The Pirate Queen (13 page)

Stronsay, the Orkney Islands

A
CURIOUS
old photograph hangs in the Scottish Fisheries Museum. In it several women carry men on their backs. The women, their full skirts tucked into waistbands, are knee-deep in sea water. They grip the men's booted legs firmly; the men clasp the women around the necks. These are wives hauling their husbands from shore out to their fishing boats, carrying them high above the water so their feet don't get wet. Apparently this was common practice on the east coast of Scotland around 150 years ago. In his book
Fishing Boats and Fisher Folk on the East Coast of Scotland,
Peter Anson describes the women of one village, Avoch:

The women were as strong as the men. They could carry immense burdens without apparently feeling the strain. They thought nothing of a hundred pounds of fish in a creel on their backs. At that time there was no pier at Avoch. The shore is flat, and the boats had to lie some distance off, so the women used to carry out their husbands on their backs, “to keep the men's feet dry.” In a like manner they brought in all the fish and tackle from the boats, never objecting to wading out into the sea, no matter what might be the weather or time of year.

Two weeks ago, my friends in Edinburgh had taken me north of the city to the coastal village of Anstruther to see this photograph, and I was glad they had. For it was in the Scottish Fisheries Museum that I first began to glimpse the old, preindustrial world of fishing, when women and men worked together in the family and community. Before the advent of decked sailing smacks in the mid-nineteenth century and the steam drifters and trawlers that came into use around 1880, fishing tended to be done on a smaller scale, and few fishermen ventured out in their open skiffs more than a day's row from their coastal villages. In those days women's contribution to the home economy was prized. In many Scottish fishing villages, women kept their maiden names, and their initials were used to mark their husbands' fishing gear. In addition to keeping house and caring for the children, women mended the nets and baited the lines with shelled mussels and limpets. “White fishing” (for cod, halibut, and haddock) was line fishing; “full” or “great” lines had about twelve hundred hooks and could be two miles long; “small” lines were about three hundred feet. Women helped bring in the boats at day's end and prepared the catch for sale.

Women carrying their husbands out to the fishing boats

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, women and men came to do more sharply defined tasks; however, women were still active and important participants in the fishing life all around the Scottish coasts and the western and northern isles. The museum has a large room devoted to Scotland's once thriving herring industry. In addition to photographs on the walls, there is a group of male and female mannequins in nineteenth-century dress displayed against a painted background of wharves and fishing boats. The women wear long, striped skirts and shawls over their hair; their fingers are wound with rags and string called “cloots” to prevent infection from knife cuts and fish guts. While the men put together barrels, the women stand in front of troughs of shining silver fish. These were the herring lassies, the gutter girls, an astonishing number of whom migrated like fish in their thousands up and down the Scottish and English coasts and islands, from Lerwick in the Shetland Islands to Great Yarmouth in England. In economic terms they were a migrant workforce that followed the fishing fleets and dealt with the catch. Some were fishing widows, but more were independent, often young, women who saw a chance to improve their lot and to support themselves. Their mothers and grandmothers may have worked closely with their menfolk to bring in the catch in the villages, but the herring lassies forged communities of their own.

O
RKNEY IS
made up of more than seventy islands, and I wanted to know more of the archipelago than just Mainland's Kirkwall, so I took a ferry to the village of Whitehall on the island of Stronsay. Whitehall was once a major fishing port for all of Orkney. Its harbor on Papa Sound faced the North Sea and
was easily accessible to foreign vessels from the east. British ships, meanwhile, could dock on Stronsay without getting too close to the Pentland Firth. Most importantly, Stronsay was near the route the herring shoals took on their annual migration south. I'd come to Whitehall looking for traces of the strong-backed, no-nonsense herring lassies who had flocked here in such numbers—fifteen hundred each season—up through the 1930s.

It was a bleached-cold day, gusting heavily, and Whitehall looked bleak and abandoned as I walked off the ferry. Everything spoke of crushed dreams and straitened circumstances, yet the gray stone and pebble-dashed stucco buildings that lined the waterfront gave evidence of a once prosperous and thriving little town. It didn't help that the wind bent me double as I walked to the hotel.

The man who'd taken my two-night booking had made a pretense on the phone of checking to see that a room was available. It was clear from the absence of tourists on the ferry that, more nights than not,
all
the rooms were free. Mine had hideous yellow walls, a lumpy bed, and the ubiquitous personal bath mat. It looked out at the harbor and a street that was always empty except for the few cars that drove on or off the ferry three times a day. A hundred years ago, looking out at this same view, I would have seen the harbor filled with sailing craft and steam drifters, the summer herring fleet. Horse-drawn carts would have been taking herring to the many curing stations on the docks. The wharves would have been jammed with barrels, just made by a raft of coopers. The herring lassies, in long skirts and shawls and with cloots on their fingers, would have been standing at troughs of fish, gutting them with a quick flash of the knife and tossing them aside to a packer, who'd sort them
into grades and layer them into barrels to be salted.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, the scene would have looked almost the same, except the “Zulu” sailboats and coal-fired steam drifters would have been replaced by diesel trawlers and large herring seiners. The women would no longer be wearing shawls, but oilskin aprons over overalls, and sweaters rolled up to show muscular arms. Their hair would be bobbed; many would sport jaunty round caps and berets. They'd be from all over Scotland, looking forward to freedom, fun, and the chance to make their own money. They roomed by the hundreds in close quarters across the harbor on the tiny island of Papa Stronsay, in dormitories that still stand, but are derelict now. All of it was abandoned now, on both sides of the bay: the wharves, the shops, the houses. In half an hour of looking out the window, I didn't see a single person go by.

Across from the hotel was a long low building called the Fish Mart. The brochures had made this sound like a bustling place: “And while in Stronsay, be sure to visit the Fish Mart, with its museum of herring culture and its teashop.”
While in Stronsay
. . . There was actually not too much to do in Stronsay
except
visit the Fish Mart. After unpacking, I went over to take a look. Marion, the other owner of the hotel, had to let me in. She put on a brave front; like her husband, she seemed chagrined at the emptiness of the hotel and the entire village, but acted as though that would all change when summer finally came. It seemed to me it might take more than blue skies to get people to Stronsay, but I didn't want to argue with her determined optimism. Marion's dyed-red spiky hair and colorful leggings were the brightest things about Whitehall. She had a bevy of tiny yapping dogs and an intermittently vivacious manner.

The Fish Mart was a warren of thirty rooms where each
herring agent had kept a temporary office during the fishing season. Each office held a desk with a ledger book and a small safe. Back when Whitehall was a busy port, fishermen would bring a sample of their catch to the Fish Mart, and in their ledger books the agents would note how many tons of herring they bought, the price paid, and to which fisherman. Over the years the building had taken on the status of a quasi museum. One or two displays were properly exhibited, but other rooms were completely empty or held odd collections: One had nothing more than a baby's wooden cradle and five gramophones, each one with a Victrola trumpet like a large dusty brown flower.

Part of the Fish Mart had become a café with plastic-flowered tablecloths on round plastic tables; a vase of plastic flowers sat in the center of each. Various “hand-crafted” items were cheerily displayed on the windowsills and counters—painted dishes, a shawl, a tea cozy, none of them particularly well made, and all priced very high.

I asked Marion if there was a way I could get over to Papa Stronsay, to see the dormitories of the herring girls.

“Possibly. It's a bit complicated, you see,” she said. “The island was just sold last week. It used to belong to some friends of ours who farmed it. But they decided to pack it in. A group of Catholic monks just bought it!” She considered. “I'll see what I can do. Bill Miller has a boat. He's a retired police inspector from the London CID.”

Two hours later I found myself climbing down a slippery green set of stairs off the Stronsay pier into the
Nora
with Bill, his Irish wife, Breida, and Marion, who wore a green velvet jester's cap with a bell for the occasion.

Bill was a strongly built man in his fifties; it was easy to
imagine him as one of the stolid inspectors in a British police thriller. I asked him if his detective work had been more like that of Morse or Dalgliesh.

He laughed dismissively. “Not much like either,” he said. “I like John Thaw as Morse though.”

“I have a soft spot for Sergeant Lewis,” I said. “He's so put-upon and decent. I like Helen Mirren in
Prime Suspect.
Is the CID more like that?”

“Umm, a bit,” he allowed.

The trip across the harbor was short. A thousand years ago, there had been a church and a monastery on Papa Stronsay (the word
papa,
found on islands from Orkney to Iceland, indicates Irish monks once lived there). The order that had just bought the 250-acre island was the Transalpine Redemptorist Missioners. An offshoot of Redemptorists originally founded by St. Alphonsus, this order was firm in its desire to live in solitude and to hold to Latin for its services. The Stronsay people, who no longer even had a church on their island, thought, cautiously, that the monks might be a good thing for Papa Stronsay. At this point, anything that might bring a few more people out to the islands couldn't hurt.

Yet the sale was so recent that the monks hadn't yet moved in, much less begun building a new monastery. The stone farmhouse had an old greenhouse attached to a south-facing room, where a rosebush bloomed with clematis twining through. One of the roses pressed its big satiny ivory-peach head of petals right against the glass. It seemed as if the owners had just gone away for the day, not abandoned their home to monks forever.

Bill and I went for a walk around the dormitories. Two long ones were still standing. They had lately been used for pigs, and smelled of it. Other dormitory buildings were gone except for
the foundations. The Stronsay herring industry was at its height during the teens, twenties, and early thirties. In the summer season, with all the fishermen, herring girls and coopers, the population swelled to five thousand. There were at least three curing stations on Papa Stronsay—the piers still stood, with rail tracks embedded in the cement—but many of the herring girls worked over in Whitehall and were ferried back and forth by a motor launch named
Welcome Home.

The Scottish girls were renowned for their speed and agility with a sharp knife. They could gut a herring in a few seconds. Since they were paid a piecework price, by the barrel, it was crucial to be quick. They worked in teams of three: two to stand at the “farlin,” or open trough, and one to pack the fish. The first layer of herring was laid with the silver side down, and the last layer silver side up. This ensured that no matter which end of the barrel was opened, the “silver darlings” would gleam. The packers kept the layers sprinkled with salt and put a lid on the barrel when it was full. In ten days the herring would have pickled; the coopers then drilled in a bunghole and drained out some of the liquid. They pried open the lid and topped off the barrel with another layer or two of fish. This method was called the “Scotch cure.” Most of the herring was sold to the Baltic countries.

It was tough work. The herring lassies routinely stood on their feet for twelve or fifteen hours a day, with few breaks. They had to work at lightening speed or lose their place. Their clothes were spattered with blood and guts; they could never get the oily stench of fish out of their skin and hair. A cut to the fingers could mean blood poisoning; at the very least their hands were always raw, salt-stung, and unhealed. The weather couldn't have been much different from today, which means that even in summer it would have been chill with wind and wet. Only in later years did they work under any covering. Nor were their accommodations good. They slept in crowded rooms, on straw-filled mattresses. All they had to sit on were the clothes chests they carried with them from port to port.