The Pirate Queen (23 page)

Don't let junior officers tell you that your job is unnecessary and that women should not be at sea! Yours is a senior officer's position, despite paucity of paypackets. Keep your dignity and deal firmly with junior officers. Keep well in with the seniors as equals.

Don't be depressed if the Captain does not make a fuss of you. As I say, the job is yours. It
is
important—you are literally the shop window of the company, even if they don't realise it, and as long as you are pleasant at all times, the battle is won.

G
RACE
O'M
ALLEY
would have understood the message about never letting anyone tell her she couldn't go to sea, but it's likely she would have thumbed her nose at the instruction to be pleasant at all times. Pippi Longstocking, the perpetual eight-year-old and strongest girl on the planet, who didn't even go to school, much less charm school, would certainly have laughed it off completely. Captain a ship? Why of course!

“‘A better seaman than my daughter has never sailed on the seven seas,' Captain Longstocking would often say. And he was right. Pippi guided the
Hoptoad
with a sure hand past the most perilous underwater reefs and the worst breakers.”

CHAPTER X

HALIBUT WOMAN

The Faroe Islands

M
Y KNEES
shook. My stomach lurched. The uneasiness that came over me at my first sight of the Faroe Islands, pin points of unnecessary punctuation in a vast uncaring sea, would creep up on me again and again during my time there. It seemed as if they could not really be anchored to the ocean floor; it seemed as if they might break loose and float off into the widening mid-Atlantic rift, helpless to hold on in spite of their Danish infrastructure of highways, bridges, and tunnels, in spite of the imported weight of petrol stations, supermarkets, and cultural centers.

I'd boarded the Faroese-owned car ferry, the
Norröna,
at two-thirty in the morning in Lerwick. Only a handful of passengers embarked with me, and as the ship glided slowly past the city's stately granite buildings, the tallest windows shimmering gold with the first rays of sunrise, it was easy to believe I was still among Scottish friends. To wake groggily six hours later was to wake into a different country. The cafeteria of the
St. Sunniva
had served oatmeal and eggs and bacon, marmalade and cold toast; suddenly I was in line for Scandinavian
smørbrod
—open-faced sandwiches decorated with single curls of cheese or roast beef dotted with semicolons of mayonnaise and shrimp. Danish money was required, and a new language. All around me were large families with blond, bored children,
en route from Norway or Denmark to a holiday in Iceland. If they'd started from Denmark they'd already been onboard two days. There was a weary, competitive jostle in the cafeteria line, and a mingled smell of dark-roasted coffee and yogurt-scented vomit.

On deck the air was as fresh as a salty mountaintop though, with only sea in sight. I cheered up and strolled fore and aft, imagining myself one of those boldly adventurous women travelers of a hundred years ago, voyaging to the Far North when it was considered one of the more remote and daring of destinations. Nowadays Scandinavia seems to many people synonymous with bland prosperity, and every self-respecting woman in search of risk is trekking across Australia, rafting the Boh in Borneo, or finagling a flight to Antarctica. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the North pulled voyagers like a magnet, curious visitors as well as polar explorers. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the first literary figures to try her hand at describing the exotic North: Her travel book, in letters
A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark,
first published in 1796, is often credited with starting the craze for icy adventures among the English (poet Robert Southey wrote to a friend: “She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight.”). Wollstonecraft made her journey alone with a very young daughter; she used the trip as a way to reflect on nature, society, and her own fragile existence. The
terra incognita
she explored was herself.

Many travelers bound for Iceland went through the Faroe Islands, but few left a record. Only American-born Elizabeth Taylor, who first visited in 1895 and spent more than ten years of her life in the Faroes, seemed to have made a specialty of this archipelago. Taylor was one of those doughty lady travelers we
find turning up in old photographs and on library shelves, their names appended to books titled
On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers
or
An Overland Trek from India by Sidesaddle, Camel, and Rail.
They are clothed in long skirts, stout boots, traveling cloaks, and Tyrolean hats, when they are not wearing bear furs or reindeer skins. Their arms are free; a retinue of natives is in the background, hauling portmanteaus and trunks. But they are far from weak. They can go without food, and almost without sleep. They take for granted conditions we would find appalling. Their cheerfulness can be unnerving. After tramping her way through the Faroes, Taylor wrote:

The way up Stóra Dímun is neither easy nor safe. In many places a fall means certain death, and no one subject to dizziness should attempt it. But the difficulties have been exaggerated. Anyone of ordinary activity, who is able to keep a cool head, can make the ascent if he wears Faroe footgear, has a good helper behind, and takes thought for each footstep.

Like her Victorian cohorts traveling in Africa and the Himalayas, Elizabeth Taylor was made of stern stuff. Long before she settled in the Faroes for an extended stay in her forties, she'd traveled by horseback through much of Canada, had been to Alaska, and had accompanied an expedition twenty-three hundred miles along the Athabasca River and Great Slave Lake to the Mackenzie River before it poured into the Polar Sea. She had traveled by foot and horse cart over the remote Hardangervidda in Norway, and spent ten weeks in Iceland, where she studied the eider duck and visited lava fields and archeological remains. Like many of the women who traveled
without male companionship or chaperon, but who had no real work to occupy them, she took notes constantly, gathered specimens, especially of plants, and sketched. Part of this was meant as self-improvement; part was to look busy in a world that had no use for unmarried women without professions. Like many of the other ladies traveling in the North, Taylor meant to write a book and prove her knowledge and her worth; yet, though she published articles in periodicals from the
Atlantic Monthly
to
Forest and Stream,
she never managed to pull her essays together into chapters. Recently, her letters and uncollected papers were gathered into a paperback with the irresistible title
The Far Islands and Other Cold Places.
It was this book that had first put the Faroes on the map for me.

E
LIZABETH TAYLOR'S
initial impression of the Faroes was so positive that I was chagrined to find that, in spite of good intentions, I felt almost immediately at a loss in the islands. My room at the guesthouse had a splendid view of the sea, and the modern prints and blond furniture made a nice change from the frilly clutter of the average bed-and-breakfast in the Scottish Isles, but my landlady, far from being a warm and chatty Shetlander, was gruff and cool. She spoke no English, only Faroese and Danish; we settled on Norwegian, but she was also practically deaf, so that any question I put to her was initially answered with a loud, cranky “HVA?” (WHAT?). She was elderly, thick-bodied, her face like a vanilla pudding with whiskers. Every step was obviously painful; she mostly sat in the foyer at a table with a telephone, papers, and several full ashtrays under a sign that said “No Smoking.”

My first afternoon in Tórshavn foreshadowed the rest of
my stay. I went to the post office first, eager to claim the package containing my Lonely Planet guide to Iceland and the Faroe Islands, which I'd cleverly sent to myself
poste restante.
It wasn't there, there was no sign of it, and the woman at the counter made only the most cursory of searches before announcing, “I'm not surprised.” Coming out of the post office, I looked down to see what time it was and found that my trusty Timex had popped off my wrist, leaving only a faint indentation on the skin. The young man at the tourist office thought the only place I might find a watch was the shopping center, a twenty-minute walk away. “But you'd better hurry—they close soon.”

I took the opportunity to ask about a Laundromat. He seemed bemused. “To wash your clothes yourself?” He engaged in a long conversation with a colleague while I perused the official Faroese tourist guide, which assured me, in exalted language, that the Faroe Islands were not about mass tourism, but about individual connections. “Each visitor is treated as an honored guest!” He passed me a slip of paper with an address on it. “This woman sometimes does laundry for tourists.”

Sometimes? The watch shop was closed when I got there. I mooned around the supermarket and wondered at some of the food displayed. One refrigerated case had a shelf of a dairy product in cartons called Cheasy 0.1%, and a second shelf of Barbie yogurt in containers that displayed Barbie's pink-and-blond charms. I would not be disgruntled, I vowed. I would not sneer and get all curmudgeonly and Paul Therouxish. I would buck up and go to a concert at the Nordic House, rumored to be the most beautiful building in the Faroes. The man at the tourist office had told me that the Nordic House had a cafeteria. I'd have dinner there and write in my journal until the concert began.

As soon as I set off for the Nordic House, the overcast sky
let loose, and my walk, disappointingly along an unpicturesque highway with views of petrol stations, auto repair shops, and a soccer stadium, was a wet, cold one. The cafeteria served only cake and coffee, as it turned out. I opened my journal and wrote chirpily:
The Nordic House is stunning. It combines the traditional farmhouse architecture of the turf roof that seems to blend into the hillside with the glass and polished wood expansiveness of modern Scandinavian design. Even though it's raining, it feels warm, light, and spacious inside. . . .
And so on, down to the description of the cake on my plate with a drawing of it. My heart wasn't in it. I was filling time as I filled pages. Thus does a writer struggle to shape her disappointment and loneliness.

“W
ELL, IT'S
beautiful of course. But I couldn't
live
here,” said the Danish woman in a blue anorak, with frizzy blond hair like a ruff around her anxious face. “I can't imagine
living
in such an isolated place. Without . . .without . . .” She gestured in the direction of civilization: of Denmark, of Europe.

We were standing midway up a grassy slope whose arc was broken on the other side by what I knew to be a sheer cliff dropping down to the Atlantic breakers. I couldn't seem to proceed any farther up the slope, even though it looked deceptively like the gently rising greensward of a fabulous golf course. Others from the tour bus had strolled up to what looked to me like the edge. From my vantage point below, they seemed to be obliviously chatting on the way to a fatal plunge. The soles of my feet, tender in hiking boots, quivered like fish.

“Could
you
live here? Could you?” she asked me. Behind us was the village of Gjógv (pronounced something like Jack). Around us the steep yet rounded hills were the softest green. A
cleft in the cliff had made a natural narrow harbor for fishing boats, though the boats had to be winched up hundreds of feet to the level of the village. The houses here were the color of bitter chocolate with candy-red doors and windows trimmed in white. Some roofs were grass, with bright yellow marsh marigolds and forget-me-nots; others were corrugated metal painted a silvery blue-green.

If Greek villages are defined by the dazzle of white against cobalt blue, Faroese villages empty the light of the world by their negative, dense black on leaf green. Originally the split timbers of the houses were tarred shiny-thick against the winds and rain coming straight over the cliffs; now it's paint that keeps them dark fudge. Ever since arriving in Tórshavn, I'd noticed post cards of paintings by Steffan Danielsen; his scenes of black houses with angled roofs of blue, orange and the powdery verdigris of weathered copper could have come straight from Gjógv.

The Danish woman was on the same tour I was, a daylong trip to the northern part of Eysturoy, the large island lying parallel to Streymoy, where Tórshavn is located. Aside from two Germans on the tour and me, almost everyone else was Danish or Norwegian. Our guide spoke to us in a combination of English and what she called “Scandinavian.” The Faroes were settled, like Orkney, Shetland, and Iceland, by the seagoing Norse, and remained under the crown of Norway until the end of the fourteenth century, when Norway itself fell under the control of Denmark for the next four hundred years. Since 1948 the Faroe Islands have been a self-governing, autonomous region of the Kingdom of Denmark. In the past the Faroes were exploited by the Danes, who controlled their local economy through trade monopolies; now the Danes complain of losing money on the Faroes. The Danish government contributed
heavily to constructing the Faroese infrastructure of highways and tunnels, and it has provided credit when fishing revenues have fallen. The Faroese proclaim their autonomy at every opportunity however, and often show a great coolness toward Danish visitors, a fact that my companion acknowledged.