The Pirate Queen (20 page)

Betty Mouat rescued by Norwegians

The image of women drifting helplessly in the sea and being rescued after a harrowing voyage seemed to be an appealing one to my male informants. But Mr. Gifford was able to tell me a few other stories when I persisted. He had once been a lighthouse keeper on one of the rocky isles of the Out Skerries, a group of islands northeast of Lerwick. Mr. Gifford recalled that, because the Out Skerries had no peat, women would row in open boats over to the island of Whalsay to cut the peat in spring and collect it in autumn after the bricks were dry.

“These women must have been very strong,” I said, after looking at a map. It was no little distance from the Out Skerries to Whalsay. It looked at least ten miles, over a rough stretch of water.

“Oh aye,” said Mr. Gifford. “They would be strong, to row that far and back.”

Douglas Sinclair, the chief librarian at the Lerwick library, agreed. “The women of Trondra were also well known for their rowing abilities,” he told me. Trondra is one of several islands tucked next to the west coast of Shetland's mainland.

“They would row out for peats, and out fishing, and to take the sheep back and forth to new grazing places. The men would be away at the fishing and the women would do everything. That's why they were such strong rowers. Once, early this century, the men of the Royal Navy in Scalloway challenged the Trondra women to a regatta. And the women won! There should be a photo of the Trondra women upstairs in the museum. You ask up there; they'll find you the photos.”

I'd been upstairs already and had found a typical maritime museum: wide-planked, dark-stained floors and glass cases full of sextants, barometers, and nautical curiosities—from scrimshaw boxes to carved coconuts to peg legs, with nary a trace of women in all the exhibits. But now, emboldened by Douglas's enthusiasm, I rang the bell and told the curator that I'd like to look in the archives for pictures of women and the sea.

The women of Trondra were famed for their boatmanship

“Women and the sea?” He drew his eyebrows together. “Women didn't go to the fishing,” he explained politely. “No, they didn't go to the fishing. They stayed at home; they did everything else: the animals, the food, and clothing, the children, the farming . . . but they didn't go to the sea; they didn't go to the fishing. Only men did that. Women and the sea, you say? There was Betty Mouat, of course.”

I said that the librarian downstairs had told me that the women of Trondra were renowned as rowers, that they'd beaten the Royal Navy in a regatta.

“Yes, well, yes . . .” he said, and pulled out a couple of stacks of photographs. “You can look . . . I don't know if you'll find anything though.”

It was with a small flash of triumph that I came across two old photographs, one of women from Trondra rowing a boat, and the other of women in Edwardian dress who may have been the winners of the regatta. There was also an illustration of Betty Mouat, going hand over hand on a rope stretched from the wrecked
Columbine
to the Norwegian rocks.

The publicity surrounding Betty Mouat's voyage was extraordinary and international. While she recuperated in Norway from her ordeal, a journalist from Edinburgh made a special trip to interview her, and the resulting story appeared around the world, including in the
New York Herald.
Betty Mouat's fantastic voyage inspired ballads in her honor and a number of illustrations, most of them dramatic, but incorrect. For instance, weeks after I left Shetland and was up on a remote island in Norway's Lofoten chain, I ran across a colored rotogravure print on my way to the restroom in a small hotel. The illustration on the wall showed a terrified young Betty with long blond tendrils waving in the wind, cowering on the open deck of a storm-tossed ship. I suddenly had a jolt of recognition. The plate of the ship read the
Columbine.

The museum curator unbent a little when I showed him the photographs I'd found and asked if I could Xerox them. He even admitted that he'd heard something about the women rowers of Trondra. “You might ask . . .” he paused. “I'm sorry, I don't remember her name, but she's the wife of Tommy Isbister, a boat builder who lives on Trondra. She's a rower, I seem to recall. . . .”

I'd heard of Tommy Isbister when I'd been on the northern island of Unst a few days before. I'd decided to go up to Haroldswick, to a small museum called the Unst Boat Haven. It was a glorious day when I set off from Uyeasound, where I was
staying at the youth hostel. First I hitchhiked to Baltasound (the first time I'd hitchhiked in about twenty-five years), and then walked along the highway a few kilometers. Although I was to go much farther north on my trip, there was something about Shetland, particularly Unst, that made me feel as though I were on top of the world. It seemed there was nothing to look at but the wild sky and the sea that changed from cobalt to purple in an instant. With the wind at my back, the very earth seemed insubstantial. Out in the sea was a small craft of some sort, with a white sail, scudding like a top.

Was it a white sail, or was it a sheep? I found myself considering the whole question of getting one sheep, much less two or three, into an open boat, and then rowing that sheep or those sheep from island to island in search of fresh pasturage. Sheep were big, sheep were smelly, shit-smeared, scared. How did the women get them into the boats, and out of the boats? How did everyone keep their balance in a boat in the middle of the sea with the wind and the waves and the sheep bleating and terrified?

T
HE UNST
Boat Haven in Haroldswick was a barn of a place with lots of boats—sixareens, traditional yoles, Faroese eight-man-oared fishing boats with a coat of black tar. They had been lovingly restored, in many cases by Tommy Isbister.

A tall man came up to me, introducing himself as Robert, the volunteer curator. He was full of goodwill (“Where are you from? Seattle! That's a long way.”), which changed to suspicion when I said I was interested in women and the sea.

“There was a woman who drifted to Norway in a boat,” he said finally. “Betty Mouat was her name. She drifted all the way from Shetland to Norway . . .”

“I know the story,” I interrupted. “What else about women and boats?”

“They didn't go to the fishing,” he told me sternly. “Only men went to the fishing. The women stayed home. Of course, women did a great many things. They raised the children, made the clothes, took care of the animals, grew the food. No, they certainly weren't idle . . . but they didn't go to the fishing.”

His reverent tone was backed up by the sacrosanct tools, craft and fishing paraphernalia around me: the beautifully preserved boats, the nets on the walls, the hooks and baskets and buoys, the photographs, none of which showed a woman's face.

“I've heard they rowed from the Out Skerries to Whalsay to collect the peat,” I said doggedly. “So they must have had some familiarity with boats.”

“They may have known how to row,” he said, after a minute. “After all, a boat was how you got places in those days. And while the men were at the fishing, the women would have to keep things going—taking the sheep to different pastures to graze, gathering seaweed, catching a few fish for dinner.”

“So the women
did
fish,” I said eagerly, too eagerly.

“They may have caught a few fish,” he conceded. “But they didn't go to the fishing.”

I decided to ring Tommy Isbister's wife, who turned out to be a lovely woman named Mary. Like many Shetlanders, she was friendly and modest and seemed surprised I would be interested in her story. She had grown up in Scalloway in the fifties. “Oh, yes, we all rowed, we girls, growing up. My father taught me to row when I was seven. It was important to him that I be able to manage a boat correctly. He was severe about technique.”

Mary and Tommy Isbister lived on Trondra now. She ran the croft and her husband built traditional Shetland yoles, many
of them for the new racing teams that had started up in the last few years. She told me that the Trondra women had always been strong rowers. They had rowed to Scalloway for provisions, about half a mile away from the island. Until 1970 there was no bridge to Trondra. A few women still commuted by boat. “As for the boats,” said Mary, “they were the small, flat-bottomed ones we used to row in, a bit less safe than yoles. The yoles were used for collecting peats, and taking lambs off one of the smaller islands for weaning.”

“And did you fish at all?”

“Oh yes, we all fished.” She again seemed surprised at my question. “It was just one of the things we did then. Part of life on the croft when the men were out at sea. You might call it pleasure fishing, but it was a necessary thing.”

“What about the Royal Navy and the women of Trondra?”

“It was about 1912, at any rate before the First World War. A Royal Navy ship's crew challenged the men of Scalloway to a rowing competition. The women turned up instead and beat them!”

I told her that the evening before I'd seen a group of women rowing across the Lerwick Harbor.

“Oh yes, racing has become quite big again. Lots of women are taking it up. I've seen them myself, rowing around the harbor.”

We talked a little more about women and boats, the whole question of getting sheep on and off a boat. She didn't mention Betty Mouat.

I
T TOOK
me a long time to find Betty Mouat's croft house. In the photograph it had looked very charming, whitewashed
stone with green trim. It had apparently been turned into a “camping bod,” a small dormitory-like hostel, and I'd toyed with the notion of staying there a night. Yet something about the emptiness of this far end of Shetland made me uneasy, and I found myself eager to take the bus back to the bustle of Lerwick. The sun was shining here, but the wind was picking up. My eyes smarted and my ears were beginning to ache.

I wandered up a hill and down another, over to the edge of the sea and then back in the direction of the fields skirting the airstrip. I crawled through a gap in a barbed-wire fence, and avoided sheep droppings. In the distance I saw a few sheep and pondered whether I could ever get even one of them into a boat and row it around. Finally I saw two cottages just off the runway, and headed for them to ask directions. Who could possibly live next to a runway? It's not that Shetland is a major destination for most of the rest of the world, but the islanders themselves come and go pretty frequently, and living practically in the middle of an airport can't be very restful. In the open door of the more rundown of the two cottages I spied a man in his undershirt eating directly from a can of beans.

“I'm looking for Betty Mouat's cottage,” I said. “I seem to have gotten turned around and ended up at the airport.”

“No, you're in the right place,” he said, still eating. “It's the other house. Though they just tore the original one down because they're digging up some ruins underneath. They built a new one, for the campers. That rubble over there, under the black tarpaulin? That's Betty Mouat's old croft.”

I thanked him and walked over to the cottage. There were two rooms of bunk beds and a kitchen with running water. At the archeological site was a large hole in the ground, with the stones of a house piled next to it, under a black sheet of plastic.
A small sign said they were excavating Old Scatness Broch, an Iron Age fort. A small jet began its ascent only a few hundred feet away. I covered my ears against the air-sucking roar. I actually felt a little disoriented, between the Iron Age and the Space Age, with a replica croft house (now including indoor plumbing) behind me. It was mind numbing to think that in our day Betty could have flown directly from her little stone house to Norway in about half an hour.