The Pirate Queen (28 page)

Gudríd spent nine years as a captive in Algiers, at a time when that city was at its peak as a Mediterranean power. Before the advent of the Ottoman Empire, Algiers was only a small town on the coast of North Africa. But under Turkish military rule, it had grown to a city of between 100,000 and 130,000 people, a polyglot community of Turks, Maghrib natives, Moriscos (expelled Spanish Moors), Jews, renegade Christians, and captives from every corner of the world. Society was ruled strictly, from the top down, with a bureaucracy that encompassed every aspect of life. There were hundreds of titles, from “Sequestrator of unclaimed property and supervisor of cemeteries” (one job) to “collector of the tax on mulberries.”

Christian slaves in Algiers

At the top of the heap was the Ottoman ruler called the
dey
or regent. According to Steinunn, Gudríd ended up in the
dey
's household. There she worked, without pay, of course, but still managing—perhaps with extra services—to accumulate, very slowly, money toward her release. For the Algerians had no objection to allowing their captives their freedom if they or someone else could pay for it. The slaves in Algiers made up from fifteen to twenty percent of the population. Between 1621 and 1627, there were twenty thousand Christian captives in the city.

A pastor from Heimaey had been released within the first year, in order to arrange with the Danish king for ransom money.
Gudríd, being related to clergymen in Iceland and one of the few Icelandic captives who could read and write, eventually managed to get one of her letters delivered back to Iceland. The story of a Christian woman trapped on the heathen Barbary Coast launched a belated effort at redemption from the Danish government. The Danes collected taxes from the Icelander's fish catch and farm assets; the king contributed money as well, and eventually several dozen of the Icelanders were ransomed and taken back to Copenhagen by ship. About half of that number, nineteen, eventually returned to Iceland. Gudríd handed over all the money she'd saved over nine years; it wasn't enough to free her son, however, and at the last minute she had to leave him behind when the ship sailed for Copenhagen in 1636.

Steinunn and her daughter cleared away the lunch plates, and Elin went off to meet friends while Steinunn and I looked through photo albums that charted the travels she'd undertaken in search of more information about Gudríd. Given that the Islamic Salvation Front and its terrorist splinter groups had begun targeting foreign tourists who visited Algeria in the nineties, Steinunn and her husband decided to travel to Algeria's neighbor Morocco to get a feel for the old North African cities. In Rabat they happened across an antiquarian bookshop with many arcane and beautiful books in French. In one volume, Steinunn found exactly the illustrations she was looking for of seventeenth-century Algiers.

From the sea, Algiers looked, as it was meant to, like an impregnable fortress, a tight geometry of white, able to withstand siege and shelling. But behind the harbor defenses and fortifications it was a place of fountains and baths, markets and bake houses, “very like an egg in its fullness of houses and people,” as one observer wrote. The houses, washed thickly with lime, were
built close upon each other, walls sloping inward as they rose from ground level, so the roofs were almost joined. The streets were narrow and sloped inward as well, toward a central drain; a man on horseback could barely get through most of the streets; it was difficult to walk two abreast. These streets had no names and no obvious directions; you'd need a good memory to find your way.

Women, of course, didn't move freely around the city. The institution of the harem had come from Turkey, where the Ottoman rulers kept thousands of women odalisques, their children, and servants sequestered in luxurious rooms with no exit to the outside city. Every other harem was modeled on the Grand Harem in Istanbul. The women had nowhere to go except from room to room or up and down stairs. Sometimes they climbed to the rooftop terraces for a view, and from there they could jump or climb ladders to neighboring households. The enforced confinement of these women has been glamorized in hundreds of British and French Orientalist paintings.

For art books, too, sprawled open on Steinunn's table; they showed lushly patterned paintings of women reclining, half-dressed in silk harem pants and embroidered vests, a cheroot or hookah in hand. Some of the paintings were of the baths, or hammams, where men and women could spend the day, separately, washing and steaming, being scrubbed and pummeled, oiled and perfumed. Scenes of voluptuous women half-veiled in water or steam, and lounging all over each other, while black servants scrub them or feed them sweetmeats, are staples of such painters as John Frederick Lewis and Jean-Léon Gérome.

We looked at the paintings with a mixture of fascination and revulsion, then turned back to the photo albums. Steinunn's photographs of Rabat and Tangiers began to merge with those
of Paris, where she had lived for two months, spending every day at the museum at L'Institut du Monde Arabe. Steinunn's long fingers lingered over the photographs of Paris; she was clearly back in a warmer climate that smelled of oranges and coffee. Her last trip had been to Amsterdam, to look in the archives of the maritime museum there for evidence of the renegade Dutch captain, Jan Jantzen. When I asked her how soon she planned to finish her book, I had the sense that she was in no hurry to leave the magic places she was remembering and conjuring up in fiction. “Oh, it will take a long time,” she said, with a writer's sigh, but she didn't seem unhappy about it. “I keep uncovering more of the story. I've found records of the amounts all the Icelanders paid in ransom; I've found material on Jantzen and his family life. I know I'm going to have to write another volume of my novel about what happened to Gudríd after she left Algiers.”

The second half of Gudríd's life was as extraordinary as the first. At the age of thirty-nine she arrived in Copenhagen, there to be “reindoctrinated” as a Christian after her years with the infidels. A young Icelander, a ministerial student named Hallgrím Pétursson, was put in charge of the released captives. Within a short time he and Gudríd had formed a passionate relationship and she was pregnant. Since, as far as anyone knew, Gudríd still had a husband in the Westmann Islands, this was fornication, pure and simple. The two of them were packed off to Iceland under a cloud. They soon found out that Gudríd's husband had drowned some time ago, and they quickly married. Hallgrím began a career as a minister in a settlement to the north of Reykjavík, on the Hvalfjord.

There Hallgrím began to write religious poetry and songs. In years to come he would be revered as Iceland's greatest
spiritual poet. Hallgrím Pétursson is the John Donne of Icelandic literature, the author of the great cycle
The Passion Psalms,
often put to music and sung in choirs all over the world. One of the psalms is sung at every Icelandic funeral.

“It's said, however,” Steinunn told me, “that when he gave a sermon, Gudríd would go outside the church and sit looking at the fjord. They said she never really readjusted to life in Iceland after all those years in Algiers. Many people believed she must have converted to Islam and wasn't really a Christian. And then, of course, she had been a slave in the
dey
's house, and a slave, well . . .”

Our eyes went back to the art books, where in the heavily patterned rooms of red and dark blue, the white flesh of captive women shone like silk.

N
OT FAR
from Steinunn's flat is the cathedral named after Turkish Gudda's husband. Hallgrím's Church rises up from a square that, violently windswept as it was when I approached on a summer's day, must be a terrible challenge to cross on a dark, snowy winter morning. The steeple is a beacon; it stands over two hundred feet tall. Inside, the church holds twelve hundred people. It has an airy plainness of purpose, its whiteness unrelieved by iconic decoration. Nothing could be more different from the swirls and flourishes of Arab color and form I'd been looking at in Steinunn's photographs.

I sat in a hard pew, relieved to be out of the wind, and read the small pamphlet about the church. Without knowing the story of Turkish Gudda, I would have been more receptive to the description of Hallgrím: “He influenced the nation's spiritual development perhaps more than any other person.” There
was no mention of his early adulterous romance, or indeed of his wife at all. I couldn't help wondering whether Gudríd had found any happiness when she returned to the North. She must have wondered about her son: Was he still alive? Did he live as a slave or did he convert, as had so many of the Christians? Should she have stayed with him, after all?

Wouldn't she have longed for Mediterranean warmth and color? Iceland engages only one primary sense: sight. There are no smells of mint and saffron; you can't finger an aubergine or pomegranate, stroke silk or satin, trail your hand in scented water. The tang of highly spiced food is absent here. The lunch I'd just finished of cheese and dried mutton had filled my stomach but not my imagination. No wonder the Icelanders were suspicious of Turkish Gudda. She'd sampled delights that were unknown in Iceland, that encouraged lasciviousness and wantonness. Could she really be a Christian after having lived among the harem, worn layers of veils and perhaps been the plaything of some wealthy pasha?

A man becomes the closest thing to a Lutheran saint the Icelanders have; a woman is nicknamed Turkish Gudda and shunned. A man gets a cathedral; a woman gets a footnote in history.

Though if Steinunn had her way, perhaps that would change. I thought back to Steinunn turning the pages of the photo album on the table in front of us in slow, considered movements, as she told me stories about the twisting streets of Rabat's souks, rich in smells of mint and figs and ripe fruit. Far from accepting that it was a nightmare place to which Gudríd had been kidnapped, Steinunn saw the appeal of the orderly, enclosed world of the harem and the hammam, where fountains splashed and the muezzins called in the distance. Perhaps it
wasn't only a desire to unravel the mysteries of a strange fragment of Icelandic history that had led Steinunn to the tangled cities in North Africa, and to museums in Paris and Amsterdam, but a longing to be changed by what she felt and saw. To physically visit a place, to immerse oneself in a strange world, was what I was doing myself. My memories of mountains and waves and wind, the act of walking down a street in Stromness or looking for Betty Mouat's house in Shetland had enriched every dry fact, every statistic and anecdote.

Tomorrow I was flying to Heimaey myself. In months to come, I would turn the pages of my own album for friends, just as Steinunn had turned them for me, explaining dreamily, “Here we are in the Westmann Islands, where Gudríd Símonardottír was kidnapped by Algerian pirates.”

A
T SEA
again, if only in a tour boat with fifty bird-watching Spaniards, I gazed over the railing into the water as we rocked our way into an island cave. The sun glanced off the cheese-holed volcanic walls, lightened to amber by guano. Sunlight seemed to enter the cave with us, its celestial gold becoming our gold, nets of gold folded wave by wave in water so turquoise as to seem deliciously swimmable. In the echo of the cave, a woman suddenly began singing “Summertime,” and “The leeving ees eesy” came at us, improved in tone, from all directions.

This was the denouement of an exhilaratingly brisk cruise around Heimaey and other smaller islands of the Westmann chain off the south coast of Iceland. We'd motored close enough to the lava cliffs to see that they were not as sheer as they appeared, but wrinkled and pitted like pale brown cardboard. In every pit and crevice, along every ledge, a bird was nesting.
Topmost were the gentle kittiwakes, who could nest on next to nothing. This was their own protection against marauders, who could not find a purchase on the finger-sized outcroppings that formed the nurseries of the kittiwakes. Lower down were razorbills and Brünnich's guillemots. Both had black heads and wings and snowy breasts, but the razorbill, a small auk, had a thick, parrotlike beak. They were pelagic birds, spending winters at sea and breeding in the Far North in summer. They stood side by side on the cliff's ledges, at deck height, long lines of sports fans rooting for the other team, jeering and heckling as we sailed slowly by. Closest to the surf breaking at the feet of the cliffs were eider ducks, while, high up, on the green pate that crowned the islands, were the tunnels and burrows of the puffins, thousands upon thousands of these sociable little birds, who like to stand around gabbing like old people reminiscing, but whose tiny-winged, heavy-bodied flights over the ocean's surface always seem to bear the hallmarks of anxiety.