The Pirate Queen (35 page)

Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir with her son Snorri

“And after that no one thought anything but ill of her and her family,”
The Greenlanders' Saga
concluded Freydís's story. All the bravery and endurance that shine through the account in both sagas about her expedition are dismissed. She was arrogant, greedy, and a murderer, and that's all one needs to hear to judge her. The legend of Freydís as killer completely usurps the story of Freydís as adventurer. Yet I found myself wanting to know all kinds of details about the powerful, pagan, and possibly vengeful Freydís Eiríksdóttir, not so much whether she killed anyone, but what it was like to sail through Arctic waters in a wooden ship. What it was like to see icebergs and whales, to steer by the light of the stars, to only guess at what you'd find on land, or whether you would find land at all.

So often the sea has marked the boundary of women's geography. Beyond the shore we could not go—or so we learned. If the ocean is a place of imagination, women were not encouraged to dream of it; we were forbidden to imagine ourselves at sea, much less to dream of discovering new lands. It was Freydís's imagination I was most interested in; I knew she had one.

I stretched out on my back on the grass and looked up at the big, fast-moving, lush blue sky of northern Iceland, thinking about Ellen Ingvadóttir's upcoming voyage on the
Islendingur.
This time a woman was keeping the ship's diary, a woman was
logging on to the Internet to tell the story of reaching Vínland. If only Freydís had been able to write down her adventures, if only Freydís had had a little laptop to tell her tale. Would she have written,
August 15: Killed five women with an axe today, good riddance
, or would she have written something completely different?

Saw the coast of a new country today. It is wooded and fertile. I look forward to exploring this vast new continent. The possibilities for me here seem endless.

CHAPTER XV

A WOMAN WITHOUT A BOAT IS A PRISONER

Tálknafjördur, Iceland

“Y
OU MUST
take abyss lessons,” proclaimed Professor Lidenbrock to his nephew Axel in
Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
Jules Verne was describing their ascent up a church steeple to prepare for the exploration of the Snæfellsnes volcano, but he could just as well have been talking about driving a small rental car along the switchbacking mountain roads on the way to Iceland's Westfjords. Unpaved, with no dividing line and often only a single lane, without guardrails of any sort, the road wound up and down and around the deep inlets on the northern side of the Breidafjord.

“What a view! You don't know what you're missing,” said my friend Tess. She'd arrived from Seattle a few days ago, bringing news of home but, unaccountably, not a single sweater. Her confident ebullience on the road both cheered and petrified me. I didn't want abyss lessons. I was grateful that she was at the wheel, but my terror at plunging over the side to a sheer fall into the water below was compounded by the sight of her driving with one hand, snacking on Fritos and Icelandic licorice with the other, while gazing out in rapture over the high volcanic plateaus. I'd tried closing my eyes at the worst parts, but the worst parts all began to merge together, and finally I had to make her stop the car so I could lie down in the back seat with a jacket over my head. The only thing that made me feel better
was recalling that Ellen Ingvadóttir, the woman about to cross the wild northern seas in a replica Viking boat, had told me she'd been deathly afraid when her husband drove them around the Westfjords.

Tess and I were on our way to visit an eighty-year-old historian, Thórunn Magnúsdóttir, in the remote fishing village of Tálknafjördur. Ever since I'd arrived in Iceland, several weeks before, her name had come up.
“She's
the one you should talk to if you're interested in women and the sea,” people said. “She knows about Skipper Thurídur, our great fishing foremother; she knows all kinds of things about Icelandic fisherwomen. She's written a book about them.”

If Iceland is shaped like a baseball mitt, then the huge peninsula called the Westfjords is the thumb poking up north by west into the sea, albeit a thumb with hundreds of indentations. In a country of heart-stopping scenery, the rocky bays, white sand beaches and dark, anvil-shaped mountains of the Westfjords arguably provide the most spectacular views. Although the Westfjords peninsula makes up only one-tenth of Iceland's land mass, it has more than half of the country's total shoreline. On a bright day in summer, especially if one is in a car and protected from the biting wind, the landscape can seem oddly reminiscent of the American Southwest: how New Mexico might look if the states west of it broke off and left the mesas at the edge of the sea. The reason so many of Iceland's mountains have that uniform height and bread-loaf appearance is that the volcanic eruptions occurred under a thick mantle of ice during one of the glacial periods. Instead of forming high peaks, the mountains flattened under the pressure of the ice even as they rose.

We'd chosen to drive around the vast Breidafjord rather
than cross it by car ferry (we'd do that on the return). The only other way to get to the Westfjords was by plane from Reykjavík and then bus. But I'd wanted to get a sense of the Breidafjord. Not only had some of the earliest settlers, like Aud the Deep-Minded and Eirík the Red, lived on or near its shores, but this huge bay, shaped like the mouth of a whale gobbling minnows (twenty-seven hundred islands have been counted), was known as the food larder of Iceland. At difficult times in the country's history, when much of Iceland was starving, the Breidafjord provided fish, shellfish, seaweed, and seal meat. Few of the small islands had farms. The inhabitants lived on sea-bird eggs and fished all year. It had one of the strongest fishing cultures in Iceland, and historical sources suggest that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women fished in this bay in almost equal numbers to men.

Head hidden under my jacket, I thought about Halldóra Ólafsdóttir, who lived on an island in the Breidafjord in the eighteenth century, during some of Iceland's worst times, when the volcanoes spewed poisonous ash and the northern coastline froze much of the year. Halldóra had a twin brother, whose boat she skippered. Nicknamed Clubfoot, she was a forceful helmswoman who competed hard against her brothers and, it's said, would only have a female crew. When famine drove settlers from the north of Iceland down to the Breidafjord, she and her twin brother took them in. They ferried the refugees from the shore to the islands, and made sure they didn't eat too much, too quickly, for starving people often died when they were given food.

At the University of Reykjavík, the librarian of the women's collection, Erla Hulda Halldorsdóttir, had shown me a book on women's work in Iceland, which included information on
women fishers and shellfish collectors. “A woman without a boat is a prisoner,” the chapter on women in the Breidafjord was called, a twist on the Faroese saying,
Bundin er batlos man,
“Bound is a boatless man.” The symbol of the Women's Association of the Breidafjord was a single woman in a small boat with its sail up. The material included oral histories with women who'd been born in the nineteenth century. Gudný Hagalín, for instance, learned to steer a boat and scull when she was twelve.

She wanted to go to sea and did so often with her father as well as accompany him on foxhunts. She was a little proud of accompanying her father on such trips while her brothers sat at home. Her father wanted to teach her to carry a gun, but her aunt forbade it, saying that he was raising Gudný as if she were a man, not a woman, and that the girl was learning no women's work.

Another woman, Rósamunda Sigmundsdóttir, also grew up on boats.

Rósa was not big, but well-formed and amazingly strong. One of her most prominent features was that she always got enough to eat. She could keep up with any average man rowing . . . She knew very well how to trim sails. After the gaff sail came to the islands, and sheets had to be loose when tacking, no one held on to the jib better than she did. . . . She liked sailing . . . And she could really haul in the catch.

Then there was Gudrún Jónsdóttir, who was “a great, heroic
fisher, not less than Skipper Thurídur . . . she was an outstanding helmsman.” She used to go out fishing with her sons, even when the weather was bad and even when she got old. She thrived on rough seas and used to say, “I'll take the rudder, boys.”

The car had braked on a slight incline. The crunching of Fritos stopped.

“What's happened?” I asked, blind, muffled, fearing the worst.

“We're up on top of the world, in the middle of absolute nowhere. And there's this
huge
statue by the side of the road. I have to take a photograph.”

I crept out and, true enough, there was a statue of a giant man, constructed from massive stones, by the side of the road. It's said that the highway crew who put these mountain roads in had built it and had given the giant the face of their boss. I stood outside briefly. Around us were flattened mountains, and in the distance snow-covered peaks. Below us, fallen boulders and gravel washes led the way back to the Breidafjord, austerely beautiful, like a lake in a desert. It looked, as many landscapes in Iceland did, just formed, prehistoric, as if human settlement were yet to come.

“It's not so bad right here,” said Tess. “We're going down. You could come back up here if you want. Of course, according to the map, we still have five fjords to drive around and a lot more of these mountain roads.”

A
SIDE FROM
these high gravel roads without guardrails, I'd liked Iceland ever since I arrived from the foggy Faroes. One of the things that most impressed me was a seemingly collective attitude toward remembrance. This was a country dedicated to
history and to family, which to them were often the same. In spite of rushing headlong into the twenty-first century, they retained old habits, still speaking the same form of Old Norse that had long vanished from most other parts of Scandinavia, still recalling and celebrating the deeds of ancestors as far back as the early settlement of Iceland in the ninth century. Iceland had begun as a pioneer culture, where everyone's help was needed to survive, and continued as a vassal state of Denmark, ground down by poverty and disease, by trade restrictions and taxes. In this country, everyone who could work had to. Through it all, through centuries of smallpox and leprosy and volcanic eruptions and poor crops and brutal laws, the Icelanders had held on to their heritage, especially to the literature of settlement and saga, and to the memory of heroic ancestors.

Like most male-oriented societies, Iceland's official histories tended to downplay the achievements of women. But at the same time, because Icelanders had saved so much of the past and because they loved genealogy, they had records of many women who'd been fishers and boat builders. These women weren't strangers, but often relatives. And they knew their relatives. So, in contrast to the sometimes blank looks I'd gotten elsewhere in the North Atlantic, here in Iceland people wanted to tell me stories of seafaring women.

Brynja Benediktsdóttir, the playwright who'd tackled the story of Gudríd and Freydís, had also written a play about a skipper called Salome from up here in the Westfjords who rowed with other women. Her husband divorced her because he said she acted like a man. Brynja also told me about Gunna the Footless, who started out as a fisher, but after suffering frostbite and the loss of her foot, turned to building boats and became
well known for it. And everybody had told me about Thurídur Formadur, or Skipper Thurídur, the greatest fisherwoman of them all, whose story I was soon to learn from the woman who knew most about her.

“E
AT, EAT
,” urged Thórunn Magnúsdóttir. “Do you like it?”

“It's an interesting breakfast,” Tess said, looking at the paper-thin gray flatbread, the tough curls of dried cod and the wet scoop of what seemed to be chocolate pudding on her plate.

“This is very typically Icelandic,” said Thórunn. “
Skyr
is thick cultured milk, full of health. I have been eating
skyr
all my life for breakfast. Of course,” she added, “it should not be chocolate
skyr.
I made a mistake with the label at the grocery store.”

We'd arrived in Tálknafjördur yesterday afternoon and were staying with Thórunn in her sunny flat on a hillside overlooking the small harbor. It was more like a college student's apartment than an old lady's: bright prints on the walls, lots of books. There was something of the student still in Thórunn, too, a guileless enthusiasm. Like a British schoolgirl, she wore a white shirt buttoned up to the neck and a plain wool skirt with white socks and black shoes with straps. Her dark hair was short, straight, and parted on the side. Her glasses were bottle-thick, and she moved slowly and methodically, but in general she looked far younger than eighty. She'd been born in 1920 in the Westmann Islands and had had two husbands, one of whom had fought in the Spanish Civil War, and five children. Like her parents, Thórunn had been active in the trade union movement and in later years became an ardent feminist. She'd gone to the university in the sixties and again in the eighties, when she'd earned a masters in history based on her research on women
fishers in the southeast of Iceland from 1697 to 1980. Growing up in a fishing community, she'd heard many stories about women who fished; one of her female ancestors had crewed with the famous Skipper Thurídur.