The Pirate Queen (6 page)

1
I have held to the conventional nomenclature for Grace because, although she would not have called herself Grace O'Malley, we are not completely sure what she did call herself. Her nickname Granuaile, widely used in the Clew Bay region, is not well known outside Ireland. Anne Chambers, her biographer, calls her both Granuaile and Grace O'Malley. Other writers have referred to her as Grania, a contemporary Irish spelling of Gráinne.

CHAPTER II

THE PIRATE QUEEN

Clew Bay, Ireland

N
O ONE
knows what Grace's second husband looked like, but his nickname was Richard-in-Iron, or Iron Dick, for his habit of wearing a suit of armor left over from his Anglo-Norman forebears. Richard Bourke was a chieftain in the northern reaches of Clew Bay, in line to become the MacWilliam, a title with even greater status. Legend has it that Grace appeared one day at the door of his castle at Rockfleet to propose marriage. Legend also has it that it was really his castle she wanted. It's easy to see why.

The stone castle of Carraigahowley stands nearly at the edge of bronze seaweed-covered rocks, deep within the island-crumbled waters of Clew Bay. Unlike the now neglected fortress on Clare Island, the castle at Rockfleet, as it's now called, is far from passing ships at sea, and still seems to hold the romance of the past intact. This square tower keep, four stories connected by a spiral staircase, came to be Grace's favorite of the many homes she had around Clew Bay. A taxi driver dropped me there early one morning, and I stood gazing out into the lightly choppy waters where I'd soon be cruising with local angler Mary Gavin Hughes on her boat,
Shamrock I.
I could see Mary now across the small cove on the dock, pumping diesel.

According to folklore, Grace wasn't married long. Traditionally, Brehon law held that either party could divorce after a year, merely by uttering the words to dissolve the marriage. Trial marriages were frequent and fashionable, and after a year and a day, it's said that Grace locked herself in the castle when he arrived, and shouted down from the battlements, “Richard Bourke, I dismiss you!”

Carraigahowley (Rockfleet) Castle

Adding, “And I'm keeping the castle!”

But history shows that they continued together, if not as traditional marriage partners, then as allies, and they presented a united front to the English, who treated them as husband and wife. While Grace was generally conceded to be the more politically astute, there are many instances of mutual support. Richard doesn't seem to have objected to Grace's continued piracy and ownership of the castle. And after his death, unlike what had happened with Dónal O'Flaherty, when she lost all claims to his property, Grace took a third of Richard's property
and made sure her son from the marriage, Tibbot-ne-Long (“Toby of the Ships” as he was called), received his inheritance.

L
IVING GEOGRAPHY
, that's some of what travel is, especially a pilgrimage undertaken with a biography or history book in hand. It was one thing to read that Grace coveted Carraigahowley Castle for its strategic location; another to slide my hands over the stone walls damp with sea wind, to breathe in the iodine tang of kelp, to see how a scatter of islands and shoals stretch out to protect the castle in this backwater inlet from any surprise attacks by sea.

Rain and gusty winds would come in a few hours, but this morning, sun spackled the mortar of the castle stones and buttered the blue waves as I went to join Mary on the dock. She ran a one-woman sea-angling business, but I'd talked her into taking me out into Clew Bay for a few hours so that I could see Grace's castle from the water and get a sense of the shape and feel of the bay itself.

Mary was trim but sturdy, brawny in the arms and narrow in the hips. Her skin was smooth and tan, her curly dark hair cut short. She wore sunglasses with leopard-patterned frames. They were the only flashy thing about her, and she didn't take them off until later in the day. It may have been as much a question of initial shyness as of glare. Later I saw her eyes were a soft, bright blue. She had on a navy fleece jacket and tall rubber boots.

We set off, at first with me standing at the back of the thirty-six-foot Aquastar, so I could snap some photographs of the castle. As it receded dramatically behind us, I came forward into the cabin and perched on a seat next to her. The cabin was
comfortably dusty and cluttered, like the dashboard of a beloved old Chevy, but Mary was precise and firm in her handling of the
Shamrock I.
No surprise that she'd grown up around boats, on one of the inner islands, and had learned seafaring and weather reading from her grandfather and father. She'd begun fishing with her grandfather at age three and at age ten had taken up sport angling, eventually winning dozens of championships in Ireland and Europe. Like Grace, Mary knew Clew Bay, down to every shoal, reef, and tricky current. As we threaded our way through the islands, Mary pointed out the shallows and other areas to watch out for. Below the surface were other little islands, submerged. All the islands, down to the rocky clusters, were named.

“That one's Frenchman's Rocks,” she said. “There was a French merchant ship coming out of Westport that came to grief there. Sunk entirely.”

The island where she'd grown up, Clynish, was one of five that were inhabited. In the past, more families had made their home out in Clew Bay. But over the last century, in particular, people began to leave, either for the mainland or England or America, more because of isolation than anything else.

“No one went hungry here,” said Mary. “It was a rich life, between the fishing, the animals, and your potatoes and vegetables. We always had fish to eat, and raised cows and sheep, too, which we sold. We used to put halters on the cattle and put them in boats or lead them across to the mainland during low tides. Islanders would also gather seaweed and sell it on shore.”

Mary and her brother were first taken to school on the mainland by their father in a small boat with an outboard motor. Later she and her brother went back and forth by themselves. “There were days when the motor didn't work. It was a long
row.” She learned to navigate the reefs and currents of Clew Bay early on, and to read the weather and waves. “My father would say, ‘Slow down when you see a big wave coming, Mary.'” Her grandfather used to take her out sailing, in a yawl with a brown sail. “I remember his hand on the tiller. The other hand held a pipe.” Her father taught her to be careful going out to sea, to make sure that nothing was wrong with the boat. “I'm famous for having three of everything.” She added, “Many fathers wouldn't be happy with a girl managing a boat, but mine was.”

Her father used to take tourists out fishing occasionally on the weekends, and Mary had done it for about fifteen years now. She mostly ferried small parties of men, serious deep-sea fishermen, to the lee of Clare Island or around Achill Island. If the weather turned bad, she could head back into the more protected waters of the bay. The sandbanks, along with the combination of deep and shallow waters, mean productive fishing. “We've caught seventeen species of fish,” she told me: blue shark and skate, conger, whiting, John Dory, ling, coalfish, and mackerel among them.

The
Shamrock I
was packed with gear, and idly, I wondered if I should turn my hand to catching fish. But I was more interested in talking to Mary. I told her my interest in Grace O'Malley. I said the taxi driver who'd brought me to Rockfleet wasn't impressed by the O'Malleys. “Great thieves,” he'd called them, only half-joking, and had gone on, “Of course everything around here is named O'Malley this and O'Malley that. Is anything named for the common people, for a family like mine? We're the ones who had our land trampled and taken, our fields burnt, our houses knocked down.”

But Mary had named her daughter Grania, and took pride in being a woman of the sea. “Europe's only lady skipper,” she
told me. She betrayed her pride in this with only a slight tightening of the lips, as if holding back a smile. “Some people call me the modern-day Granuaile,” she said. “Men don't mind sailing with me. They know I'll take care of them and lead them to a very successful day of fishing.” Her husband wasn't much for the sea, she added. He was a roofer, and liked to stay on shore.

Most of the islands of Clew Bay were near the mainland, but now we headed out into rougher waters. I hoped for dolphins, but didn't see any. The boat bucketed, and Mary told stories of storms that had forced her over to Achill Island to tie up for a few days. I'd been supremely happy while we'd been making our way around the small islands—the empty pasture-lands with crumbling stone walls here and there, the white sandy beaches, the colonies of seals basking or swimming, steel gray heads like helmets flashing—but I also liked riding the foaming green waters farther out, bracing myself in a corner of the cabin as Mary, as she had learned, slowed to take the big waves slugging our bow.

I could imagine Grace looking something like Mary at around forty, though probably more weather-beaten, both of them steady at the tiller, energetic and unflappable. Middle age was the time of some of Grace's most outrageous exploits, undocumented in history books, recalled in traditional stories in Connaught, burned into the memories of some of the unlucky families who lived through them. The O'Boyles, the MacSweeneys, the O'Loughlins all knew her raiding parties firsthand, as did the inhabitants of the islands off the coast: Inishbofin and the Aran Islands, Inishmore, Inishmaan, Inisheer. She stole their ships; she stole their cattle; she attacked castles all along the coast. At Carradh Castle her men fired a cannonball from their ship and knocked down part of a wall. Her gambling
was as legendary as her bravery in battle. She was notorious for swearing and sex, too: perhaps another reason she lived on in popular memory but not in Irish history books.

Given the stories of Grace's physical toughness and courage, it's not surprising that there's even an admiring tale about the birth of her fourth child, Tibbot-ne-Long, the son of Richard Bourke. Legend has it that she was out at sea when she felt the first contractions. Seeing no need to turn toward shore, she simply went below and delivered him. The day after he was born, as Grace lay in her cabin recuperating, Algerian corsairs attacked the galley. The second-in-command came below and asked her to lead the men against the pirates. “May you be seven times worse off this day twelve months, who cannot do without me for one day,” she said. Half-dressed, she climbed on deck, swearing loudly and blasting the Algerians with her musket while she rallied the men. “Take this from unconsecrated hands,” she shouted. Reputedly, the Algerians were so overwhelmed by her fierceness and dishevelment that they abandoned their attempt to board Grace's galley and fled.

Those years were halcyon for Grace, but they weren't to last. The English had first noticed Grace O'Malley when she was married to Dónal O'Flaherty and exacting tolls from merchant ships off Galway. They took greater notice when she beat them back at Hen's Castle. But for a long while she was only one of many Irish irritants to England's grand plans for the country, a curiosity perhaps because she was a woman.

Although the Anglo-Normans had nominally conquered Ireland in the thirteenth century, they'd intermarried and become as Irish as the Gaelic clans, given over to the pleasures of cattle stealing, jockeying for power, and feasting and drinking. Richard Bourke's family, for instance, came from
Anglo-Norman stock that had turned Irish. The only part of Ireland that England could be said to control fully was the former Viking town of Dublin and its environs, called “the Pale.” The west and north of Ireland, especially, was boggy and thick with trees, difficult to penetrate. That was how the O'Malleys and other clans had held out so long. With the reign of Henry VII came new policies aimed at subduing and colonizing the wild Irish, but it was Henry VIII who decided to call himself King of Ireland. Within a few years of his death, Elizabeth I took up where her father and grandfather had left off.