The Pirate Queen (21 page)

Betty Mouat's astonishing voyage seems to have the hand of either God or Lady Luck in it. Yet it's her quiet heroism that in the end impresses me. Except for an initial wail of horror when she discovered she was all alone on a ship rapidly heading out of sight of land, she seems throughout to have been composed and alert, though rather unhappy with the whole business. Fame did not unhinge her or bring on a fit of bragging. When she finally returned to Shetland, to a rousing welcome, she went back to her croft house and her knitting. She lived a good many years longer, until she was ninety-three. I haven't been able to find out, however, whether she ever traveled by ship again.

CHAPTER IX

SEAGOING CHARM SCHOOL

Unst and Yell, the Shetland Islands

“Y
OU
ASK
,” wrote Margaret Fuller, in 1845, “what use will she make of liberty, when she has so long been sustained and restrained? . . . if you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply—any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will.”

That women had
not
been sea captains in the past was all too clear; otherwise this American feminist author wouldn't have reached for such an audacious metaphor. Certainly, all through the great Age of Sail there had been, as we know now, women passing as cabin boys and marines, as well as acting as navigators and helmswomen to their husband-captains on the clipper ships that sailed back and forth across the Atlantic and around Cape Horn to Australia and San Francisco. On more than a few documented occasions, when one of those husbands fell ill or died, it was his wife who took control of the ship and the crew. One of the most extraordinary stories is that of Mary Patten, the nineteen-year-old wife of Captain Joshua Patten, who in 1856 took the helm when he developed a brain fever en route from New York to California in the magnificent clipper
Neptune's Car.
For two months she was at the helm, finally bringing the cargo safely into San Francisco, to the great relief of the insurance company and the applause of the crowd.

But taking control in a crisis was not the same as being the
captain. The striking thing about Grace O'Malley was not just her seamanship, but her role as commander at sea. Her circumstances were unusual: encouragement from her father and clan, and unsettled times in Ireland, along with obviously charismatic powers of leadership. One had to look far back in history, to stories of the exploits of Queen Tomyris, who in 529
B.C
. battled Cyrus the Great off the Caspian Sea, and Queen Artemesia, who led five ships into battle with Xerxes of Persia in 480
B.C
., to find comparisons to Grace.

All through my travels I'd been keeping an eye out for stories of women captains and commanders. Here in Shetland I'd encountered mainly doubt as to whether women had even gone to sea at all, except to drift. Drifting was, of course, the very antithesis of commanding. Shetland was no different than most maritime countries. I found no hidden histories, hard as I looked, of sea captains who were women. Yet in a curious way I did come closer to understanding how the dreams of girls who longed to run away to sea were converted into more traditional and respectable roles.

“I
'
VE BEEN
up all night! I've been writing poetry!”

It was about seven in the morning and I was having a solitary cup of coffee in a glass room off the main body of the youth hostel at Uyeasound on Unst, the northernmost island of Shetland. This warm, slightly steamy little conservatory with its shabby chintz armchairs and ivy trailing up the inner glass walls was my secret. I'd found it a perfect place to sketch and write, snug when it rained and brilliant when the sun burst out. Since these two phenomena alternated on Shetland at ten-minute intervals, the glass room was also a watertight refuge.

“I couldn't sleep! I'm in a state of grace. I'm in love with life!” A vigorous woman of sixty suddenly materialized before me, wearing bright red-and-blue floral leggings and a red sweater tunic. She had a matching floral scarf tied gypsylike around her head, with the ends falling over her shoulders. A large rhinestone cross rested on her ample bosom, and a tattoo of a swallowtail butterfly decorated her inner forearm.

She had a pack of cigarettes in one hand and a pen in the other. She grabbed a pad of paper from one of the armchairs. “Sometimes poetry is the only way to say what you feel, isn't it?” she called back as she left the room.

A few moments later I could hear her having an animated conversation with someone on the phone in the hallway. I walked past her to get another cup of coffee from the kitchen, and asked Bob who she was. Bob was retired from the merchant navy and running a leadership retreat for boys here at the hostel.

“Dorothy Thomson? She's the sister-in-law of the warden,” he said. “She used to live up here on Unst—divorced now. She was in the merchant navy, too.”

“The merchant navy! What did she do?” I asked excitedly.

“She worked on one of the ships that went back and forth to New Zealand. After the war, in the fifties and sixties, a good many people decided to leave Britain for the colonies. I believe she was a child minder, or some such thing.”

Dorothy vanished before I could talk to her, but the next morning, as I was setting my backpack out by the bus stop, the hostel warden appeared and right behind her, Dorothy, again wearing bright red, with a scarf tied dashingly around her short, streaked blond hair, and a great deal of gold jewelry. Her pumps were big and white and her manicured fingernails long and red. She was driving back to Lerwick today, she said. She
didn't live there, but she had some errands. She'd be glad to take me, no, she
insisted
; the company would be grand, and she could show me more of Shetland. I had to excuse her for yesterday—she'd been in such a state of bliss. She'd just been substitute teaching on the remote island of Foula, off the west coast, and felt transformed. The children in her class—all two of them—the people on the island, getting to and from the island, especially when the weather was so terrible, then driving up to Unst to see her son's soccer team, oh, all of it made her heart so full that poetry was her only response!

She laughed and lit a cigarette, and opened the door for me. “Don't worry, I won't quote you any on the drive. Though I may sing you a song or two.”

T
HERE ARE
lots of jokes about the name of the island of Yell, which so easily rhymes with hell. It has no trees and not much of a population. But on an intermittently sunny day, as this turned out to be, one could almost be south as well as north, in Baja California or some other barren landscape that is mostly rock and water. Yell isn't as green as some of the other islands. It's brown and soft like a long cat that continually changes position; a cold bright wind blows over the hills. A hundred inlets, or
voes,
invite the sea into the island. The clouds billow and unfurl and pile on top of each other like sumo wrestlers. Every turn in the road is a different vista, the Atlantic one way, the North Sea the other.

The
Northern Star had
been Dorothy's ship, she told me, as we careened around the narrow roads that cut around the hills of Yell. It was the newer of two sister ships built in the fifties by the British Shaw Savill line. The
Northern Star
and the
Southern
Cross
were, at the time, the very model of comfortable postwar ocean travel. They carried no cargo, so they were always on schedule, and without a hold, the engines could be placed aft, creating more room for cabins and decks. They sailed from Southampton to Wellington, New Zealand, and back, about seventy-five days round trip.

Dorothy first went aboard the
Northern Star
in May of 1968, when she was twenty-seven. She was one of only fifteen women out of a crew of five hundred; five of the women were officers—two “nursing sisters,” the assistant purserette, the social hostess, and the children's hostess. “Yes, I was a chili ho,” said Dorothy, “for three years on the
Northern Star.
I went around the world nine times, and once to Japan and Hong Kong on the Cherry Blossom Tour.” Dorothy's father had been a ship's engineer. She was born in Orkney, and after finishing at the University of Edinburgh, she married her childhood sweetheart. He was going to be a captain and she would be his wife and travel the world with him. He drowned three months after they were married. “I had a strong Orkney accent,” she said. “They claimed they hired me because of that. Because there were so many Orcadians on board, going to the colonies, they wanted someone to make the children feel at home. You had to have a teaching certificate to be a children's hostess, and be at least twenty-four.”

The
Northern Star
carried fourteen hundred passengers, of which about two hundred were children. Dorothy had two assistants to help her keep them amused. There were also a few hairdressers and stewardesses on the ship and two laundresses, nicknamed “steam queens.” Their quarters were variously called Fluff Alley or Quality Street. The children's hostess and social hostess were on call seven days a week; their only free time came
when they were in port. The women who worked onboard were expected to act like ladies and represent the ship. “I took a course called Seagoing Charm School,” said Dorothy. “It was all about deportment, manners, manicures. They gave me a certificate. I remembered the manicure lessons anyway.” She laughed and waggled her long red fingernails. “Our wages were very low. They held them back until the end of the voyage, but you had an account. Sometimes at the end, you had nothing.”

As she drove, she waved at people we passed, and told me a story about each of them. He'd divorced. She had a cranky mother. Dorothy had worked with him as a teacher. I kept returning to her sailing days, however. “You're really interested in all this ship business?” she asked.

“I worked on a ship, too, the summer I was twenty-two. It was the
Kong Olav,
one of the coastal steamers, in Norway. I loved it, though not the work. I was a dishwasher, at the very bottom of the heap.”

“Then you know all about the social stratification of a ship,” Dorothy said. “The captain at the top, descending all the way down. Oh, we did have fun though. We weren't supposed to fraternize with the crew, but of course we did. The engineers traditionally did not get on with the mates. Oil and water don't mix, we always heard. That never bothered me. A lot of the stewards were gay. Management liked them because they were so neat. Every voyage they'd put on a drag show for the crew called ‘The Sod's Opera.' Do you like to sing?”

“Yes, but I can't hold a tune.”

“I love to sing. I'm in a singing group and we're going to Norway next week on an exchange. Look, there's a little church down that road, a Methodist one. Let's stop and I'll sing you some songs on the organ.”

We pulled alongside the tiny white church. Its door was open and it was neat as a pin inside, with children's artwork on the bulletin board. There were about ten pews and a dazzling view of the water. Dorothy flung open the small organ and played me a funny song about being seasick on the Pentland Firth. Then a religious tune or two. By the end she was wiping away tears. “Are you religious at all?”

“I had a religious childhood,” I said.

“I'm a believer,” she said, fingering her rhinestone cross. “God saved my life. My second husband was an alcoholic. I've had such tough times, such up-and-down times that I couldn't have survived without my faith.”

We got back in the car and Dorothy sang some more. “Now I hope you're not in a hurry,” she said. “It's not raining and I want to show you something else.”

She set off again, down a winding road. “I haven't been here in a long time, but I know it's here. ‘The White Lady,' it's called.”

We parked by a farm and started a steep descent through sheepy pastures. The wind was frisky. I had on my hiking boots, but Dorothy was wearing big boatlike white pumps that didn't make the descent easy. “It's somewhere. It's somewhere . . .”

Then, lower on the slope, we saw it. A woman's figure, painted white, slanted to fit the prow of a ship with the long skirt sweeping behind and her chest proudly angled forward. She wasn't a bare-breasted beauty, but a sedate, high-collared matron with a book clasped in her hands over her heart. The White Lady came from a German clipper that was wrecked off this point last century. A farmer had rescued her and planted her here, forever looking out to sea. She was twice as big as Dorothy, but there was something of the same attitude in them as they faced each other on the promontory.