The Pirate Queen (36 page)

The remarkable history of Skipper Thurídur was part of Thórunn's dissertation, but there were other stories and accounts of women fishers from much earlier in Iceland's history. The only trouble was keeping Thórunn on track. Last evening she'd spent an hour telling me her adventures in China during the 1995 International Women's Conference in Beijing, and this morning she'd shown me a book she'd written on Romania, as well as her collection of Bulgarian art books—all before I'd had my first cup of coffee.

I nibbled at my flatbread and opened my notebook. I'd read a précis in Danish of Thórunn's dissertation on Icelandic women fishers, but was eager for the details. “Last night,” I began, “you said you'd used parish registers, court cases, tax records, the census in Iceland, local history, family genealogies, and oral sources.”

“Don't forget the Annals of the Bishops,” she said. “That is how I found some of the earliest material. The bishops of Iceland had to keep records, you see, and for instance, in 1554 one of them writes about a fishing boat capsizing. Nine men and three women drowned. In 1640 there is a note in the annals about another boat sinking with eleven men. The owner of the boat is listed as ‘Katrina.'

“And of course one of the early fishers from the north was Björg Einarsdóttir, born in 1716. She was the daughter of a priest, but the times were very difficult. In that century the weather was often cold and wet so the crops failed, and then there were eruptions and earthquakes. Her parents sent her to a
farm in Eyjafjördur and she ended up living there most of her life. She had a boat. She was a poet. She had a foreign lover, a man left onshore by a ship from another country. She wrote him a poem about his poor rowing:

       
You have to row better, my dear.

       
You shouldn't fear slamming

       
Your oars against the sea

       
Tomorrow it will recover.

“When she was old, she was reduced to begging. She rowed her lover out to another foreign ship and sent him on his way. Those were very terrible times,” Thórunn said pensively. “Do you know Iceland's history? Do you know about the famine years? What about the government?”

“Of course I'm curious about everything to do with Iceland,” I said a little nervously. “But what I'd really love is to hear about the women. I'd love to hear about Skipper Thurídur.”

Thórunn fetched a book that seemed to be a full-length biography of Skipper Thurídur. “It's all here.”

“Yes, but in Icelandic.”

“Such a pity. You speak Norwegian. A year or two of study and you'd be able to read Icelandic. Then you could read our sagas, the history. You really should know more of our history.” She waggled a finger and smiled. “But in the meantime, I'll tell you the story of Thurídur Formadur . . .”

T
HURÍDUR
E
INARSDÓTTIR
was born in 1777 on the south coast, near Stokkseyri, the daughter of a skipper and farmer at Stéttir Farm. Her brother Bjarni started fishing and Thurídur
begged to go as well. In those days women in Stokkseyri often rowed out with men, but it was less common for girls. One day when she was eleven, her brother was ill, so her father took her out instead.

As the biography tells it:

As soon as her tackle hit bottom, a fish took the hook; it was haddock. Thurídur began to pull it in and did not lack courage, but things would not go smoothly. She was inexperienced, had little stamina, and her sea mitts were an obstacle. For a while, either Thurídur hauled in the line, or the haddock pulled it out through her hands. Then one of her mitts fell off; she seemed to get a better grip then and threw off the other mitt as well without letting go of the line. The haddock began to tire, and Thurídur finally got it. She immediately paid the line out again, and another haddock took the hook. It went the same way with this one as the first. So it went time after time. As soon as Thurídur's line reached bottom, another fish was on the hook. Actually, she hardly had the strength for haddock then, but she quickly learned a technique for hauling in that kept her from tiring without giving the fish enough line to get loose, and she always got it in the end. Her father saw that allowing her to fish was worthwhile, as she caught more than most others. He therefore had leather clothing as well as sea mitts made that fit her, and he allowed her to keep half of what she caught that spring and the next two springs after that.

This was the beginning of Thurídur's fifty-year career as a fisher and skipper. It was also the beginning of her reputation
for luck, as well as for wearing men's clothing. After her father died when she was fourteen, she began to row for her brother, who had inherited the family's boat and farm.

This was regarded as a novelty, that a girl under twenty would be treated the same as full-grown men when the catch was divided. However, the deckhands thought this was fine because Thurídur both caught more fish than anyone else and was quickest and most energetic at everything, and then she was especially confident and clever at finding solutions, deliberative and clear-headed, so that people on the ship often referred matters to her if a lot rode on the outcome, and she was deemed to find quick and good solutions.

Her prowess as a rower was no mean feat off the south coast of Iceland. Although the fishing was rich because of a shelf extending offshore, there were no harbors. That particular coastline was dangerously jagged with volcanic reefs, sharp as black scalpels. The fishing was usually done in the winter and spring, before the planting on the farms began, and a storm, especially a snow or ice storm, could descend at any time. Nothing could be seen, hands turned to ice at the oars, and the reefs were invisible until they sliced the hull. No one could stay out in such weather; worse yet was the return to land. The boats were heavy with fish, and the waves crashing into shore made it difficult to maneuver the closer to land they came. Many skippers tried to stay out fishing as long as the weather held, but that meant they often didn't get back in time. So often the boats overturned close to shore, in full view of those who stood there ready to help unload the catch.

This is what happened eventually to Thurídur's brother, Bjarni. When his boat capsized offshore, he thrust his axe head into the bottom of the boat and managed to hold on as he shouted for help. But the seas were too rough and the wind too strong. Like so many others, he drowned as those who stood on shore watched helplessly. Thurídur's “luck” had much to do with caution. After rowing for her brother for some years, she went to work for a skipper called Jón Thórdarson, known for his large catches and his bravado at tempting fate.

Jón was known to stay rather a long time at sea and be daring in how much he loaded his ship; but Thurídur was cautious in this as in other matters and had the integrity to tell him what she thought. But he was always amenable to reason, and he usually followed her suggestions. He noticed that Thurídur always urged a timely return to shore, and that later was not better. It also happened that Jón reproached deckhands for something, but not with the tact or reasonableness that seemed appropriate. Thurídur then always answered on their behalf and smoothed everything over. From this, they got used to letting Thurídur answer for them whenever necessary. Thurídur was also fun to be around, talkative and uplifting at sea or ashore. Word got around that Thurídur would be a good skipper.

And this is what happened. She was given a boat in 1816, when she was thirty-nine, and was its skipper for fourteen years; in 1830 the fish off Stokkseyri were scarce, and she moved, as did others, to Thorlákshöfn, where she skippered another boat for ten years. She retired from fishing in 1840, at sixty-three, but continued farming and lived to the great age of eighty-six.

Like most women who fished, Thurídur wore pants and a shirt under traditional outerwear made of water-repellent sealskin. At that time in Iceland it was illegal for a woman to wear men's clothing on land, so she always switched to a dress when she was in public. On one occasion, however, after a robbery had taken place in the district, Thurídur was called in front of the local magistrate to testify. Not that she was a witness, but the judge thought she might know something about the perpetrators. She'd been tarring her boat, and hadn't had time to change from her male attire. She apologized to the judge, and he told her, “I have already heard that you go about in men's clothes every day. However, to do so, you must apply for a permit, and I shall obtain this permit for you if you give me a clue about who the robbers were at Kambur.”

Although Thurídur feared for her safety if she testified, she was able to identify the stitching on a pair of shoes left behind at the robbery, which led to the capture and imprisonment of the thieves. From then on she wore men's clothing in public, though one source says that three times she was maligned for doing so. Each time she sued the men for slander, and each time she won.

Thórunn's grandfather, Jón Jónsson, had been one of her first sources for family stories about Skipper Thurídur, for his mother and grandmother had both worked for Thurídur. His grandmother Ingibjörg had been a deckhand on Thurídur's boat for sixteen seasons. “My grandfather was a good historian,” Thórunn told me. “He always got the names of people. Women were never just wives or mothers to him. He wrote down their names and what they did. Ingibjörg and Thurídur were very close, and Ingibjörg lived with Thurídur before she married. My grandfather told stories of storms at sea. There was a terrible storm once and two boats were out; the boat with all the
women rowing got back into shore while the other boat went under and everyone drowned. Many stories were told about this and other storms and perils. My grandfather said he believed the women's accounts more than the men's. Why? Men are so often drunk when they tell about their sea voyages.” What was true, what everybody says, is that Skipper Thurídur was counted a very lucky captain and many people wanted to crew with her.

Skipper Thurídur was an unusual woman, but apparently very attractive to men. She had many offers of marriage, and probably several lovers, one of whom gave her a child. Sadly, the little girl died at age three. Thurídur married once, when she was in her early forties. According to Thórunn, the young man, only twenty-three, crewed on her boat and said he'd leave if she didn't marry him. “So she did, because she needed him on the boat, but it didn't work out and they divorced. All of them wanted to take away her independence, but she ended all the relationships without any rancor.

“To appreciate living with a woman of so many talents, men have to be great themselves,” Thórunn, herself divorced, added tartly.

A
FEW
hours later Tess, who had gone out for a walk as I took notes, returned and we set off for the sports center that every Icelandic town has. Here in Tálknafjördur a windscreen protected the outdoor pool and gave an illusory sense of heat. As we settled into the embrace of the pool, cerulean-tinted, slightly sulfuric, with the dry brown mesas looming around us, and a bright azure sky above, I felt I'd been transported to a Palm Springs resort. Floating on my back, in spa comfort, I couldn't
help thinking of the desperately hard lives most Icelanders had lived up until only a few decades ago. I told Tess what I'd learned about Thurídur, and how I was trying to understand the large number of women who'd gone fishing in Iceland for almost three hundred years. There had been women fishing—women in their eighties!—in the Breidafjord until the last twenty years or so. So many names, and so many stories of luck, skill, and courage. Tess listened as I enumerated them, and laughed at one point.

Skipper Thurídur

“You said there was a woman called
Salome
? That's a change. I thought half the women in Iceland were called Gudrun and the other half were called Gudrid. I keep wondering, how do they keep everybody straight?”

I'd been muddled, too, though now I was getting more used to it. Still, when Thórunn had brought out her family's genealogy book, full of variations and repetitions of the same names, I'd found myself asking, “If no one has the same last name as her grandfather or father, much less relatives who went further back, how do Icelanders know who their relatives are?”

Thórunn had looked at me strangely. “We
know
who we are,” she said. “We're a family of fishers, historians, and musicians.”