The Pirate Queen (16 page)

       
O, ‘twas in the year of ninety-four,

       
And of June the second day,

       
That our gallant ship her anchor weighed,

       
And from Stromness bore away, brave boys!

       
And from Stromness bore away!

On a clear evening like tonight Christian Robertson is at a window in her upstairs office, looking up from her correspondence and her ledger books with interest at the progress of the loading, hardly aware of the commotion and noise in the street, it being so familiar. Taking her pen, she dips it in ink and writes:

G & J Egginton, Esqs.,

Gentlemen,

Your ship
Leviathan
arrived here the 7th, with 15 fish, all well and sailed the 9th at 4
A.M
., and I hope has arrived safe. Enclosed you have the Certificate & copy of my acct. Which I trust you will find correct. I only sent 2 oxen by Capt. K as I could not ship any more without detaining the vessel, it being Sunday.—There is a ship in sight which I hope is the
Kiero . . .

T
HE HOUSES
on this main street were built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by sea captains and merchants, and from the outside they seemed hardly changed, tucked together tight and tall. Few cross streets, but many steeply squeezed lanes, sporting fanciful names like Khyber Pass or Hellihole Road, wound up into the hills above the town. It was easy to imagine the parlors of these elegant graystone houses still decorated with shells from the South Pacific, paintings of barks and schooners, carved teak furniture, Chinese vases, stuffed parrots. Gardens were squeezed in wherever there was a bit of space, a single sycamore or lilac spreading low, with ivory and teal hostas beneath, or an intensely worked paradise of bold yellow Welsh poppies, airy columbines, and dark-blue irises. I followed one pinched alleyway down to the water's edge to admire a lush garden tucked next to a boathouse draped with nets, a rusty spar, a crumbling rowboat. Stromness met my inexact criteria for favorite places: Could I live here? Yes.

Standing by the boathouse and the garden, I saw the tide was out, and the two green hillocks across from the inward curve along which the town was built were once again revealed
as the higher ground of a small peninsula. You could walk over the mud flats and sand to reach them; occasionally, from my room at the Ferry Inn, I'd seen a truck driving across the sand bar, for the smaller of the two hills had a farm atop it. When the tide was in, the only way to approach was by boat, for the hillocks became islets, or holms. The Inner Holm and the Outer Holm they were called on my nautical map of Orkney, and I hadn't yet invented new names for them. Since leaving Ireland, I'd sometimes given names to islands on my voyage: Papa Stronsay was, to me, the Isle of the Herring Lassies, for instance.

Holm
was a word I knew from Norwegian; it meant small island. Although you didn't hear it much in American English, the word was everywhere along these Celtic-Norse coasts. Its meaning was islet, from which I extrapolated that a holm, unlike a sea rock, was always visible, just not in its entirety. The tides could claim it and lap it and hide most of it, and then, six hours later, expose it again. This natural rhythm of conceal and reveal was pleasing to me somehow.

Walking through Stromness this evening, I came to a halt in front of Login's Well. No one drank from it now, but it was still preserved as a watering hole, with a plaque that recalled several important expeditions that had made use of it when provisioning in Orkney. Captain Cook and Captain Bligh had both set forth from Stromness, as had the Franklin Expedition, which later came to grief in the Canadian Arctic and never returned. Across from the well was Login's Inn, which had flourished as a hostelry for ships' officers and passengers in the early 1800s.

Margaret Login, like Christian Robertson, was a widow with children to support. She was the daughter of a merchant
who had traded to the West Indies from London, and had later retired to Orkney. Margaret's husband, John Login, had been in the merchant navy, too, but settled in Stromness to become a ship owner and agent. His death was followed by a string of other losses, including the wrecks of several vessels in which he had been part owner. Margaret took over his shipping and whaling interests and ran them from an office down on the pier. She turned her home into a hotel, and Login's Inn became known for its genteel hospitality.

On an evening like tonight, with many officers and their families in town, one might have heard music from the spinet through the open windows of the inn and glimpsed women in low-bosomed, sprigged chintz dresses and lace caps flitting by the windows. Candles later, when it was dark, and glasses of claret raised in toasts, perhaps some whist, and conversation sprinkled with Jane Austen niceties of speech. Not far away, of course, would have been many more inns and alehouses run by widows who entertained a different clientele in an atmosphere of tallow and peat, tobacco smoke and whiskey. In June of 1817 the Town Council decided to enroll the “respectable inhabitants” of the town as a police force “against . . . the outrageous and turbulent proceedings of seaman and others who frequent the harbour.” The “others” may well have been prostitutes, for as a port town, Stromness would have attracted young women who had no other means of income.

The sea has spawned a thousand livelihoods over the centuries; maritime work is not always seafaring. In Stromness, certainly, it's difficult to think of women doing anything not connected with the sea. Anne Robertson had said to me, “It was a man's world, of course, but in Scotland there doesn't seem to have been such a prejudice against women in business. They
started schools, ran inns and shops. They inherited businesses from their husbands and ran them profitably.” Some prospered greatly, like Christian Robertson, whose two huge houses I was passing now. The Doubles were constructed gable-end to the water. She had lived in one and let out the other. Now each house is divided into three, and only the flats on the end face the harbor. Christian Robertson was an exception, of course, as was Margaret Login. But one suspects that they were less exceptional than later historians might find them. It may have been a man's world, but it was a world that had room for them, and that they helped create.

I
HAD
arrived by now at the outskirts of Stromness and was following a road that led alongside the channel separating Mainland from the small island of Graemsay and the much larger island of Hoy rising behind it. If I were to follow this road several miles into the face of the wind, I would come to a point where it could properly be said that I was on the shores of the Atlantic. But even from here it was quite possible to look west and see nothing on the horizon but a reflection from the sun. It was easy to imagine a convoy of three-masted ships bearing for Stromness, the pilot boats competing to be the first to escort them around the point, the excitement growing back in the town. In days gone past young women gave their sweethearts a garland of silk, knotted for as many whales as they hoped they'd catch. These young women would have been waiting at the wharves to catch sight of their beloveds.

Not all women stayed at home waiting. On many sailing ships in the nineteenth century, it was common for wives to follow their captain or officer husbands to sea, and to take their
families with them. Christian Robertson's daughter had married a captain and voyaged with him. In the Stromness bookshop I'd found a delightful memoir by Elizabeth Linklater, the mother of a well-known Orcadian writer, Eric Linklater. Her book,
A Child Under Sail,
recounts growing up at sea in the late nineteenth century on voyages with her mother and captain father across the Atlantic, around Cape Horn to New Zealand and Cape of Good Hope to India. Some passages reminded me of Pippi Longstocking's adventures. Linklater recounts:

When we got home from the Boston voyage I had to go to school. This was hard on one who had acquired the lovely importance of a child at sea. I had become, I suppose, a most objectionable little girl. I had been taught songs of all kinds, and stories such as no nicely brought-up child would ever have been allowed to repeat. One such anecdote, I remember, was punctuated by frequent
hics,
which I did so well as always to elicit rounds of applause—from the sailors, that is. Others were in broad Scots, with an occasional snore, also well done, I think. But this impropriety soon yielded to treatment when my mother got full control of me again. It was not by her will that my education had begun on these lines.

I could see why the young Elizabeth had loved the salty vigor of shipboard life, especially compared to the way girls were raised in those days. Hardly seedy any longer, yet still tinged with the raffish, Stromness made me remember how port towns had always thrilled me. Was it from spending stolen time as a child at the Pike in Long Beach, where sailors from around the world strolled smoking and joking past curio shops,
tattoo parlors, and sideshows, where the air smelled of fish, smoke, cotton candy, and the sharp tang of illicit excitement. During my mother's illness, when I was eleven and twelve, my father, who had an office downtown on Atlantic Boulevard, would take us to the Pacific Coast Club for our swimming lessons. We had strict instructions not to leave the fortress of the club; as soon as the lessons were over, however, I took my younger brother by the hand and set out for the Pike, the seaside amusement park that had descended into seediness. What did I want? Danger, pleasure, the chance simply to look and sniff and imagine. Port towns have a pungent density of smells and sights; yet they are open, too, one whole wall removed and exposed to the sea, a place of comings and goings, dreams hatched and dreams dashed. Downtown Long Beach was not a place for a young girl, and yet in the Pike I found everything to stir my imagination, to feed my wanderlust.

How was a woman of an earlier time to experience adventure and autonomy in the world? The sea, for so many of the women I'd come across in Scotland and Orkney, had been work or trade, not the high road to independence. The women were coastal folk for the most part—fishers and fishwives, kelp gatherers and herring lassies—who stayed close to loved ones on shore. Within the bounds of their society, widow entrepreneurs like Christian Robertson and Margaret Login were successful and emancipated, far more so, in fact, than the scruffy whalers and drunken seamen of the port towns. Yet in our collective imagination, freedom belongs to the sailor, the one who leaves friends and family behind for the wind and the waves.

The Stromness captain's wife with the most remarkable story was Eliza Fraser, who left her three children here under the care of a pastor and sailed off to Australia on the
Stirling
Castle,
a merchant brig, with her husband in 1835. After a long voyage from London to Buenos Aires to Cape Town to Sydney, Captain Fraser unloaded his cargo, and received instructions to sail to Singapore and load up goods for England. Eliza was by this time heavily pregnant with their fourth child, and the only woman on the ship. Unfortunately her husband was in poor health (one reason Eliza had accompanied him), and in Sydney most of his crew jumped ship. The new recruits were in some cases less able, and certainly less experienced. In stormy weather the ship went aground on a reef north of what is now Brisbane, and the crew was forced to abandon the vessel in two smaller craft, a pinnace and a longboat, which immediately began leaking. Eliza, in the almost swamped longboat, went into contractions and delivered a baby, which drowned immediately. She said later that she was hardly conscious of having given birth at all.

The two boats finally put in at Great Sandy Island, and there their troubles began in earnest. The island was inhabited by aborigines. We don't have the aborigines' account, only the white survivors, of course, but their story goes that the two boats were separated while they were trying to escape. Eliza spent almost two months as a captive. She was starved, exhibited, beaten, and had her legs burned. She was most likely raped. She watched her husband speared through, and others of the crew die horrible deaths. Finally, in a daring rescue by an Irish convict backed up by soldiers from Brisbane, Eliza was saved, and taken back to Sydney. There her story becomes less certain, a bit ludicrous, and rather sad. Although she was said to have been strong-willed and capable of command during the first days of abandoning the ship and reaching land, two months of degradation and physical misery had troubled, if not unhinged, her mind. She fell under the sway of a Captain Greene, who seems to have seen in her a good possibility for making money. After an appeal for funds in Sydney for Eliza, they sailed to Liverpool, and made their way to London. Further appeals for money were investigated and exposed, reducing Eliza to humiliation, especially after Captain Greene decided to exhibit her as the only survivor of the
Stirling Castle.