The Pirate Queen (37 page)

I'd told Tess soon after she arrived in Iceland that I'd felt
the call to change my name. Now I brought it up again, not sure whether to be firm in my decision or to ask advice.

“Well,” she said diplomatically. “It's your choice. A big choice, though.”

“Wilson's not right now,” I said. “I don't feel connected with it anymore.”

“But what about publishing? Isn't it too late to change your name? What will happen to your books? Won't it be confusing? What is this new name anyway?”

“I'll find it,” I said confidently, then paused. “Actually, I have no idea how.”

“Maybe it will find you . . .” She still seemed uncertain. “I've always known you as Wilson. I
liked
Wilson.”

But I noticed she was already using the past tense.

W
HEN WE
returned to Thórunn's apartment, we found that she had organized a small gathering for us. She'd asked three teenage girls who fished with their fathers to join us for soft drinks, cake, and cookies. Two were sisters, Gudrún and Erla Thorsdóttir, and the third their friend Birna Tryggvad. Erla, sixteen, had broad shoulders, fluffy-fine light hair and a very freckled face. She wore an Adidas sport shirt and had several studs in her upper earlobe. Her elder sister Gudrún was also tall, with a serious round face and blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She spoke American English well and idiomatically though she'd never been out of Tálknafjördur. She planned to go to university the following year and eventually to study law. Birna, in a black ski cap pulled down over her ears and platform shoes the size of astronauts' moon boots, seemed less mature and prone to snorts of laughter.

All three girls fished during the summers with their fathers, mostly for cod, off the coastline of the Westfjords. “We go out early in the morning, set the lines and then come back and winch the fish up and cut their throats,” said Gudrún matter-of-factly. “It's a summer job for us, we've done it most of our lives. We only fish because our father has a boat. Girls who don't come from fishing families don't go out fishing. So I guess we're lucky; we're able to help our families and save money for ourselves. We have more money than the girls whose families don't have boats. But we wouldn't go on our own; we would never ask a man if we could go out on his boat.”

“You wouldn't want a boat yourselves?” I asked. “You wouldn't think of becoming a fisher yourself?”

Gudrún and Birna looked decisive. “No. Our brothers will take over from our fathers. We'll do other things.”

Erla, making her way through a large slice of cake, seemed slightly more wistful. “We're not strong enough to fish,” she said, and her elder sister confirmed it: “Men have more strength, and strength is needed for fishing.”

Tess and I couldn't help glancing at Erla and back at each other. Erla had told us she played basketball and soccer; she was about five foot eight and had shoulders like a linebacker.

Thórunn poured everyone more Fanta Orange and urged more cake on us. “But your aunt—your father's sister,” she said to Erla and Gudrún, “she fishes for a living.”

Erla perked up. “Yes, she's strong.”

Gudrún shook her blond head. “Our aunt wouldn't fish if she wasn't part of the family business,” she explained to us. “Our grandfather had eight children and all of them had four to six children, so we're a big part of the population of the village. His company has eight boats. But our aunt usually goes out fishing
with her boyfriend,” she added. “Some women might fish
before
they get married, but hardly any afterward, when they have children.”

Tess coughed slightly. “You know, strength isn't the only thing. When I first started as a carpenter's apprentice, when I was twenty-two, I was surrounded by young men twice as strong as me, who could pick up heavy objects without blinking an eye. Because I was physically smaller and weaker, I had to learn other ways of lifting and carrying. I had to use my head. As the years went on, I saw these guys' backs go out. By the time we were all forty, many of them were on painkillers just to get through the day. Now they were interested in learning ways to lift and carry that didn't put such a strain on their bodies. I found I was no longer physically weaker than most of them.”

The girls looked at her solemnly, but perhaps with some skepticism. At sixteen, at eighteen, it's almost impossible to imagine being forty. Besides, fishing wasn't how they imagined spending their adult lives.

When we'd finished with the cake and Fanta Orange, all of us gathered at the apartment's big picture window that looked down over the village and the harbor. The girls lovingly pointed out the different boats pulled up at the wharf; of course they recognized each one.

“That's a good boat. That's
our
boat,” said Erla.

I
T WAS
a mild, sunny day in Stokkseyri, a village of perhaps a couple hundred souls. Tess and I had made our way safely back over the high mountains and across the Breidafjord, a ferry journey of four hours. We'd then driven south, circling around Reykjavík down to Iceland's south coast. The tide was out and
jagged volcanic rock stretched far offshore. A reek of sea wrack and bird guano pulsed in the morning sun. A sea wall had been built along the shore and behind it sheltered houses, some covered with stucco and some with rusty galvanized cladding. There was a processing plant that looked permanently closed, and a feeling that the little settlement had seen better days. I asked at the gas station for the house of Thurídur Formadur, and at first the attendant looked quite surprised. He led me outside and pointed down the road.

Although I'd been hearing about Skipper Thurídur ever since I arrived in Iceland, I didn't expect much in the way of a memorial. In fact, I was prepared for a few stones to mark the foundation of her fishing shack. Instead, along the road that ran through the village, we found a tiny, well-tended house that one of Beatrix Potter's characters could have inhabited, constructed of dry-wall volcanic rock with a steeply angled turf roof that fit snugly over the walls. There was a small window set into the wall, and a black-painted door with a high sill. Above the door was a wooden sign with the words carved into it by hand: “Thurídur's Cabin.” The door was only about four and a half feet tall; you had to duck to enter. Inside were three beds, one after the next, on each side, with a little ventilating hole in the center of the roof. In olden times, I knew from having visited Gudríd's farm at Glaumbær, Icelanders didn't have tables or chairs, because of the lack of wood. They sat, slept, and even ate meals in their beds. Very frequently two people shared a mattress.

Around the back of the little house was a sod wall, and to the side was a stone bench near a weather-proof plaque with a drawing of Thurídur, wearing a jacket and top hat, carrying a riding whip and looking like a young George Sand. Under the drawing was what seemed to be a short biography and a history of fishing off the south coast. My grasp of written Icelandic was improving slightly; I could make out the fact that in 1890 there were forty-six cabins like this in Stokkseyri. This was the only one remaining; it had been refurbished and maintained as both an example of how fisher folk lived in the old days, but also as a monument to Skipper Thurídur.

Thurídur's cabin

Sitting outside on the bench, I began to draw a picture of the little house. Out at sea the waves whipped up a froth. You'd have to be a good sailor, not just lucky, to navigate these shores and bring a boat in through these black, knife-sharp reefs. You'd have to have been a good sailor, too, to fish in the Breidafjord, which was no protected narrow inlet, but a great, rough sound.

Could a woman be recognized as a good sailor? “Devillish” is what the Orcadians called Janet Forsyth, while Annie Norn was bewitched. Some of the Irish—not her victims—may have praised Grace O'Malley; the English were more ambivalent: She was called “a woman that hath impudently passed the part of womanhood,” but also “a most famous femynyne sea capten.” Icelanders seemed far more accepting of their seafaring women.
Of Gunna the Footless who became a boat builder, of Halldóra Ólafsdóttir, who competed against her brothers and would only have women on her crew, of Rósamunda Sigmundsdóttir, well-formed and amazingly strong, who could really haul in the catch, of Gudrún Jónsdóttir, who thrived on rough seas and used to say, “I'll take the rudder, boys,” and of Skipper Thurídur, the greatest of them all—of all these women they said, “They're Icelanders, they're ancestors; they are my family.”

CHAPTER XVI

SEAWIM

Tjøme, Norway

The romance of the sea, that's what you're suffering from. You'll have to stop reading all those adventure stories about the exploits of seawim and stick to books for boys instead. Then your dreams will be more realistic. No real menwim want to go to sea.

—Gerd Brantenberg,
Egalia's Daughters

I
N
1864 Sven Foyn invented the automatic harpoon gun. He was a Tønsberg boy, and so it wasn't surprising that much of the basement floor of the Tønsberg Museum was devoted to the full arsenal of lethal weapons used to slaughter and process whales. From primitive spears to stationary harpoon guns with a powerful charge, from flensing knives to old pots used for boiling the blubber, everything was here except the whale.

I was visiting the museum with Gerd Brantenberg, a Norwegian writer and old friend, who had a house nearby, on the island of Tjøme in the Oslofjord. I'd flown to Oslo from Reykjavík, and had taken the train to Tønsberg, looking forward to some days of rest at Gerd's house, where I could swim and sail, before heading up the northern coast on the steamer for my final voyage.

Tønsberg is one of Norway's oldest towns; the famous Oseberg ship, from approximately 820
A.D
., was excavated from a Viking burial mound nearby. For over a hundred years Tønsberg was a whaling port as well. In addition to the whaling exhibits (large and lovingly maintained, in contrast to the exhibit at the maritime museum in Oslo, which was modest and discreetly captioned only in Norwegian, in deference to the sensibilities of international visitors), the Tønsberg Museum had a floor called “The Seaman's Life” full of colorful objects collected from the seven seas: carved curios of wood from the Far East, jade from China, ivory from Africa; conches; stuffed parrots, models of Chinese junks; Japanese dolls in kimonos, Kente cloth, balsawood rafts. Even through the glass of the display cases there was a faint tang of market haggle on the timbered wharves of exotic ports.

Gerd's father, a doctor, had shipped out on a whaling expedition to the southern ocean for a season in 1946. The war and the German occupation of Norway had just ended; he left behind a wife and two little girls. The doctor worked on the big ship, “the Cooker.” The smaller boats did the hunting and harpooning, and then would bring the whale back to the large ship to be boiled down. “When he came home,” Gerd said, “he had a suitcase full of presents. There was flowered cloth from Cape Town, I remember. My mother made the bolt into dresses and we always called them the African dresses.” The little girls could hardly believe what he told them about New York. “The lights were on there twenty-four hours. In the middle of the night it was as bright as day.”

Gerd's father had a friend who was a radio operator on a tanker. When the girls were growing up, he used to bring them presents from all over the globe. He was her father's age, but he
fell in love with Gerd. When she was twenty, he suggested that she go with him on his ship, a Swedish tanker, and help him with his work and see the world. Gerd's father was incensed. “He said, ‘The only women who go to sea are whores,'” Gerd told me, leaning against a display of sextants and compasses. “That was enough for me. I slammed the door when I left.”