Authors: Barbara Sjoholm
The Pirate Queen
THE PIRATE QUEEN: IN SEARCH OF GRACE O'MALLEY AND OTHER LEGENDARY WOMEN OF THE SEA
Text © 2004 by Barbara Sjoholm
Maps © 2004 by Avalon Publishing Group
Some photos and illustrations are used by permission and are the property of the original copyright owners.
Published by
Seal Press
A member of the Perseus Books Group
1700 Fourth Street
Berkeley, CA 9 4710
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.
Portions of this book appeared in
The North American Review,
Spring 2003 (“The Lonely Voyage of Betty Mouat”), and in
A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe,
Seal Press, 2001 (“Halibut Woman”).
Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58005-605-2
9 8 7 6 5
Designed by PDBD
Cartographer: Suzanne Service
Distributed by Publishers Group West
To my mother
in memoriam
“I'm going to be a pirate when I grow up,” she cried. “Are you?”
âAstrid Lindgren,
Pippi Longstocking
CONTENTS
AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA CAULDRON
From Oban to the Pentland Firth
From the Orkney Islands to the Shetland Islands
THE LONELY VOYAGE OF BETTY MOUAT
Sumburgh Head, the Shetland Islands
Unst and Yell, the Shetland Islands
From the Faroe Islands to Iceland
ReykjavÃk and the Westmann Islands, Iceland
Snæfellsnes Peninsula, Iceland
ReykjavÃk and Glaumbær, Iceland
A WOMAN WITHOUT A BOAT IS A PRISONER
STATUE OF A WOMAN STARING OUT TO SEA
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Grace O'Malley at the Granuaile Heritage Centre
Carraigahowley (Rockfleet) Castle
The meeting of Grace O'Malley and Queen Elizabeth I
Ships caught in the maelstrom off the Norwegian coast
A witch selling the wind to sailors
Women carrying their husbands out to the fishing boats
Three generations of New Haven fishwives
Mrs. Fraser fought over by rival claimants
Seal folk listening to a mermaid's song
Betty Mouat rescued by Norwegians
The women of Trondra were famed for their boatmanship
Faroese women grading cod on the docks
GudrÃd Thorbjarnardóttir with her son Snorri
Women carrying fish from boats, northern Norway, late 1800s
LIST OF MAPS
The journey of Aud the Deep-Minded
The voyages of FreydÃs and GudrÃd
Steamer route up the Norwegian coast
Â
O
NE 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 had 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 costes of Ireland,” wrote Sir Henry Sidney in 1583. Another English governor, Lord Justice Drury, called her “a woman that 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.