The Pirate Queen (2 page)

The inner reaches of Clew Bay are riddled with hidden reefs and rocks, dotted with hummocks and holms, those small islands that are sometimes exposed and sometimes submerged. Its currents are fierce; any invading force would think twice about trying to navigate it. Grace O'Malley knew it like the back of her hand. She grew up on its shores and for years made Clare Island, just outside the entrance to Clew Bay, her stronghold and base for raiding the coast.

Her pirate galleys and the English ships that pursued them
are long gone, but ferries and launches make the crossing several times a day from Roonagh Pier, on the mainland. I'd just arrived in Ireland from Seattle, and was now on the first of what would be many voyages around the North Atlantic in search of the stories, lost, forgotten or otherwise misplaced, of seafaring women like Grace. It was a brisk, sunny day, and the midday light winked up from the choppy waves like tiny mirrors on an Indian bedspread patterned in aqua and dark green.

An elderly, tweed-capped gentleman called Paddy leaned over the railing of the
Very Likely.
The seagulls keened in swoops above, the whitened green water boiled under us, and Paddy clung in misery to my arm. From the small cabin forward his wife called anxiously, “Paddy, if you feel the urge, remember to hold on to your teeth, will you now?”

He nodded weakly in her direction and confided to me, “I'm not a good sailor. Are you?”

“Yes, except for the very worst weather.” The short voyage of the
Very Likely
across the island-flung channel was a heart-leaping, wave-skidding pleasure to me.

“You're a seafaring woman then?” Paddy asked.

Aye, matey! I wanted to say, though kayaking around Lake Union in Seattle and off the rocky coastlines of the Pacific Northwest wasn't exactly like commanding a pirate galley in the North Atlantic. But I'd always loved the ocean, whether I was in it or on it. I'd grown up in Southern California swimming in the ocean, and though I never had a boat, I did have a surfboard. More importantly, I'd always dreamed of ships and the sea. Long Beach was a port city, filled with sailors, tattoo parlors, and blood banks. Our next-door neighbor was a longshoreman; school field trips were to the harbor to watch the cargo being hoisted on and off the ships. Growing up, I liked to
read about cabin boys on clipper ships and was much taken by the adventures of Pippi Longstocking, whose father had been a sea captain before he became a cannibal king, and who dreamed of becoming a pirate herself.

I'd first become interested in Grace O'Malley the year before, while on a writer's residency in another sea-smashed landscape, Cape Cornwall in England. Passing through London, I'd picked up a book on women pirates.
Bold in Her Breeches,
edited by British writer Jo Stanley, had a whole chapter on Grace, and it was this pirate who most captured my imagination, for everything she was, and everything she wasn't. Commanding vessels at sea and a fighting force of two hundred men, engaging in piracy and swordplay, looting, destroying, murdering—the captain of a pirate ship must be, hands down, the most transgressive role to which a woman could ever aspire. Dirty, greedy, sensual, tough, and charismatic; a gambler, a wife, and a mother; a leader of men, a politician when necessary, Grace comes down to us as that rare woman who claimed freedom as her birthright. For to go to sea is to feel that ordinary boundaries cannot hold you; to be a pirate is to assert that whatever you fancy belongs to you. The boldness of Grace's adventurous life long past youth was something that appealed to me particularly; she had, after all, remained a pirate into her seventies.

Grace O'Malley was only one among many pirates in
Bold in Her Breeches.
Jo Stanley had collected material on women as disparate as Alfhild, a Viking princess who commanded a fleet of longships for battle and piracy, the Chinese pirate Cheng I Sao, and Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who plied the trade in the Caribbean in the 1700s. It was Grace O'Malley who interested me most, however, and not just because she was a pirate, but
because she was, from all accounts, a great seafarer, and stories of women and the sea were sparse. After reading Anne Chambers's biography,
Granuaile: The Life and Times of Grace O'Melley,
I began searching for other stories of seafaring women from the past and was disappointed, though perhaps not surprised, to find so few.

The scraps I discovered here and there often seemed to be more mythic than historic. Creation stories told of Tiamat, the Babylonian goddess of salt water, whose waters commingled with the fresh waters of her consort, Apsu, to engender all the gods. Norse myths sang of Ran, the sea god's wife, who captured the drowned and carried them to her watery kingdom. Legends from many northern European countries described underwater creatures—mermaids, seal people, Finfolk—while more recent folklore mentioned “sellers of the wind” and sea witches, who had the power to create storms and calms. The more I poked around in the library, at used bookstores, and on the Web, trying to satisfy this new, consuming interest, the more curious I became. When mythology told us there once had been sea goddesses who ruled the watery depths, why did it seem that women had so rarely rowed and sailed the ocean's surface? Or, if they had, what had happened to those histories?

Like most people I'd been raised to believe that women never went to sea, and a glance at some of the best-known anthologies of sea literature bore this out. Their names simply weren't there. Yet, with just a bit of research, I found references to women who passed at sea as sailors and marines, to fishers and fishwives, to ship owners, stewardesses, and navigators, to wives and daughters who sailed with their families on whalers and merchant ships. Why didn't their intriguing stories figure more prominently in maritime history and literature?

I kept looking and found tantalizing fragments in histories, sagas, and old travelogues, fragments that only whetted my appetite. Many of them seemed to come from the European North Atlantic, from Ireland, the British Isles, and Scandinavia. With source materials so hard to obtain from the other side of the world, I decided that to really get a picture of women's maritime lives in history and myth, it would be far easier to travel there myself than to keep requesting interlibrary loans. I wanted to see those same coastlines I was reading about, to sail those same seas.

I decided that my pilgrimage would take me, as often by sea as I could manage, from Ireland to Scotland, to Orkney, to the Shetlands, to the Faroes, to Iceland, and finally to Norway. Although many other parts of the world—Africa, Brazil, the Mediterranean countries, and Polynesia—claim sea goddesses, and although women have fished, rowed, swum, and sailed off every inhabited coastline on the planet, I knew that the North Atlantic has an ancient tradition of myth and folklore about the sea, as well as a long, recorded seafaring history. I suspected I was most likely to find written material in the local libraries and bookshops of the British Isles and Scandinavia. Other northern countries—France, Germany, the Netherlands—all with rich mythic and maritime cultures, seemed beyond my ken, language-wise. On the other hand, I read and spoke Norwegian from many visits to that country. I was particularly interested in stories from Norse myths and sagas, as well as the sea-going culture of coastal Norway. It had often struck me in my reading of maritime literature how infrequently Scandinavia was mentioned. Yet the Vikings were some of the greatest sailors in world history, and in times past the Norse influence was strong all through the region I proposed to travel.

The northern waters were my heritage, too. With a grandfather born in Ireland and a grandmother from Sweden, I sometimes wondered if I carried an inborn love of cold gray waves and blustery winds. I might have grown up under sunny skies, along white sand beaches in Southern California, but there was nothing I liked more than a rocky coast and a howling gale, and I'd settled in the Pacific Northwest as a young woman in part because it had a salt-wet climate and a maritime history.

I'd once been to sea in the North Atlantic. The summer I was twenty-two I worked as a dishwasher on the
Kong Olav,
one of the Norwegian coastal steamers that plied the long and tortuous fjord country from Bergen around the North Cape to the Russian border. Every third trip we crossed the Norwegian Sea to Svalbard. Although I'd been far from keen on dishwashing, I'd loved the ship itself, and everything about being at sea. I'd always wanted to take the trip again—as a passenger. I was looking forward to that voyage, at the end of my journey, in late August. Now, however, it was mid-May, and I had leagues and centuries to travel first.

I'd wanted to begin the trip in Ireland because of Grace O'Malley. She was one of the very few seafaring women to be remembered so heroically in ballad and story. She had castles as her monuments and a growing contemporary interest in her life not only as a pirate, but as a powerful female leader in a fracturing society. Whatever I might find as the weeks went on, Grace would be my touchstone: the one maritime woman who really was remembered, in folklore and song, if not always in the history books.

Grace O'Malley even had a small museum now—the only one in the world dedicated to a seafaring woman. I'd been there this morning, before embarking on the
Very Likely.
Dim, mysterious, and cold, the Granuaile Heritage Centre in Louisburgh smelled of cleaning fluids and old carpet. A life-size figure of Grace O'Malley met me at the entrance to the exhibition room. She wore a long auburn wig, like a transvestite, and had a saber in a leather belt slung around her waist. Her arms, in a white shirt with vast sleeves, were arranged awkwardly, as if she were dancing the Swim. Perhaps, over the winter, her posture had slipped. One hand, I was sure, was meant to be shading her brow as she looked into the distance for doubloon-laden galleys to plunder.

Grace O'Malley at the Granuaile Heritage Centre

The museum wasn't yet open for the summer season, but I'd arranged with caretaker Mary O'Malley (a common last name in these parts) to let me in for a look around. Fortyish, quick
stepping, with her cardigan held close around her neck, Mary was apologetic about the state of the museum, which had been closed up since the previous September. The building, a former Anglican church, was unheated and mildewy. The electricity was dodgy. The spotlights on the exhibits kept shorting out. Boxes of post cards and books had yet to be put on shelves. “We need to Hoover! We need to wash windows!” They had so much to do before next week! She explained it all in a hopeless but jolly rush. They were all volunteers here, and very proud of the place.

“You'll show yourself around?” she asked. “I've a few things to do at home and then I'll be back.” She sidestepped a pair of tourists who were hammering at the door, “We're closed, my dears. Come back in June,” and drove off.

I hadn't expected to be left to myself here. I walked past erratically lit maps of sixteenth-century Ireland and found myself in front of a model of a typical castle of the time, four stories high, with ramparts and a wall walk. Storage was on the lower floors, and quarters for the chieftain's family on the upper. Green branches, animal skins, and antlers decorated the whitewashed walls; bits of hay and rushes were strewn about the flagged floor. Along with fireplaces on each level, narrow, recessed windows opened in the thick stone walls. On the ground floor someone had placed a few model sheep and pigs. More sheep and cows ruminated outside, in between the beehive-shaped huts of the clan's followers and local peasants. These tiny, barefoot figures with disheveled hair milled around in worsted trousers and overshirts.

This was Ireland in the early sixteenth century, a tribal society that had hardly changed for centuries. Unlike the rest of Europe, where the humanistic ideals of the Renaissance were flourishing and nations were on the rise, Ireland was fragmented
into warring fiefdoms, each controlled by a clan. Raiding and cattle stealing were the norm. There was no central government, no head of state who could have gathered the loyalties of the chieftains and parleyed with other European rulers. In the Europe that was shaping itself, this decentralized, tribal society had no chance. The world Grace O'Malley was born into would be almost gone by the end of her lifetime. Paradoxically, it was the very disorder of the sixteenth century that allowed Grace to assume a powerful role that few women in history have matched. As the clan system disintegrated under the increasing colonial control of Henry VIII's and Elizabeth's governors, space opened up for an enterprising and wily woman who could play both sides, and keep her own counsel.