The Pirate Queen (3 page)

O'Malley coat of arms

When Grace was born, the O'Malleys, whose motto was
terra marique potens,
“powerful by land and sea,” were still wealthy and strong, a law unto themselves. They controlled Clew Bay and the region around it, and had for centuries. Unlike many of the other Gaelic clans, the O'Malleys made a living from the ocean; they fished, traded, and licensed fishing rights in their waters. They hired their crew out as sailors and ferried Scottish mercenaries, the fabled gallowglass, to fight in clan battles. They also raided the coastlines of Western Ireland, including the international port of Galway Town, and robbed merchant ships of their cargoes of silks and spices, damask and wine.

       
They are the lions of the green sea

       
men acquainted with the land of Spain

       
when seizing cattle from Cantyre

       
a mile by sea is a short distance to the O'Malleys.

G
RACE'S FATHER,
Dubhdara, or “Black Oak,” was chieftain of the O'Malleys, and by all accounts he raised Grace, if not to carry on the family line—for she would have to marry—then to be an experienced seafarer with an eye for the main chance when it came to trading and raiding. Her mother, Margaret, had lands of her own, which Grace eventually inherited. Once there had been warrior queens in Ireland, like Queen Maeve of Connaught, and descent was through the female line, but with Ireland's conversion to Christianity in the fifth century, Roman law had gradually influenced traditional Gaelic, or Brehon, law, and that had meant a downgrading of women's status. Still, even in the sixteenth century, women in Ireland had more rights than women in England. They could keep their family name and hold and administer property, for instance. Even though we know little of Grace's mother, we know that Margaret had the right to pass on land and property to her daughter.

Grace wasn't an only child, but her biographer Anne Chambers has suggested that her brother, Dónal, may have been illegitimate, or at least not the son of Margaret. Importantly for Grace, he seems not to have been inclined to the seafaring life. If he had been, it's more likely he would have carried on the family's tradition of trade and piracy, and no one would have thought anything of it. But just as Grace's birth in the sixteenth century made an opening for her in Ireland's shifting power structure, so did being her parents' sole offspring. The girl with
a weather eye and an aptitude for life at sea was early given the chance to show what she was made of.

The Granuaile Heritage Centre cheerfully mingled fact and legend in its telling of Grace's story, and indeed, it couldn't be any other way. The English had been most assiduous about recording Grace's pirating and raiding; letters and documents attest to their interest in her, a mixture of respect and frustration. On the contrary, in the comprehensive Irish history, the
Annals of the Four Masters,
Grace's two husbands are mentioned, as are her sons, while her name is not recorded. Until Anne Chambers began looking through English state papers and other old manuscripts and forgotten records, stories about Grace had mainly survived in ballads and local folklore—and a few enjoyable, but not necessarily accurate, historical novels.

I circled around the exhibit hall to the entrance again, where Grace, in her long wig and doublet and hose, stood watch. I took out my almost blank journal, the notebook I hoped to fill with stories of northern maritime women by the end of a few months, and wrote some notes and made some sketches. Dissatisfied with her drooping posture, I took Grace's left arm in mine and joggled it back up above her shoulders, so that her hand was firmly above her eyes. Now she looked a proper sea captain again, bold and farseeing. In this pose she was a good subject for a picture.
Grace O'Malley Looking Out to Sea,
I scribbled in my journal underneath the sketch.

O
N THE
Very Likely,
Paddy and I found ourselves awash in spray as we approached Clare Island. Paddy was utterly miserable, bent over the railing, while I was, in spite of my jet lag, terribly exuberant. I made out a stone tower in the mist. “Look, there's
the castle!” I said to Paddy, to distract him. “Grace O'Malley's castle! Still standing after all these centuries.”

“D'you still have your teeth, Paddy?” his wife shouted, hearing my excitement and seeing me point.

“Grace O'Malley's castle!” I shouted back.

The castle on Clare Island now hove firmly in sight, a smallish, squared stone fortress on a slight hill overlooking the bay. The
Very Likely
entered the harbor and tied up at the dock. Paddy's wife and I each took hold of an arm and helped him up the ladder. He had a decidedly pale and dejected expression and his bandy legs shook. I knew that they were only on Clare Island for the day. They planned to take the six o'clock launch back to the mainland. Paddy confided that he was dreading the return.

“What about you, dear?” asked his wife, as I shouldered my pack and began walking away in the direction of land. “Just a short trip? Or a long one?”

“A few months,” I said, suddenly overwhelmed to find myself in Ireland, actually on Clare Island, instead of in Seattle, paddling past houseboats on Lake Union and simply reading books about women and the sea. The moment that stuns us in life is the moment when dreams become reality.

But as I stood looking down the tar- and seaweed-scented wharf, and felt the unaccustomed weight of my possessions on my shoulders, my courage returned. These were the times, these days of new beginnings in foreign places, when I'd always felt most awake and alive. I took a deep breath and started down the dock.

Grace O'Malley's Connaught

 

CHAPTER I

GRACE O'MALLEY'S CASTLE

Clare Island, Ireland

M
Y HOME
on Clare for two nights was a converted lighthouse at the western edge of the island. One of the Belgian owners, Monica Timmerman, her shrewd face topped by an angelic frizz of blond curls, was waiting at the curve of the harbor with a large and muddy dog in tow, to drive me in her Land Rover three miles across the island up to the lighthouse. The afternoon sun blazed as Monica walked me across a neatly pebbled courtyard to my room. I was the only guest, though two others would turn up later, in time for dinner. Even Monica's husband wasn't around. He was in Brussels being interviewed for a television program called “Far-Flung Belgians.” The lighthouse and its outbuildings reminded me of a convent—in the Caribbean. The thick curved walls dazzled with whitewash, the doors were bright reds and blues, and inside my room aqua, orange, and crimson made a tropical splash. When I walked a few steps outside my door to the wall at the edge of the cliff, I looked out into the fierce immensity of the Atlantic.

Grace was born on the mainland, probably at Belclare Castle, the seat of the O'Malley clan, but she would have spent many summers out here on the island. The fishing was good, and the moorage closer to the sea lanes; it was the custom to graze animals on Clare and the other islands of the bay in warmer months. Some of the legends that relate to Grace's
youth take place on Clare, including one where a determined young girl climbed up these cliffs to kill the eagles that had been carrying off O'Malley lambs from the valleys. She was small, the eagles were large and angry; their talons gashed her forehead, leaving scars. There are no pictures of Grace, so novelists have felt free to describe her as a fiery redhead, or “tiny and dark.” With a father called Black Oak, I imagine her as raven-haired and firmly planted on her feet.

In the Granuaile Heritage Centre yesterday I'd seen a painting of a young girl hacking at her long hair. One story has it that when Grace's father told her she could no longer sail with him because she was a girl, she immediately chopped off her hair. Some say that her Irish name, Granuaile, came from the nickname Gráinne Ui Mhaol, or “Bald Gráinne,” the word
maol
meaning bald and the reference being to her shorn locks as a child. More likely is it that Granuaile was related to the Gaelic Gráinne Umhall (the Umhalls were the territory over which her father ruled). Over the years the English used many variant spellings of her name in their letters and papers: Grany Imallye, Grany Ne Maly, Grainy O'Maly, and, finally, Grace O'Malley.
¹

I stood looking out into the Atlantic, and the wind blew my own hair back in a banner. Seagulls and terns shot up and down the cliffs like tiny living elevators. It's said the O'Malleys had the gift of weather prophecy, and that it was Grace, not her brother, who inherited the ability to recognize a shift in wind, a scent of thunder. How many of these childhood stories can we
trust? Perhaps the important thing is that the legends of Grace were told and retold; she flourished in folklore as a wild and resourceful young girl during centuries in which women lived cramped, restricted lives. One story tells of how she climbed up into the rigging of her father's ship when the O'Malleys were fleeing Algerian corsairs; pulling down her trousers, Grace wickedly mooned the infidel pirates. On another occasion, it's said, when the family galley was boarded by sailors from an English man-o'-war, Grace jumped, cursing and shrieking, from the yards on to the back of a knife-wielding sailor, in order to alert her father and save his life. It's with bravery like this that a girl can endear herself to a crew. However Grace managed it, she learned the sailor's craft early on, and never let it go.

Like the adventurous childhoods of many headstrong, free-spirited girls, Grace's ended, at least temporarily, in marriage. In 1546, when she was sixteen, she was married to Dónal O'Flaherty, the son of a chieftain. Although the O'Flahertys were more warlike than the O'Malleys, the two clans had more often been allies than opponents, and this marriage was meant to solidify the link. Grace left Clew Bay and moved south to Connemara, to Bunowen Castle. She had three children with Dónal, two sons, Owen and Murrough, and a daughter, Margaret.

If Grace had had a different husband, her story might perhaps have ended there. With reluctance she might have accepted her role as the wife of a powerful man, in line to become a chieftain. She might have spent her days organizing the castle's household, entertaining guests, and rearing children. The O'Flahertys had some ships, but they were not a great seafaring clan like the O'Malleys; their wealth, as was typical, came from land and cattle. As an O'Flaherty wife and mother, Grace might never have put to sea again.