “Taught me?” she laughed. “I remember fishing at five years old. It was one of my first memories, how I managed to catch a fish, but it was too heavy for me to get in the boat; my father had to help. I was going out in a boat by myself and with my younger brother by the time I was ten. Sometimes we would go long distances. My father went to the Lofoten fishing in the winter. When I was fifteen my father asked me to go with him to Lofoten. We went for two weeks, then came home, then went out again. This was 1951. There were no other girls on boats. In the evening men from other boats would come by to look at the man who brought the girl fishing. I was a Buks-Beret. My biggest problem aside from the hard work—we had to haul the long lines of cod up by hand in those days—was peeing. There was just a bucket. Usually I waited till night. Luckily it got dark early. I envied Buks-Beret’s tissehornet, her peeing horn. I used to hear that it had stayed in the family, but I don’t know who has it.”

  For this is also part of the Trouser-Beret legend, that Beret had a reindeer horn with a hole at one end attached to her belt, and when she felt nature’s call on the boat, she would use it.

  Back in Kjøpsvik, Hilgunn prepared sandwiches and we watched the news. There was a long story about an eighty-five-year-old man in Oslo who’d fought off a burglar. They interviewed the fellow from his hospital bed. “I told the boy who attacked me that only one of us was getting away alive. That scared him. He didn’t think I had it in me.”

  Sven watched contentedly.

  I SPENT the night in a pension a few blocks away from Hilgunn’s house, and the next morning set out with Hilgunn and Sven to the Efjord, where Hilgunn had been born and where Beret had built a house.

  Hilgunn turned out to be an amateur geologist as well, whose rock collection was now on display at the Kjøpsvik community center. The area around the Tysfjord is a kind of chalk, she told me, which means this region was once covered by a shallow sea. They’re still finding fossils of fish and birds in the mountains. When we’d stop the car for a look and I’d pick up a piece of rock, Hilgunn would often say, this is malachite, or quartz, or there’s copper in this, too. The mountains didn’t look to me like chalk, but they were, ancient and full of caves. In some of the caves researchers had found strange undersea fish skeletons; in other caves archaeologists discovered rock drawings from thousands of years ago.

  Since we’d begun our journey, Hilgunn had mentioned the dates when this tunnel was built, when that road was completed. Some were as recent as the last five or ten years. “Before the roads,” she said, “we traveled by boat. That was in my lifetime. Just imagine how people lived until fifty years ago.” Desolate as it looked, this landscape was deeply inhabited, though it took a guide to help me see it. Hilgunn was always pointing to a cleft in the rock and naming it, or telling me that here was the pass through which the Sami herded their reindeer. The landscape, too—bogs, rock with heather and moss, waterfalls, coastal pine (some of the trees were short but five hundred years old), birch forests—was mysterious, nonhuman, crystallized into quartz.

  We passed through a long tunnel and came out on the other side to
the Efjord. The mountains in the distance were black, jagged, forbidding. This mountain chain between Norway and Sweden is called “the Keel” for it resembles the keel of a ship. The Sami had been famous for their shipbuilding craft; some say it was the Sami who built the longships that took the Vikings all over the world. Throughout the Tysford region, the Sami lived by boatbuilding from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, says A.W. Brøgger in Viking Ships, and the origins of their skill with boats goes back even farther. Old illustrations showed the Sami sewing their boats together with sinew, not hammering nails into them. Rock carvings from the Bronze Age suggest that the ancestors of the Sami had a boat culture; the boats depicted had ribs of wood and were skin-covered, usually with sealskin.

  These boats carved on rock looked very much like the Inuit umiak, or “the woman’s boat.” It was not a kayak, which is found mainly in the North American Arctic, but a large open boat. The Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen wrote, “By Europeans it was named the woman’s boat because in contrast to the kayak, it was rowed almost exclusively by women.” The umiak is found over the whole Arctic, from Siberia to Greenland. Most common in the north of Norway was the Nordland boat, Hilgunn told me, as we began driving along the Efjord. That would have been the sort of boat Peder Thomassen, Beret’s husband, built. The Nordland boat, clinker-built and single-masted, has remained essentially unchanged in design since Viking days. It once came in eight different sizes to accommodate everything from inshore fishing to coastal trading voyages. Smallest was the faering or kjeks, probably from the Sami word kjaex, meaning “woman”—that is, a boat handled by a woman. Most traditional for Lofoten fishing was the åttring or fembøring. Trouser-Beret had a fembøring. Because people often rented rather than owned land, the boat was the main piece of property to be purchased and passed down. Salten and Tysfjord supplied the whole of Lofoten with boats. The Sami who lived by the fjords had to pay a tithe of a boat to the sheriff every year.

  Sami sewing boat with sinew

  “That’s where she took her boat out,” said Hilgunn, pointing across the fjord. “There, do you see? By that waterfall. She had her mill there. The house was farther in, much farther, by a lake called Dypvann. After she got the boat out, she had to walk at least five kilometers, perhaps more, to the house.”

  There’s a story that in the winter of 1832 Beret decided to leave Lofoten before the fishing was over. Her crew protested; they were doing so well that year. The fish were plentiful, and the prices were good. Their protest didn’t matter a bit; as skipper, Trouser-Beret made the decisions. They set sail for home a full month before the fishing was over. Early the morning of March 22, they arrived in full sail here in the Efjord, and she steered the boat right over to the spot Hilgunn pointed out. The moment the boat touched shore, she hopped out and told the crew to deal with the boat and the gear. She was late for something, she said, and hurried up past the waterfall to her home.

  Inside she lit a fire in the hearth, boiled herself up some coffee. She took out her pipe and tobacco. There was time for a well-deserved smoke. Afterward she went into the bedroom and gave birth to her fifth child.

  In Lofoten, Beret and her crew, like the other Sami, wouldn’t have been welcome in the fishermen’s cabins, Hilgunn told me as we drove on, Sven still silent as a clam in the back. They would have lived in tents they erected themselves. But here on the Efjord, she and her husband had a boat shed, a mill, and a house inland. Beret earned the money for the lumber from her fishing and Peder built them. “Her house burned down,” said Hilgunn. “She had to build another. Oh, it was a sad story. First a man came to their farm with a weapon. Her young son Paul took hold of it. He had never seen a gun before. He looked into the barrel and somehow hit the trigger. The shot went right through his head. There were long days afterward when Beret just stayed in bed. Then the house burned down. The family just stood there, robbed of everything. Then, too, Beret lay down for eight days and refused to get up. But she had the courage to start again. The winter after those misfortunes she went fishing again in Lofoten. She made good money and with it bought material for a new house, so she and her family could move in before the next winter set in. They built the mill then, too.”

  We passed by a waterfall roaring down toward the fjord. This landscape made me shiver; it was alive in the way that Iceland had been alive, filled with names and memories, and something older than that, the skeletons of the nomads, the skeletons of fish and reptiles from a time when all had been tropical and warm. Now we were climbing; surely it was more than five kilometers that Trouser-Beret had to walk from the fjord to her lakeside home. But then, of course, she’d had her white horse. I pictured her in her colorful blue Sami tunic, with wadmal or skin trousers.

  The sun was coming out and the landscape was transformed from harsh to bright. The lake had no firm shore; it was marshy at the edges, tea-dark, almost black in the middle, with white birches all around. I put my hand in my pocket, felt the sharp mineral edges of the rocks I’d picked up.

  There were no traces now of their house, rebuilt with such courage after the fire. Dypvann meant “deep water,” and it had been called that in Beret’s time as well. Hilgunn remarked conversationally as we drove past, “Her husband took that name after a while. He was Peder Thomassen Dypvann. They were all Dypvann.”

  “Beret was Dypvann, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “So then she had three names. She was Beret Paulsdatter. And Buks-Beret. And Beret Dypvann. Dypvann,” I mused. “What a beautiful name. That’s a name I wouldn’t mind having. Could I take it, do you think?”

  Hilgunn glanced at me a little strangely and rebuked me, as the historian she was, “You can’t take the name of a place you don’t live.”

  We drove a little farther, slowly, peering through the trees. Hilgunn had a zest for life that I envied, and more than that, a vocabulary, a deep remembering. I would like to know the names of all the rocks, all the lakes, all the trees. I would like to be from a place as fully as she was. Southern California, where I’d grown up, was buried under a million tons of concrete and asphalt. Greenwood in Seattle referred to a thick dark forest that had been cut down a hundred years before I moved there. In America it was hard to be from a place that wasn’t constantly changing. Then Hilgunn said, “But you know, Beret had a fourth name; it was her real name that no one knows. I mean, it was her Sami name. People weren’t allowed to write down their Sami names on the church registers, so they’ve been forgotten.”

  I didn’t say anything to this, but I took it in. The sun struck the black water and the white birches. It didn’t matter where I was from; I was here now. I could name myself. I could choose whatever name I wanted, whatever address I needed to call home.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  STATUE OF A WOMAN STARING OUT TO SEA

  Norwegian Coastal Voyage

  THEY CALL it the Lofoten Wall, this island chain that seems to rise up sheer and black out of the Norwegian Sea, frosted with white in winter, emerald green in summer, jagged-spined as a prehistoric beast. Our ship, the coastal steamer Lofoten, had made the crossing from Bodø, a town just above the Arctic Circle on the Norwegian coast. We were now approaching the town of Svolvær at about seven on a cloudy violet evening shot with gold. At the end of a rocky causeway in the harbor, high on a pillar, stood a bronze statue of a woman, waving. Her long skirt blew in the sculptor’s breeze; she had a kerchief on her head and a shawl around her shoulders.

  I’d seen other statues like this on my voyages north, sometimes at the site of a terrible fishing disaster, where many men lost their lives. There’s a mammoth granite figure of a woman at Gloup on the island of Yell in Shetland, recalling a terrible summer storm in 1881 that swept away six fishing boats with fifty-eight men. In the Faroes, at Gjógv, where two boats capsized in the surf in 1870 and seventeen men were lost, a monument portrays a cluster of three, a mother with her two children clinging to her skirts. In Ålesund, Norway, a woman shading her eyes and staring s
eaward perches on the edge of the harbor, while farther north, in Rørvik’s town square, looms a bereaved-looking woman with her arms crossed below her chest, and a small boy beside her. Invariably, the statues were called “The Fisherman’s Wife” or “Waiting.”

  Alfhild the Viking princess

  “This is the Fisherman’s Wife,” said a new acquaintance, Maggie, who’d joined me on deck with her friend Helen. “I read about it in the guidebook. She’s supposed to be waving to the husband who’s gone off fishing and might not come back.”

  “Oh, that’s sad then,” said Helen. “I thought she was waving hello to us!”

  Maggie grumbled, “As if a busy woman would have time to stand around waving to some guy in a boat. She was probably milking the cows at home. Where’s the statue of the woman milking the cows?”

  “Where’s the statue of the Viking woman warrior ready to go off pirating and raiding?” I asked.

  “I know there were Vikings up here,” said Helen, looking puzzled. “But the women didn’t go to sea, did they?”

  TWELVE CENTURIES ago, long before Grace O’Malley commanded a fleet of pirate galleys that struck fear into the hearts of the Galway merchants and put the English to flight, another woman raider and warrior roved the northern seas in search of loot and a good fight. She was the Viking princess Alfhild, and her deeds, true or not, come down to us through the work of the medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus, whose early-thirteenth-century History of the Danes mixes genealogy, saga, and myth. Fascinated with the heroic pagan past, this Christian scholar knew enough to disapprove of the women warriors whose stories he told—still, he told them with relish. Some three hundred years later another chronicler, the exiled Swedish bishop Olaus Magnus, was also to write about Alfhild (or Alvild, as he called her) in a chapter entitled “On Piracy by Noble Maidens,” in his comprehensive work, A Description of the Northern Peoples, first published in 1555.