Introduction from THE PIRATE QUEEN
Crossing Clew Bay
One afternoon in May I found myself in the stern of the Very
Likely, a motor launch ferrying me and four other passengers across Clew Bay on the west coast of Ireland. We were bound for Clare Island, where the sea captain, clan chieftain, and pirate Grace O'Malley lived in the sixteenth century. Born in 1530, Grace grew up to become a rover, a raider, and such a scourge to the English that her name appears regularly in Elizabethan state papers. "This was a notorious woman in all the coasts of Ireland," wrote Sir Henry Sidney in 1583. Another English governor, Lord Justice Drury, called her "a woman who hath impudently passed the part of womanhood and been a great spoiler and chief commander and director of thieves and murderers at sea." Queen Elizabeth put a price of five hundred pounds on her head.
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 were to 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 mid-day light skittered over 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.
Ay, 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 first, 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 ninth-century Danish princess who commanded a fleet of long ships 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'Malley, I began searching for other stories from the past of seafaring women 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 the Babylonian goddess Tiamat who separated land from water, and Norse myths sang of Ran, "the sea-god's wife," who captured the drowned and carried them to her watery kingdom. Folktales described mermaids, seal people, Finn Folk, "stormbringers" and sea witches, all with 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 that women had created the earth from water and ruled the underwater depths, why had we so rarely rowed and sailed the ocean's surface or, if we had, what had happened to those tales?
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 historical women who passed at sea as sailors and soldiers, to fishers and fish wives, ship owners, lady travelers, 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 largely 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 folktale 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. I was, however, particularly interested in stories from Norse myths and sagas, as well as the fishing and sailing culture of Scandinavia. I'd already spent a lot of time in Norway and knew Norwegian, which would be an advantage in my research.
The northern waters were my own 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 myself 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.
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, 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 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 kingdoms 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 parlayed 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 managed. As the clan system disintegrated under the increasing colonial control of the Henry VIII's and Elizabeth's governors, there turned out to be room for an enterprising and wily woman who could play both sides, and keep her own counsel.
When Grace was born the O'Malleys, whose motto was
terra marique potens, "powerful by land and
sea," were still wealthy and strong, a law unto themselves. They controlled Clew Bay and the region around it, and had for centuries. Unlike many of the other
Gaelic clans, the O'Malleys made a living from the ocean; they fished, traded, and licensed fishing rights in their waters. They hired their crew out as sailors and ferried Scottish mercenaries, the fabled
gallowglass, to fight in clan battles. They also raided the coastlines of Western Ireland, including the international port of Galway Town and robbed merchant ships of cargos of silks and spices, damask and wine.
They are the lions of the green sea
men acquainted with the land of Spain
when seizing cattle from Cantyre
a mile by sea is a short distance to the
O'Malleys.
Grace's father, Dubhdara, "Black Oak," was chieftain of the O'Malleys, and by all accounts he raised Grace, if not to carry on the family line--for she would have to marry--then to be an experienced seafarer with an eye for the main chance when it came to trading and raiding. Her mother was Margaret, who had lands of her own that Grace eventually inherited. Once there had been warrior queens in Ireland, like Queen Maeve of Connaught, and descent was through the female line, but with Ireland's conversion to Christianity in the fifth century, Roman law had gradually influenced traditional Gaelic or "Brehon" law, and that had meant a downgrading of women's status. Still, even in the sixteenth century, women in Ireland had more rights than women in England. They could keep their family name and hold and administer property, for instance. Even though we know little of Grace's mother, we know that Margaret had the right to pass on land and property to her daughter.
Grace wasn't the only child, but her biographer Anne Chambers has suggested that her brother Dónal may have been illegitimate, or at least not the son of Margaret. Importantly for Grace, he seems not to have been inclined to the seafaring life. If he had been, it's more likely he would have carried on the family's tradition of trade and piracy, and no one would have thought anything of it. But just as Grace's birth in the sixteenth century made an opening for her in Ireland's shifting power structure, so did being the only child of her parents. The girl with a weather eye and an aptitude for life at sea was early given the chance to show what she was made of.
The Granuaile Heritage Centre cheerfully mingled fact and legend in its telling of Grace's story and, indeed, it couldn't be any other way. The English had been most assiduous about recording Grace's pirating and raiding; letters and documents attest to their interest in her, a mixture of respect and frustration. On the contrary, in the comprehensive Irish history, the
Annals of the Four Masters, Grace's two husbands are mentioned, and her sons, while her name is not recorded. Until Anne Chambers began looking through English state papers and other old manuscripts and forgotten records, stories about Grace had mainly survived in ballads and local folklore--and a few enjoyable, but not necessarily accurate historical novels.
I circled around the exhibit hall to the entrance again, where Grace, in her long wig and doublet and hose, stood watch. I took out my almost blank journal, the notebook I hoped would be filled with stories of northern maritime women by the end of few months, and wrote some notes and made some sketches. Dissatisfied with her drooping posture, I took Grace's left arm in mine and joggled it back up above her shoulders, so that her hand was firmly above her eyes. Now she looked a proper sea captain again, bold and far-seeing. In this pose she was a good subject for a picture.
Grace O'Malley Looking Out to Sea, I scribbled in my journal underneath the sketch.
On the Very Likely, Paddy and I found ourselves awash in spray as we approached Clare Island. Paddy was utterly miserable, bent over the railing, while I was, in spite of my jet lag, terribly exuberant. I made out a stone tower in the mist, "Look, there's the castle!" I said to Paddy, to distract him. "Grace O'Malley's castle! Still standing after all these centuries."
"D'you still have your teeth, Paddy?" his wife shouted, hearing my excitement and seeing me point.
"Grace O'Malley's castle!" I shouted back.
The castle on Clare Island now hove firmly in sight, a smallish, squared stone fortress on a slight hill overlooking the bay. The
Very Likely came into the harbor and tied up at the dock. Paddy's wife and I each took hold of an arm and helped him up the ladder. He had a decidedly pale and dejected expression and his bandy legs shook. I knew that they were only on Clare Island for the day. They planned to take the six o'clock launch back to the mainland. Paddy confided that he was dreading the return.
"What about you, dear?" asked his wife, as I shouldered my pack and began walking away in the direction of land. "Just a short trip? Or a long one?"
"A few months," I said, suddenly overwhelmed to find myself in Ireland, actually on Clare Island, instead of in Seattle, kayaking around Lake Union and simply reading books about women and the sea. The moment that stuns us in life is the moment when dreams become reality.
But as I stood looking down the tar and seaweed-scented wharf, and felt the unaccustomed weight of all my possessions on my shoulders, my courage returned. These were the times, these days of new beginnings in foreign places, when I'd always felt most awake and alive. I took a deep breath and started down the dock.
Copyright ©2003 by Barbara Sjoholm
All rights reserved.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED: Steady As She Goes: Women's Adventures At Sea
NEW: "The Pirate Queen: In Search Of Grace O'Malley And Other Legendary Women Of The Sea"
Introduction from " THE PIRATE QUEEN"
Copyright © 2002-2003 by Barbara Sjoholm