The Pirate Queen (24 page)

“I came for curiosity's sake,” she said. “But I am having trouble liking it. In Denmark we were having a nice hot summer when I left last week. Here I've been cold every day, all the time. There's not very much to do. The people are not very friendly.”

T
HAT WAS
not Elizabeth Taylor's experience during her first extended stay in the Faroes, from 1900 to 1905. Elizabeth Taylor liked the Faroese very much. Even on her brief visit half a decade earlier she had noticed the men, describing them as “ruddy blond with thick half-curling hair and very thick soft beards.” They put her in mind of the old Vikings in the sagas. Five years later, she was back to stay. “I am going up to the Faroes, & even to think of it gives me a feeling of strength & enthusiasm,” she wrote to a friend. She was forty-four then, a self-taught botanist, ornithologist, and ethnologist. She planned to draw, to take notes, to gather specimens for the British Museum, the Smithsonian, for collections at Harvard and Oxford. “In order to secure material, I must see different islands and have certain experiences. . . . I must write about trout fishing, bird cliffs, whales, etc.”

Elizabeth had grown up in St. Paul, Minnesota; her father was appointed the American consul to Winnipeg when she was fourteen. She was close to him and made visits over the years to Canada; he encouraged her explorations. Middle-class women rarely went to college in those days. Most professions were
closed to them. If they didn't immediately marry, their choices were few. They could be nurses or teachers. They could live with their families. For many women, of course, a life with such prospects was stultifying. Elizabeth first sought an identity as an artist. She studied at the Art Students League in New York for several summers; she went to Paris and took lessons at Colarossi and Académie Julian. She spent a winter in Venice. Like many Americans, she found that a small income went further in Europe. She did not think she was particularly talented as an artist; she turned instead to writing. Yet even though she published many articles, she felt undereducated. She did not want to be an amateur; she thought that if she settled in one place and thoroughly investigated it, the book that resulted would make a contribution to world knowledge. The Faroes appealed to her for their remoteness, and for the fact that no one else seemed to have written much about them.

She tramped, she painted, she botanized and collected specimens; she was rowed about by eight strong men in a boat.

So I climbed down and waited on the rocks for a lull, while the men kept the boat in a quiet spot under some cliffs across the inlet. “Now!” cried a man who was watching the sea. The boat shot forward to where I stood, I tumbled in anyhow, waved a farewell to those on shore, and in an instant we were tossing high in a whirl of white water between the reefs, cutting through masses of foam, and reaching the open sea just before the next big wave broke. There we were safe; there was little wind, and the great waves swept shoreward in unbroken lines. We could easily climb them and race down their outer slopes. It was a glorious day.

Pastor Peter Lorentz Heilmann and wife Flora are joined by Elizabeth Taylor (wrapped in a blanket) in 1901

In spite of the effervescence in many of her descriptions, Elizabeth's time in the Faroes was not completely euphoric. Dependent on her writing for income, she was forced to be the guest of various Faroese. The winter she spent with the governor of Tórshavn was long and difficult. There were nine children, five of them babies; they suffered that winter from whooping cough, chicken pox, and meningitis. The youngest
baby died. The servants were “disorganized.” Another winter found her with a pastor's family on the northernmost island. Although she buoyed herself with thoughts that here were the essentials: salt-of-the-earth peasantry, lots of fresh air, and the opportunity for good walking (“As to society, who wants it? I don't.”), her spirits understandably flagged. “The surf is so bad that in winter no visitors can come. . . . There are but two shops & all the people except one shopkeeper & the schoolmaster are peasant fisherman.” But soon she chided herself, “Do not look melancholy about the cold & make folks regret you are in the house.”

She made friends, but not many were women. Educated, Danish-speaking men—the schoolteachers, governors, consuls, and pastors of the island—were her preferred companions. Elizabeth had wished to be a boy when growing up; all her life she envied male freedom. Like many Victorian women travelers, she achieved a kind of genderless authority by coming to a new country in the persona of an independent adventurer. Her foreignness made freedom possible; her announced occupation, to gather as much material on the Faroes as possible in order to write a book, gave her a reason for living in a remote island archipelago in the Atlantic.

She found romance in wondering, “Am I or am I not a
Kalvakona
?”

That means a halibut woman, one who possesses mysterious powers that can charm a big halibut to the hook of a fisherman. But the fisherman must have promised her verbally, or in his thoughts at sea, the beita—a choice bit cut from the fish between the forefins. . . . Last week, a man on the fishing bank promised me the beita, and a few minutes later he was having a sharp fight with a halibut that weighed almost two hundred pounds. . . . Two days later, another man promised me the beita, and caught nothing. So what is one to think?

Faroese women grading cod on the docks

Old photographs of the Faroes show dozens of women working in the fishing industry, as they worked all over the North Atlantic, particularly in Iceland and Norway, laying the split cod out to dry on the rocks and gathering them up if rain threatened. The women wear shawls and long dresses in the photographs; they stand next to great piles of dried cod, which were sold primarily in the Mediterranean for
baccalao.
But these women were invisible to Taylor; she did not describe them in her writing. She would rather be at a remove from everyday working life; she would rather be an outsider, a traveler, a halibut woman.

“W
HAT ABOUT
you?” asked my Danish companion. She had just taken a photo of me (months later the photograph would be held by a magnet to my refrigerator at home: I'm wearing the perpetual green rain jacket; my hair is flying. I look staunch and farseeing rather than very cheerful), and we were strolling back through the little village. “Why would you come to the Faroes? Do you like it here?”

I wasn't sure how to answer. Back in Tórshavn, things were not going well. My landlady seemed to have taken a dislike to me. Two months earlier I'd faxed a request to stay three days; once here, I'd asked to change it to five, which she'd agreed to—I thought. Then last night, the evening of my third day, she'd knocked forcefully on my door and demanded to know how long I thought I was staying. “Two more nights,” I said. “We agreed.”

“HVA?!?”

“TWO MORE DAYS.”

“Impossible. I have other people coming. You must leave.”

“I'm not leaving. We agreed.”

“HVA?”

Yesterday morning I'd taken my clothes to the woman who was said to do laundry, and nearly had a tussle with her when she attempted to put them into a large bag full of other people's clothes. I said in both English and Norwegian, “How will you tell my clothes from anybody else's?” Finally her son came to the rescue and explained that his mother thought I was the same lady from England who had been by earlier and dropped off some clothes.

I bought a new watch, at a vastly inflated price. I went to the tourist office to arrange this trip to Eysturoy, and found my
young friend in a puzzled mood. He had been an exchange student in America, he confided, and although he had asked his friends to come visit him, nobody would ever come to the Faroes. Why was that? I was American, could I tell him? I went to the post office several times looking for my Lonely Planet guide, to no avail. I collected quite a few stamps that showed an unfriendly sheep's head.

Back on the bus, leaving Gjógv for Eidi, another remote village in the north of Eysturoy, where Elizabeth Taylor had spent five years, our tour guide came back and sat by me to practice her English. She pointed out the “cheeps” on the hillside, and rehearsed what to say about the pilot whale hunting, the famous
grindadráp.
She thought the two Germans might disapprove and wanted to explain that it was a long tradition in the Faroes. The people waited months for the pilot whales to blunder into shore. The resultant killing supplied the natives with necessary nourishment.

“What is the word for whale fat in English?”

“Blubber,” I said.

“It's not
spekk
?”

“No, that's Norwegian.”

“Blubber,” she sounded it out. “Blubber, blubber, blubber. Are you in Greenpeace?”

I changed the subject. “Eidi,” I said. “Isn't that where Elizabeth Taylor, the American traveler, had to live throughout the First World War?”

“I do not know her.”

Elizabeth Taylor left the Faroes in 1906, after spending six years gathering information and specimens. She lived for a while in England, then returned to the U.S. but did not progress with her book, though she did manage to place a few articles and
organize illustrated talks on the Faroes. She continued her restless ways, settling nowhere in America, visiting Europe again, living a time in Scotland. She made another appearance in the Faroes in 1913, and again, unluckily, in 1914. The First World War broke out and few ships came into or out of the Tórshavn harbor from abroad for five years. What was it like for her, without mail, on short rations, a perpetual guest? She was in her sixties by then; her vigorous cheerfulness must have been fading slightly. She discovered she did not like the cold, after all. Botanizing, painting, birding seemed less important. She pottered stoically in a borrowed garden, taught a local boy to paint. It would have been a good time to work on her book, perhaps to finish it. Instead, she brooded over her perfectionism, her procrastination. “Everyone seems to be dreadfully clever nowadays and the public wants things that are striking, and a trifle sensational and picturesque, and I fear that is all beyond me.” She published only two articles from this second long stay. One is called wearily, “Five Years in a Faroe Attic.”

I wouldn't have liked to be stuck in Eidi for five years. Taylor called it a “dirty disagreeable little village.” It was not as picturesque as Gjógv, though it was larger, ranged along two roads overlooking a beautiful wide bay, just the sort of bay an unlucky pod of pilot whales might mistakenly swim into. On a windy viewpoint where we stopped to use the toilets, our guide gave us an enthusiastic talk in English and Scandinavian about the
grindadráp.
The Germans, contrary to expectations, were not Green at all, but seemed very respectful of the need of the Faroese for all that blubber. The Norwegians, longtime whale hunters, also remained composed. Only the Danes seemed grossed out. The Danish woman asked me to take a picture of her. “I really don't want to hear what these people do to the poor
whales,” she said, gesturing me away from the group. She smiled into the camera, bravely, I thought. She'd said she was a schoolteacher. This wasn't her first trip away from Denmark, but it was the first time she'd traveled alone. “I return to Denmark tomorrow,” she said. “I can hardly wait.”