The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  Still, it was the coastal steamer, and I loved the coastal steamer’s route. Back in 1973 I’d joined the crew of the Kong Olav on a whim, after seeing an ad in a Trondheim newspaper during my second summer working in Norway. Skipspike, “Ship’s Girl,” sounded a lot better than stock clerk, the job I held at the time, and I was disappointed to find out that in this case it meant dishwasher. All that summer I slaved long hours and couldn’t get the smell of fish and potatoes out of my hair. But I never tired of going out on deck and watching the coastline; I never tired of coming into port and leaving port. I could have done that the rest of my life.

  The journey to Tromsø was short in coastal-steamer terms, just one night, just one last night sleeping in a cabin to the sound of the engines, just one more morning eating breakfast by a porthole, just one more port for a final disembarkation. I was sorry to have gotten off the Lofoten and often found myself wishing that I’d gone all the way up to the North Cape. I missed Maggie and Helen a little, the odd trio we’d formed by the end, shipboard friends with little in common except the voyage, three Norns at sea.

  Yet in Tromsø, even with the weather getting colder and the days growing shorter, the time passed quickly. I had research to do and café lattes to catch up on. I went to museums and the university library, and even to the College of Fishery Science, a marvelous building in the general outline of a ship, with many festive decorative touches like portholes and fish-print drapes. The assistant director gave me a tour, loaded me with brochures and promotional material, and put me in contact with a few women who could tell me about women fishers. Another day I persuaded my friend Ragnhild to go with me to Polaria, a high-concept museum with little of interest except a model of how whirlpools are created. I’m afraid I taxed her patience by pushing the button again and again so I could see how the funnel swirled up from the bottom of the tall glass tank, faster and faster, until it became a tornado of white water with a wide opening on the surface. If ever there were a symbol for the once revered and now lost power of the feminine to create and destroy life, this was it. Call me the Cailleach, creator of sea cauldrons, the storm goddess now living in a glass box.

  One afternoon I sat in the market square with my notebook, and sketched the statue before me: a large bold fisherman in a small boat, tilted at a vertical angle over two abstract curls of either wave or whale. His harpoon raised to strike, he was the epitome of action. All around the granite pedestal were bas-reliefs made of forged metal. One of them was a small tableau of two women and a small boy staring out at a ship. One woman had her hand on the other’s shoulder; the boy wore a sou’ wester and pulled impatiently away from his mother.

  I’d just come from a meeting with Marit Husmo, who’d done a lot of interesting statistical research on women in the fishing industry, and now I sat in the square, across from a man hawking fresh shrimp and a Russian woman selling lacquered boxes and dolls, reading through my notes. At the end of our talk I’d asked Marit about the custom of erecting statues of women staring out to sea, and she sighed. “Most women still work in factories, on the fish processing assembly line. That’s the reality. There’s no statue to them. There’s nothing that reflects what women actually do.”

  It hadn’t been until my last day in the Lofoten Islands that I’d tried to find out something about the Fisherman’s Wife statue there, and about some of the other statues now being erected along these maritime coasts. Although most of these statues show women in old-fashioned dress—long skirts (the better to blow in the sculptor’s breeze), kerchiefs and shawls—almost all have appeared in the last decade or so. When I finally asked, “Who’s putting these statues up and why now?” the answers surprised me. Although the figures clearly drew on an iconography of mourning as old as Homer, most people didn’t mention loss, but told me, “It’s to acknowledge women’s contribution to Norway’s fishing culture. The men went out fishing and whaling, but the women did everything else. So this is a tribute to these women.”

  It seemed odd that the statues seemed to be appearing at a time when the old way of life was almost gone, when fishing was still tough but safer and less heroic, when women were encroaching on male territory in every way. The majority of coastal fisherwomen fished together with their male partners, I’d read; hundreds worked on factory ships, and thousands more in the industry as a whole. Even in earlier times, women had rarely stood around on shore waving and waiting. Their tasks, from milking to milling, from weaving to seaweed gathering and line baiting, from midwifery to childcare, were what kept the maritime communities alive; they had no leisure for sad farewells. To give tribute to women’s endless labor ashore by showing them sadly waving or staring out to sea seemed entirely suspect. It didn’t take into account Norway’s own Trouser-Beret and her sisters, or Skipper Thurídur in Iceland, or the herring lassies of Scotland, all of whom had been hardworking women who supported themselves and their families from fishing.

  Fisherman’s wife

  Not to mention Grace O’Malley and Alfhild, and explorers and captains and sailors, who stayed at sea for months at a time, and whose wanderlust and expertise equaled that of men. It was, after all, pirates and seafarers, not herring lassies, whose boldness and transgressions captured the imagination. Women in the fishing industry—I looked at the pamphlets in my lap and my notes from Marit—were just as much a part of the wide lore of sea, but they weren’t, you had to admit, heroines to live by, though they certainly deserved a statue or two.

  If I’d discovered anything on my voyages, it was that women’s maritime heritage was diverse: fishing and piracy, seaweed gathering and swashbuckling. Women’s connection with the sea was about business and adventure, work and pleasure. About dressing as a man sometimes, about earning the respect of a crew, about making a living as a widow, about throwing off expectations. About taking passage on a boat to new shores, whether it was Elizabeth Taylor traveling to the Faroes, or Freydís Eiríksdóttir sailing to Vínland. About fighting with valor and keeping one’s head when attacked. About standing on shore, and about sailing away.

  The sailing away was the best part though.

  At the beginning of my notebook was a sketch I’d done, months ago now, in Louisburgh, Ireland, at the Granuaile Heritage Centre. Tentative then, hardly knowing what I was recording, I’d copied the mannequin of Grace, in doublet and hose, with a sword at her belt, and one hand raised awkwardly to her forehead. It was the same pose, I realized, that the Fisherman’s Wives were forced to take, but the meaning was entirely different. Grace O’Malley was looking out to sea for ships to plunder. She wasn’t waiting for anybody.

  WHEN I’D arrived in Tromsø, I’d found myself reluctant to disembark, for this was the farthest north I’d go on this trip, and yet I yearned to go much farther: up to Hammerfest and the North Cape, around the top of Norway to the Russian border. I wanted to book a small berth on the Harald Jarl, a ship even more like the Kong Olav than the Lofoten was, a ship that wouldn’t sail again after this year. I often found myself walking by the docks at six in the evening, just when the coastal steamer pulled up its ramp, blasted its horn, and slowly moved away from land and out to sea again.

  It was this rhythm of arrival and departure that I loved and had always loved most during my summer working on the coastal steamer. I loved the grinding of the engine as the propellers churned counterclockwise to halt the ship, the thunk of the rope cables hitting the dock, the lowering of the metal gangway, the sudden silence as the engines stopped. I loved even more to hear the engines start up again, to look over the side and see the gangway disappearing back into the ship. A man on the dock would loose the ropes that were all that held the ship to the side, and they’d be winched up again into a coil. The space between the ship and the dock widened; for a second, no more, you could still have jumped the distance, then it was too late. You were separated from land. The ship hooted when we arrived and when we left, and in those blasts from the horn was everything I understood about departures and arrivals, about
beginnings and farewells.

  I stood on the Tromsø wharf many evenings watching the ships let go of land: the Narvik, the Vesterålen, the Nordnorge, all white and gleaming, all with their captain at the bridge and their crew at the ready, all steaming north. I stood watching their departures, and sometimes I waved to the passengers on deck, and envied them—but only a little.

  I would take other voyages, I was sure of it.

  Once, as a child, I’d stood with my mother on the pier in Los Angeles, waving goodbye to her friend, a woman sailing off for adventure in foreign ports.

  Now I had become that woman.

  “Goodbye, goodbye,” I remember calling to my mother.

  “Goodbye, goodbye,” my mother had called to me. “Don’t forget to write.”

  EPILOGUE

  RETURN TO CLEW BAY

  IT HAD been a few years since I’d first come to Clew Bay. Once again I’d traveled by the train from Dublin. Once again it was spring, the first day of June and a bank holiday. Once again sun sparkled green on the pastures and hills of Ireland, the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick a perfect cone in the distance as the train chugged into Westport Station.

  I’d long wanted to meet Anne Chambers, the biographer of Grace O’Malley and the woman who’d done the most to put the pirate queen on the map. Although Anne lives in Dublin, she was here in Westport to help supervise the setting up of a statue of Grace on the grounds of Westport House, which belongs to Jeremy Browne, Lord Altamont, the eleventh Marquess of Sligo and thirteenth great grandson of Grace O’Malley.

  Nearing the end of writing this book, I’d conceived a great longing to return to Clew Bay, the seascape of my pirate queen. In the mysterious way of things, no sooner had I decided on a short trip to the west of Ireland than I heard from Anne Chambers: The week I planned to come was the very week the Grace O’Malley statue was being installed.

  We met in the lounge of the Olde Railway Hotel, a parlor so stuffed with horsehair sofas and wing chairs, birdcages, fern stands, occasional tables, pianos, and footstools that it seems hardly changed from Thackeray’s time, when he visited Westport and pronounced the hotel “one of the Prettiest, Comfortablist Inns in Ireland.” Tall and auburn-haired, Anne had an angular, animated face, generous and no-nonsense. Rangy in her jeans and jean jacket, she looked almost Western, as if she roped cattle in Wyoming.

  I’d been living with the stories of Grace O’Malley for a long time now, but Anne had lived with them since childhood. She grew up in nearby Castlebar and spent her summers on the shores of Clew Bay. “I knew that some of the ruins and the castles had belonged to a woman they called the pirate queen, Grace O’Malley, but I never really knew if she was a real person, or if the stories were true. We didn’t study her in history class; she wasn’t even in the history books. I wondered if she was legendary, like Queen Maeve of Connaught.”

  Anne moved to Dublin; she worked at a bank and went to discos at night, like any person in her twenties. But she was still thinking about Grace. She started going over to the National Library during her lunch hours and after work, trying to satisfy her curiosity. “I knew nothing at all about how to do historical research,” she told me. “I remember those state papers, learning how to decipher the faded handwriting, and my excitement when I found the letter from Grace to Queen Elizabeth.”

  The first edition of Anne’s biography, Granuaile, came out in 1978, and since then it has always been in print, with a couple of revised editions as new material became available. For Anne, Grace has never lost her fascination and, in fact, grows more relevant as the years pass. “There’s something modern about Grace. She was a career woman who had to balance business—i.e., piracy, seafaring, and warring—with a personal life of children, household responsibilities, and personal relationships. She wasn’t patriotic; she was practical and pragmatic. She essentially got a ‘prenup’ agreement with her second husband. And she proved that she could do all this, be as tough as a man, without losing her femininity.”

  Granuaile was the beginning of Anne’s writing career and her continuing interest in the tumultuous world of sixteenth-century Ireland, but in spite of her other projects, she’d never lost interest in Grace. She had a screenplay in the works, and a TV documentary. She was the energy and vision behind the Granuaile Heritage Centre in Louisburgh. She’d written countless articles and been interviewed many times. She’d seen an orchestral piece, The Granuaile Suite, performed, and she’d christened the Clare Island Ferry the Pirate Queen. Even in the few years since I’d first read Granuaile and had the notion to travel around the North Atlantic collecting stories, Grace O’Malley had become better known. In fact, the great excitement around Clew Bay this time was a recent visit by Lucy Lawless, of Xena, Warrior Princess fame, who had been here with a film crew only weeks before, shooting one segment of a five-part series on women warriors for the Discovery Channel. Anne had been a consultant for the program, and Mary Gavin Hughes, with her Shamrock I, had taken the crew out on the water, even donning a gray wig at one point for a crowd scene.

  During the course of all her research and promotion of Grace, Anne and her husband had become very good friends with Jeremy Browne, Lord Altamont, and his wife. One of the fruits of the friendship was a closer pairing of Westport House and the story of Grace O’Malley. The statue, erected four hundred years after Grace’s death in 1603, was the most visible mark of that pairing. Actually, there were two statues, one of stone, set inside the house, and the other, a bronze cast, on the grounds nearby.

  Anne’s Jeep was parked in front of the Olde Railway Hotel. We jumped in, but instead of driving to the Wyoming ranch, we swept up the long drive to a magnificent Georgian country house a couple of miles away. Westport House was designed in 1778 by James Wyatt, on the site of an older building, where earlier descendants of Grace O’Malley, the Brownes, had lived. The foundation is said to have been one of the O’Malley castles. One of its greatest beauties is its setting. “The most beautiful view I ever saw in the world, I think . . . It forms an event in one’s life to have seen that place, so beautiful is it and so unlike all other beauties that I know of. Were such beauties lying on English shores it would be a world’s wonder,” Thackeray wrote in 1842. The back of the house, terraced with gardens, slopes down in a landscaped descent of oaks and beeches, a small lake dammed from a stream whose course was altered to make it more picturesque. Now Clew Bay is hardly visible through the magnificent trees.

  It being a holiday, the first of the summer, the parking lot was full and dozens of families roamed around both the house and the other attractions. In the lake, giant white swan-shaped boats (called swan pedaloes) glided, propelled by the humans inside. It took a few minutes to hunt up Jeremy Browne, the owner and instigator of the diversification of Westport House into a “leisure park.” Finally he came bounding up. A marquess is one step down from an earl, and I felt a little nervous meeting a member of the aristocracy, though Anne had assured me, “He’s not like that. You’ll like him!”

  I did. Tall, white-haired, wearing a sweater and slacks, Jeremy Browne had a boyish enthusiasm and an English accent. After we said goodbye to Anne, he led me into the house for a quick but thorough tour. He was forthright about his family’s decision to turn the ancestral home into a paying concern. “In the 1950s we put it up for sale, just to test the market. We had two offers, one for £7500 and the other for £6000—that was to demolish it and sell off the property. It seemed a pity to let go such a house, and so we had to think of something else. We opened the house to the public and since then, gradually, we’ve been adding attractions, mostly for the kiddies, who get so bored, don’t you know, with stately houses.”

  The new stone-carved statue of Grace O’Malley stood in the front hall, under a magnificent barrel ceiling with an early-nineteenth-century Waterford glass chandelier, next to the staircase. Hanging on the wall was a portrait of Maude Bourke, Grace’s great-great-granddaughter through her son Tibbot-ne-Long, later Viscount Bourke. Maude w
ore a very low cut gown plunging practically to her navel and looked very snobby, as did her bewigged husband, John Browne, in a matching portrait. Grace, seven feet tall in marble, also showed quite a lot of exposed chest, but her expression was far sterner. She had one hand on a tiller, the other on the handle of her saber.

  I had the sense that it wasn’t just the kiddies who were a bit bored with stately homes. The Brownes didn’t even live in this grand mansion any longer, but down the road. For Jeremy, showing visitors the collections of plate and silver, Waterford glass, paintings, and furniture had paled next to creating his amusement park, tucked discreetly behind trees so little was visible from the windows. Soon we were out of the house, and the next thing I knew I was sitting next to him in the small open car of a miniature train. The engineer pulled the steam whistle and off we chugged. All my life I’d read British novels with lords and ladies in them. In previous centuries they were haughty and proud. In the twentieth century they were sometimes, on the contrary, depicted as terribly modest, even off-hand, about their aristocratic roots. Still, nothing had quite prepared me for the experience of whizzing round a train track with an ebullient marquess who talked openly of restoring the family fortunes as he created a place that everyone could enjoy.