The Pirate Queen (25 page)

B
ACK IN
Tórshavn, I sneaked into the guesthouse while the landlady was in the kitchen. I had half-expected my room to have been cleaned out while I was gone, but everything was as I'd left it. In fact, she hadn't dusted a single day since I'd been here. What was I so desperately hanging on to? Some futile desire for control in a foreign place. My own things, arranged my own way, my own place, if even for a few nights.

But travel is about letting go; there's no other way to experience it. I knew that it's only when you let go that the best things happen. That's why I traveled, and why I found it so hard sometimes.

I was about seven years old when I first realized that a girl, a woman, could go off by herself to see the world. One day my mother and some friends took me along to the Port of Los Angeles. From the dock we went up the gangplank of an ocean liner and down the corridor to a small stateroom. The voyager, my mother's friend, was a middle-aged lady whose name I don't remember, a teacher who had the summer off. She was going by ship around the whole world, and she took me on her knee and said, “I'll send you some post cards,” which she later did, of Japan, and India, and Paris. Then there was a warning blast, and we all rushed off. We stood on the dock while colored streamers flew out and over the sides of the ship. The lady looked very small up there at the railing, wearing a hat and a corsage pinned
to her jacket. “Goodbye!” she called. “Goodbye,” we called back. “Don't forget to write!”

The idea of her sea voyage was enormous to me, and all the way home in the car I thought about it, and laid my plans. My first trip around the world would have to be via the cardboard globe, which I spun and spun, letting my finger touch the countries under it. “I'm in Japan now,” I announced to my brother. He spun the globe and ended in the Pacific. “I'm drowned,” he said. I organized a game in the backyard of me on the picnic table throwing down some colored streamers to the mystified dog. I waved to my mother at the window: “Goodbye! Goodbye!”

“Goodbye!” she waved back from the kitchen. “Don't forget to write!”

I lay on my bed in Tórshavn and thought about women traveling, about all those ladies without proper professions who wrote books. I was hardly any different from them. I'd come to the Faroe Islands because they sounded adventurous, because they were wildly remote, because no one I knew had ever been here. I was a lady who had sailed off on a boat and had come to an island in the middle of nowhere precisely to write about it. Elizabeth Taylor and her failure to finish her book haunted me. Who has the right to say another person's life is futile? Yet I mourned for women of the past, whose wildest adventures, most passionate and courageous acts had been reduced to anecdotes about “intrepid Victorian lady travelers.”
Intrepid:
Well, that was one word I refused to use, about myself or any other unfortunate soul who found herself far away from home, having to depend on strangers.

I was so tired that I didn't eat dinner. I read a mystery and listened to a tape on compassion by Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, kept in my bag for just such self-pitying moods. I
waited for the whiskery landlady to bang on my door and demand I leave instantly, but she didn't. Gradually I grew more peaceful; all the same, I fell asleep in my clothes, afraid of a nocturnal rousting.

The next morning I found I'd had a change of heart. Travel is the state of being homeless; we should welcome the opportunity it gives us to live nowhere. I wrote a note to the landlady in Norwegian, saying that I had thought about it, and that I would be leaving this morning.

She looked astonished, and then grateful, when I handed the slip of paper to her. She said, smiling somewhat ruefully, “I believe we had a misunderstanding. I am a little deaf, you know. Where will you go?”

“I don't know.”

“I will call the Seaman's Hotel. They have reasonable rooms. I will drive you there.”

Perhaps she just wanted to make sure I was really leaving. She called and there was a room at the Seaman's Hotel. I packed up quickly, suddenly lighthearted. I let her drive me the few short blocks; on the way we talked about the weather, whether it would rain or not today. We parted cordially. She apologized again, and I marveled that I had ever been afraid of her.

CHAPTER XI

AUD THE DEEP-MINDED

From the Faroe Islands to Iceland

I
AWOKE
one morning in Tórshavn to find the red-and-black wooden houses wrapped in fog, green turf roofs dripping. In the harbor, masts poked out of the mist like knitting needles from white cotton batting. The gulls swooped over the glassy water and perched watchfully on boats. Leaving the Seaman's Hotel after breakfast, I could feel the cobblestones of the old town under my feet, but I couldn't see my legs. I imagined that the islands might well have drifted overnight even farther away from the rest of the world.

That morning I left Tórshavn by bus for the island of Sandoy to the south. I'd decided to visit the village of Húsavík overnight and to see the ruins of a medieval farm once owned by the “Lady of Húsavík.” Gudrún Sjúrdardóttir, a ship owner and merchant, was once counted as one of the wealthiest women of the North. She was born in Bergen, Norway, in the mid-fourteenth century; her father was Sjurdur Hjalt, Hjalt meaning that he came from Shetland. When he died, Gudrún inherited his considerable wealth and property: many houses in Bergen and some twenty farms along the west coast of Norway, as well as land in Shetland. She came to Húsavík with her husband, Arnbjørn Gudleiksson, who persuaded her to return to his home in the Faroes to rebuild the farm after the Black Death carried away much of the valley's population. She moved to the
Faroes and still maintained ties with Bergen and Shetland through trading interests. How many ships she had, we don't know, but one of them went down in the North Sea in 1403 with her husband on it.

In medieval times, strangely, the Faroes would have seemed no more remote than most places in the maritime countries of the north. These islands may even have seemed more accessible than Ireland or England, which were still forested and populated by hidden, hostile inhabitants. The Norse who settled the northern isles were seafaring folk. Shetland was two days' sail from Norway, the Faroes another two or three from Shetland. Nowadays, when we get into our cars to go from place to place, cities seem close and islands distant. Yet, until a century or two ago, traveling overland was far more onerous and dangerous than a sea voyage. Especially important to the Vikings and their descendents was the fact that you could see your enemies coming out at sea.

Hanus undir Leitinum, a schoolteacher and native of Húsavík, was my guide. Growing up, he was one of five other Hanuses in the village, so instead of being called by his last name, Sorensen, he was called after his family's house. He'd been the teacher in Húsavík for nine years; before that he taught at the secondary school in Sandur, Sandoy's main village. I walked to meet him at the schoolhouse. The evening sun was in the west, coming over the hills, and laying down ribbons of lemon-silver light along the ridges and hummocks. The black-painted houses gleamed. Not all of them had turf roofs; some were constructed of rippled, galvanized metal, and painted floury aqua, dusty rose. Many had red doors and red trim. The dark-blue sea beat upon the shore. Everything was colorful, quiet, and very cold.

We were meeting at the schoolhouse to get out of the wind
and to find a history book or two that mentioned Gudrún. It was a single room, with six tiny desks, a chalk blackboard, and posters of bears, seals, and whales. There was a library of picture books, novels, and information, a small, shiny black piano, and a brand-new computer, which had just arrived last month. The children, all three of them, already knew how to use it. Hanus told me he hadn't touched it yet.

The population of Húsavík is ninety-five today, about what it was in Gudrún's time and less than half of what it was when Hanus was growing up here fifty years ago. After elementary school the children go to the middle school in Sandur and then to Tórshavn to study. Few who study in Tórshavn or Copenhagen return to Húsavík. Every year more people move away. “You don't notice it so much in the summer,” Hanus said. “People still keep their houses, and they come back for holidays. But in the winter, when you take a walk and so many houses are dark, then you notice it.”

Hanus began to tell me about Gudrún, and to translate patiently from a Faroese history book that showed diagrams of how the houses at her farm once looked. He was tall and powerfully built, with a calmness and ease about him. He wore a darned wool sweater and a shirt whose cuffs were frayed: well-used clothes.

He explained that so much is known about Gudrún because six letters have been preserved from 1405. These documents concern the settlement of her estate. Gudrún not only outlived her husband but her two children as well; her estate went to relatives in Bergen and Shetland. The letters enumerate her properties and the rents she derived from them, as well as her possessions in Húsavík: silver platters, jewelry of gold and silver, fine clothes and headdresses, the house and the farm, horses and sheep.

By the fourteenth century, the Viking age was long over, and farming and trade were what mattered. Gudrún's ships would have traveled regularly between the Norwegian mainland and the Faroes, and perhaps farther afield, to England, Spain, and Constantinople. She was no Grace O'Malley; it's unlikely she captained her ships. But like Grace, she was a trader, amassing wealth by sea. I imagined Gudrún, like Christian Robertson, keeping a firm handle on her business. She would have had a grasp of geography much different from my own, and an understanding of weather as something to be reckoned with, not just ignored.

It was pleasantly sunny in the schoolhouse, and we sat for a long time and talked before venturing out into the chill so Hanus could show me what remained of Gudrún's estate, now part of the village. Around a large courtyard was a longhouse where Gudrún and her family had lived; across from the house were kitchens and storehouses for food. Still standing, too, were the foundations of a hayloft and a barn, and several outbuildings, probably once a washing house, a bakery, stables. Gone was the arch over the entrance to the courtyard, under which Gudrún would have ridden her horse to church. The church was only a few hundred feet away, but highborn women always rode. The church that now stood was the third church in that spot. It was wood not stone, painted white, with a steeple. Gudrún's bones lay beneath.

Not far away was a group of magical little boathouses built of drystone boulders. Each had a heavy green hat of turf pulled down over a weather-polished wooden door and large stone lintel. The doors had beautiful wooden latches and locks. Beyond the boathouses, the gray silk breakers rolled rhythmically onto a smooth sand beach. A band of twenty black-and-white oystercatchers stood in lines, all facing the ocean, as if they were a tuxedoed concert audience waiting for the symphony to begin.

The fog had mostly receded, rolling up and back over the mountains like soft white sheets being taken off green armchairs. The bay was clear of large rocks, and the wide sand beach would have been a welcoming place to pull up a broad-beamed, shallow-draughted sailing ship, loaded with timbers and goods. The valley was marvelously green and flat, with a river running right through it. Before the Black Death the population had lived on one side of the river; afterward they built homes on the other side. The mountains closed in the valley, but unlike other parts of the Faroes where the peaks were often sharp black basalt, these were flattened on top. The mountains looked like green anvils hammered down by weather.

After leaving Hanus, I walked up and down the beach, imagining one of Gudrún's merchant ships appearing on the horizon and coming into shore. In autumn the ships were rolled up on logs into shelter for the winter, to be repaired and retarred. In the spring they would set off again with sheepskin, dried meat, and grain. It's believed that in those days the climate was somewhat drier and warmer; fodder could be grown to overwinter animals indoors. Gently sloped, treeless, bright green mountains surround the valley. At least two dozen waterfalls, some short and trickly, some much grander, leak out of the hillsides. I could see sheep. From this angle, there was no depth perspective: Two big white lambs seemed to be standing directly on top of their mother. Baaing and bleating, suddenly they rushed down to her, as if falling from a green sky, and buried themselves in her coat.