The Pirate Queen (11 page)

A witch selling the wind to sailors

Nehalennia was a powerful deity, but over the centuries her popularity was replaced by images of Christian saints. Eventually the stern faith of Calvinist Scotland had no room for women at all except as
scapegoats. The useful power of female sea goddesses lived on in folklore about the sellers of the wind, whose weather services could be purchased up until the early nineteenth century. More often the old connection between women and the sea was held to be evil. As memories of sea goddesses died away, rumors of sea witches who caused shipwrecks, storms, and drownings grew.

I
WOKE
my first morning in the Orkney capitol of Kirkwall to rain flying at the window and a slightly dismayed sense of having been transported back in time to the bedroom my new stepmother had designed for me when I was a young teenager. This room was pink, too, with twin beds, a chair, and tiny desk, prints of fluffy kittens hanging too high up on the walls. Draped over the chair was a thin paper rectangle announcing that it was a “Personal Bath Mat.” These personal bath mats made an appearance everywhere I stayed in Orkney.

Mrs. Harris's bed-and-breakfast, arranged for me last night by the tourist bureau, seemed the very opposite of everything I'd expected to find in these northern isles. Photographs of stone circles and breathtaking cliffs hadn't prepared me for a view, when I tugged open the curtains, of wet washing on a line, and some rain-bedraggled geraniums in pots. My immediate thought was that I needed to find another place, but on the way back to the tourist office in the town center, I discovered an enchanted woods across the street from Mrs. Harris's ranch-style house, and this mysterious little forest made me decide to stay where I was.

A woods of any sort was unusual in Orkney, where the fierce Atlantic winds make forestry a difficult art. As I'd find on all the northern islands, trees often grew sideways, if at all.
Instead of a tree sheltering a house, it took a town with thick walls to shelter a few trees. The sycamores in this stand seemed to have been planted long ago. Most of them had their lower branches lopped off, so that the upper, leafed-out branches formed a canopy over the carpet of bluebells and grass beneath. Other trees had thick trunklike branches snaking out only a few feet from the ground, and those branches had a sinuous, gray-barked solidity.

It was always noisy in these woods, I found, morning, afternoon, or evening. The wind whooshed through continuously and the cawing of the rooks who lived there trumpeted through the wind's bass notes. The rooks had at least two dozen big, twiggy nests in the upper canopy. They rarely seemed to rest however; they careened away from the trees and swooped the fields, then returned to settle with a multitude of squabbling caws. I noticed that they pushed each other off the branches whenever they could, like black-suited gentlemen sidling up to each other on a bench and shoving. There was no fighting, just this endless positioning, nudging, and jostling. One rook would eventually topple off and soar noisily into a recuperative spin before returning again.

Although the rain stopped while I was in Kirkwall, the wind never did. It was a freight train of a wind, too, barreling over the land with a cargo of salt fresh from the Atlantic. It was a surgeon of a wind, poking a scalpel of ice into any uncovered sliver of skin. It could dry your eyes and take the words from your mouth. I'd expected to meet this wind farther north, in the Faroes and Iceland, but Orkney in these first days was where it became my constant companion. I put on the long underwear I'd been saving for Iceland, bought new woolen gloves and a tighter-fitting watch cap. My lips grew chapped; my ears ached from the
howling. When I came into any enclosed, human-created space, I panted involuntarily, the way I saw others do, like a dog.

There was another guest at Mrs. Harris's, and he almost never went out. He sat in a big upholstered chair in the spacious living room in front of the electric flames of the fireplace and read steadily through the
Times,
the
Daily Telegraph,
the
Scotsman,
and the
Orcadian.
The living room had a big picture window and he would occasionally look up at the clouds being knocked about like billiard balls and say, “Wheew, I'm better off here, eh?” He was from Winnipeg. Every morning he ate an enormous breakfast. He was in his late sixties and had been traveling by bus through England and Scotland for about two months. He had a way of ducking his head and giggling like a preadolescent boy. Yet he had a life behind him. An unexpected trip to the ICU a few years ago—a feeling that he had been only a tiny step away from death, perhaps he
had
died and returned—had led him to give up everything and start traveling. His favorite place in Orkney was the Wireless Museum; he had been there twice, his only excursions from the house, and he was adamant I'd like it. Every time I came into the house, he asked if I'd been to the Wireless Museum yet, and then gave an embarrassed little chortle.

The town of Kirkwall stems from Norse times, but the history of the Orkney Islands begins much further back, in the Neolithic period. Burial cairns and stone circles date from 3500 to 3000 B.C., and the village of Skara Brae, miraculously preserved in sand until a ferocious storm in 1850, is one of the only ancient villages in Europe still intact after five thousand years. But you have to get out into the countryside to experience the sense of time, to one of sixteen inhabited low-lying islands, of which there are sixty-seven that make up the Orkney
archipelago and offer vistas of huge skies and stone circles.

Kirkwall itself, while hardly modern, having in its midst the medieval St. Magnus Cathedral and the ruins of the Bishop's Palace, is distinctly buttoned-down and Calvinist in feel, with rows of granite-faced buildings along a stone-flagged narrow street. Once this kilometer-long street, variously called Broad, Albert, Bridge, Victoria, and Main, ran by the sea front; when the inner harbor was filled in and a new section of the town built closer to the new piers and jetties, the street became enclosed, a good thing, too, as the buildings on either side now offer protection against the wind. Kirkwall is a twee place, in spite of its long and often bloody history, less bohemian than Stromness on the other side of Mainland, more like a grayly genteel Victorian town on the east coast of Scotland. Shabby, too, with a number of shops closed along the main street.

Of course, I was there in late spring, before the proper beginning of the tourist season, and a cold wind and rain make it difficult to appreciate any place properly. I found myself spending most days in the public library, one of the oldest in Scotland, upstairs in the Orkney Room. There I sat cozily, while the wind rattled the small-paned windows and the rain lashed down, and I searched for stories in the glass-fronted bookcases about sea witches, those much maligned daughters of the Cailleach and the Mither o' the Sea.

I was particularly intrigued by tales of the sellers of the wind. According to some sources, it was the Finns and Lapps of the Far North who'd specialized in selling knotted rope to sailors, with the advice not to untie more than one or, at most, two of the knots. This advice was so rarely followed that it seems to bespeak an unconscious need to keep alive the mysteries of the storm goddesses. In a book on women pirates translated from
German, I'd come across the interesting note that a woman called Bessy Miller had been “the last European wind-seller,” and that she had lived in the Orkney Islands. A little more research had turned up the fact that Sir Walter Scott had based one of his main characters in his novel
The Pirate
on this real woman, Bessie Millie, whom he'd met on a trip to Orkney and Shetland in 1814. The existence of Bessie Millie seemed to suggest a place and a time when the legendary powers of the storm goddess to control the wind and waves had intersected with the fortunes of a mortal woman who made her living off the association of women and the sea by convincing sailors that she could speed their return home. Was Bessie a witch or simply rather clever?

A friend in Edinburgh had given me a copy of
The Pirate,
and I planned to spend my evenings reading it. Meanwhile, I searched in the library for stories of sellers of the wind. I found none. What I did find were stories of witchcraft and witch trials, so many of which took place here in Kirkwall, especially in the early seventeenth century.

Although Scotland had prohibited witchcraft since 1563, the law hadn't been implemented extensively until James I of England (the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and still, at that point James VI of Scotland) became personally involved in the trials of the North Berwick witches in 1590. It was said that witches had raised such storms that James's bride-to-be, Anne of Denmark, had been unable to cross the North Sea for their wedding in 1589. Three times the ships came near Scotland and three times they were turned back, until the captain made for Norway. The witches from North Berwick confessed—when tortured—to raising storms at sea when James and Anne were returning to Scotland from Scandinavia the following year. The earl of
Bothwell was named as the instigator of the plot, and treason became mixed with witchcraft. Fear of losing power through human disloyalty and supernatural forces seems to have led to James's obsession with witches, which culminated toward the end of a witch-hunting decade with his tract,
Daemonologie.

Although some men were tried and executed as witches, there were fewer of them than there were women, and few as malicious and evil. “The reason is easie,” wrote James, “for as that sexe is frailer then man is, so is it easier to be intrapped in these grosse snares of the Devill.” The trial of the North Berwick witches took place while Grace O'Malley was still harrying ships off the coast of Ireland, but while Queen Elizabeth's Irish governors sparred and battled with the unwomanly Pirate Queen, no one had ever suggested anything “devilish” or “evile” in her behavior, or that she carried out daring feats at sea through supernatural means. But Elizabeth's heir was far more superstitious than she. Although James, when he crossed the border to become James I of England, soon had other things than witchcraft to worry about, the damage in Scotland was done, and the following sixty years saw over three thousand trials of witches, particularly in border areas around Edinburgh and in Orkney.

I
KEPT
busy in Kirkwall, but I can't say I liked it overmuch. In town I evaded the wind by doing imaginary errands in old-fashioned shops, and drinking endless cups of tea. “Don't think I'll go out today,” the man from Winnipeg told me every morning as he settled into the easy chair with his newspapers. “If I did, I suppose I'd go back to the Wireless Museum. It is really something. You ought to go, you know.”

In the evenings, in my pink bedroom with the scent of potpourri seeping under the door, I worked my way through
The Pirate
with its portrayal of the charlatan witch Norna, based on the real sea witch Bessie Millie. In the old edition of
The Pirate
I was reading, there was a note crediting Bessie Millie for the story that became the plot of the book. Scott describes her as “nearly one hundred years old, with light-blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity.”

But in Scott's journals of his travels around Orkney and Shetland, in an entry made August 17, 1814, Scott describes making a climb into the hills above Stromness, in company with a sea captain paying a call on Bessie Millie:

An old hag lives in a wretched cabin on this height, and subsists by selling winds. Each captain of a merchantman, between jest and earnest, gives the old woman sixpence, and she boils her kettle to procure a favourable gale. She was a little miserable figure; upwards of ninety, she told us, and dried up like a mummy. A sort of clay-coloured cloak, folded over her head, corresponded in colour to her corpse-like complexion. Fine light-blue eyes, and nose and chin that almost met, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave her quite the effect of Hecate.

In
The Pirate
the compelling figure of Norna roams the cliffs at the southern end of the Shetland Islands, chanting runic nonsense that nevertheless strikes awe into everyone she meets, and declaring “Do not provoke Norna of Fitful-head!” Norna can see the future; she can control the weather, even create it. She moves in thunder, to the crashing of waves. Many fear her, yet her power is based on a willful act of self-creation, which is more sand than solid earth; in the end her magic fragments to nothing, and she's revealed as a deranged impostor. It's a fascinating portrayal of a nineteenth-century man's ambivalence about female power. Scott recalls, romantically, with great gothic flourishes of description, an ancient reverence toward the winter hag and the storm goddess. At the same time, his awe has something of disgust and even fear in it; by the end of his novel, he's done all he can to demolish the old legends.