The Pirate Queen (27 page)

Still, what would it have been like to be on a wooden ship with a single sail in the midst of a North Atlantic storm? Especially a ship loaded with people, farm animals, timber for building, goods for trading? A few long kayaking trips in Puget Sound and along the east and west coasts of Vancouver Island had made me appreciate the strength of currents and the power of the wind to stir up waves. A kayak is a flexible boat, low in the water, difficult to capsize, but it is still not reassuring to see a regiment of dark-gray waves approaching. My Canadian friend Nancy and I had once made an ill-fated expedition to one of the northern Gulf Islands from the mainland of British Columbia. Midway across the channel a thirty-five-knot gale rose suddenly. A passing water taxi had his window blown out by the force of the wind. It was this fortuitous loss that enabled the boat's captain, Mike, to see our two kayaks battling through ever-increasing and ever-higher waves. He persuaded us, meeting little resistance, to let him pull our kayaks onboard. At the time, we experienced it as an ignominious failure. In retrospect we realized we were lucky to have been spotted by Mike (who was tremendously pleased to write in his logbook, “Saved two female kayakers”).

In the North Atlantic, in the Middle Ages, there would have been no passing water taxi. There would have been no weather radio, no GPS. You could call “Mayday” all you wanted, but no one would come. Of course, this made the Norse much better sailors than we are now.

I finished my soup and wandered about the ship for a while, before returning to the cabin. My bunkmate was already tucked away and the room smelled of night cream and fish cakes. I climbed up to my bunk and put on my headphones. What better
time than now to listen again to a cassette of Shaun Davey's
The Brendan Voyage,
an orchestral suite for uilleann pipes that I'd found in a music shop in Westport, on Clew Bay? Centuries ago one of my Irish ancestors could have been traveling (far less comfortably) on a
hafskip
as the slave of a Norse master or mistress. The great settlement of Iceland took place over the course of sixty years, from 870 to 930. As many as twenty thousand colonists took all the arable land, cut down all the trees and formed themselves into a culture that valued law but not central authority. Although this decentralized form of rule eventually led to family feuding among the medieval Icelanders, it was a noble experiment, and one that echoes, in all its idealism and tragedy, through the sagas.

Aud was one of the early arrivals. She went first to her brother Helgi. But not meeting with as much hospitality as she had hoped, she left his household and sailed north and into the wide mouth of the Breidafjord to her other brother, Bjorn, who greeted her warmly and didn't seem at all put off by the number of companions she had with her. Here she spent the winter. The following spring she went land hunting, and a thousand years later, there are still names that recall the places where Aud stopped and surveyed. The name of one headland can be translated as “Breakfast-ness”; another, where she dropped her hair comb, is “Comb-ness.”

She “took possession of as much land as she pleased,” built a home and became the matriarch of a large family. As she approached old age, she began to free some of her slaves and to give land grants to her younger relatives. She put on a huge wedding feast for the youngest of her grandsons, and made a speech, leaving everything she owned to him.

Thereupon she rose to her feet and said that she was now retiring to her bed-chamber; she urged them all to enjoy themselves in whatever way each thought best, and ordered ale to be served to the whole company. It is said that Unn was tall and stoutly-built. She walked briskly down the length of the hall, and those present remarked on how stately she still was.

There was drinking all that evening until it was thought time to go to bed. Next morning Olaf Feilan went to his grandmother's bedroom. When he entered, Unn was sitting propped up against the pillows; she was dead. Olaf went back into the hall and announced the news; everyone thought it most impressive how Unn had kept her dignity to her dying day.

The wedding celebration became a funeral as well, and on the last day of the feast, Aud was buried, fittingly, inside a ship, and the ship laid in a mound with a treasure trove, and closed.

The pagan Norwegians weren't the only ones to colonize Iceland. First- and second-generation Norse born of marauders who had stayed to settle Orkney, the Hebrides, and Ireland also came. They brought with them Celtic thralls, Christians with a mythic history and oral literature far different from the Norse. The Celtic influence, many say, is why Iceland isn't like the rest of Scandinavia, and why the preoccupation of the sagas with great deeds and revenge has an Irish flavor.

Some believe that Iceland was first settled by Irish monks, who fled when the Vikings arrived. It's the voyage of St. Brendan, the wandering monk, that Shaun Davey's musical suite commemorates. I listened to the achingly sweet pipes floating on the swell of oceanic orchestration until I fell asleep. I awoke very
early, around five. Wrapping up as warmly as I could, I went out on deck. We were about four hours from landing at Seydisfjördur, on the east coast of Iceland. But everything was so fog-curdled it was impossible to see beyond the railing.

Hafvilla.
Somewhere out there I seemed to hear the wet flapping of a woven wadmal sail, the eerie creak of a wooden ship on a glass sea. Everyone except the helmsman was asleep; they dreamed of forests they would never see again, and families who counted them as dead. Their skin was caked with salt; it thickened their hair, flaked into their eyes, roughened their breathing. They didn't know it but they were close to the longed-for yet fearsome sound of waves slapping around half-submerged rocks, to breakers smashing on the rough Icelandic coast. Getting into shore was the true test of seamanship and luck. Many a ship had crossed the Atlantic only to break up in sight of land.

Hafvilla.
Had I lost my bearings on this trip or was I merely shifting direction? Perhaps I could never be Barbara the Deep-Minded or Barbara Wisdom-Slope, but it came to me, with a jolt of recognition, as I stood in the chill white mist with the vast bulk of unknown Iceland somewhere off the port bow, that an unexpected transformation had begun to work in me on this journey. More like a reverberation in my body than an actual voice, but with all the authority of a spoken annunciation, I now heard clearly what had been rumbling, in a joking way, for weeks.

I wanted to change my name.

Doubts would come later. This morning I felt as if I held a compass in my hand.

CHAPTER XII

CAUGHT IN THE NET

Reykjavík and the Westmann Islands, Iceland

A
T THIRTY
, she was a mother of a young child, living on the island of Heimaey off the south coast of Iceland, when the Algerian pirate ship appeared offshore. Like the other islanders, she lived in a sod house, smoky and dark, with earthen floors and only one exterior door. Heimaey was volcanic and farming was poor; the only water the islanders had came from rain. It was a bare and unforgiving landscape in a country fallen on hard times. Seventeenth-century Iceland was a colony of Denmark, and as with the Faroes, Denmark sent governors and pastors, but supplied little defense. The climate had turned colder since the 1500s, and the golden age of the Vikings in Iceland was long past. But the fishing around Heimaey had always been the best in Iceland; that's what sustained the small population of the Westmann Islands.

That morning Gudríd Símonardottír had said goodbye to her husband as he set out to sea. He may have seen the foreign ship set anchor in Heimaey's bay, and known with a sinking heart that it wasn't Danish. He may have seen the corsairs, in striped pantaloons and turbans, spilling from the rowboats onto shore, may have heard the screams of the women and children as they tried to flee. But if he had, he didn't return and Gudríd never saw him again. She and her two-year-old son were hunted down that day in 1627 and kidnapped, along with 242 of the
island's population of five hundred, to be sold as slaves in the market of Algiers. Like the others, Gudríd ran, holding her child close. Some found shelter in caves; others were murdered on the spot. The island has no trees, and they had no ships in which to flee. Other Icelanders were kidnapped that week off the mainland—there were five corsair ships in all—and in Icelandic history the event has the same status as a cataclysmic volcanic eruption. The Turkish Raid, it's usually called, because the Algerians lived under the Ottoman Empire, governed from Istanbul.

Nine years later a handful of the captives found their way back to Iceland, ransomed through a combination of their own savings, collections from the Icelandic people, and a gift from the King of Denmark. Many died in captivity, others converted to Islam, but some managed to hold on to their Christian faith and hopes of being rescued.

For all that I was enchanted by Grace O'Malley's long career as a pirate queen, my blood ran cold to think of being hunted down outside my home and carried off in a ship to a distant land, the fearsome Barbary Coast. That was the other side of piracy. As a woman, it's more likely I would have been the victim of a pirate than a pirate myself. Unlike Grace, though, the Algerian corsairs were less interested in plunder than in people. They attacked ships, but most of their prey came from villages along the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts (Grace O'Malley fought off Algerians herself in the memorable battle just after giving birth to her son). They killed all who resisted and subdued and kidnapped the rest to sell as slaves or hold for ransom. Jesuit priests often acted as the intermediaries; sometimes governments collected money and sent emissaries to buy the freedom of their citizens. These corsairs weren't all
Algerians; in some cases, the pirate ships had foreign captains, renegade Christians. The captain of the ship that took Gudríd and many others that year from Iceland was a Dutchman named Jan Jantzen, alias Mourat Rais. Like the well-known Simon Danser, another renegade European called “Captain Devil,” Jantzen captured ship passengers and kidnapped villagers, bringing them back to Algiers to be enslaved. Gudríd Símonardottír was one of them.

R
EYKJAVÍK WASN
'
T
what I'd expected. Neighborly and hip, the center of the city was concentrated around a dozen charming streets, always crowded with well-dressed blond people on cell phones. There were music stores, hair salons, vegetarian restaurants, cafés, bookstores, galleries, and antique shops. Clad in corrugated metal and painted bright yellows, reds, and blues, the houses flowered with window boxes and pocket gardens and offered glimpses into tiny courtyards. But this miniature Copenhagen soon flowed out into broad highways, industrial parks, subdivisions, and apartment blocks, looking for all the world like any medium-sized city in North America, complete with SUVs parked in supermarket parking lots.

I'd been given the use of a spacious basement apartment in the house belonging to the Writers' Union of Iceland. The staff was on vacation and the offices upstairs were closed, so I had the complete run of the place. What a luxury to have a kitchen, washer and dryer, phone, fax, and computer. Fortunately the director was still available to put me in touch with people to help me with my research, and it was in this way I came to be invited for lunch at the house of Steinunn Jóhannesdóttir, an
actress turned playwright, who was now researching and writing a historical novel about Gudríd Símonardottír, or Turkish Gudda, as she came to be called.

Steinunn had played the part of young Gudríd for the National Theater of Iceland years ago. A playbill showing Steinunn, ethereal and earnest, was framed on the wall of the living room. At fifty, Steinunn was still a bit ethereal, with shoulder-length brown hair, lightly freckled skin and the considered movements of someone trained for the stage. “The part of Gudríd had a big effect on me, but I didn't feel the play did justice to her. When I wrote my own play about her,
Gudríd's World,
I made Gudríd an old woman, looking back on her life.” Since that play was produced, five years ago, Steinunn had delved deeper into the subject, traveling to North Africa, Paris, and Amsterdam, digging into archives, writing her back into history.

Outside the window, the afternoon sky was the opaque gray of a newly painted battleship, a typical Reykjavík summer's day. Rain occasionally spattered the glass ill-naturedly, as if trying to punish the potted geraniums inside for daring to be red. In front of us, on the dining room table, the lunch plates of cheese and sliced, dried mutton had been pushed away, and photo albums were open to scenes of minarets and courtyards, to yellow and cobalt-blue tiled interiors and to fountains splashing in the midst of jasmine-draped gardens. You could almost hear the fountains echoing the cry of the muezzin.