The Pirate Queen (40 page)

Women carrying fish from boats, northern Norway, late 1800s

Male transgressions against gender roles, Lars reminded me, were actually punished more heavily than female boundary blurring. Men whose wives were ill or dead were permitted to do housekeeping, childcare, and other women's work. But if a man stayed unmarried or chose farm work over the sea, he became a laughingstock, was called an old maid, a weakling, a good-for-nothing who should wear a skirt. Women were less punished by social sanctions and verbal scorn, which only underlines the fact that labor traditionally associated with men has much more prestige, no matter who does it.

Lars and I compared notes on Beret. At the University of
Bergen library I'd tracked down an oversize travel book with engravings of dramatic cliffs and fjords published in 1882, at a time when Norway was drawing tourists the way Alaska does now. The author, traveling by ship up north, mentions the Lapp community of Tysfjord, and a remarkable woman who belonged to that group, twenty or thirty years prior. The author writes that he heard she was the skipper of her own boat, with her husband as first mate, and that she was accustomed to wear men's clothing, hence her name, Buks-Beret, or Trouser-Beret. A later reference in a Norwegian encyclopedia of the 1920s refers to Buks-Beret as “the pride of the Lapps.”

I'd also discovered that in the early part of this century a young woman named Inga Bjørnson, the niece of one of Norway's most famous authors, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, used to come and stay with her mother's sister and her pastor husband at the parish Evenes, one or two fjords from Drag. Inga, an adventurous girl, became interested in collecting stories about the local Sami people and in 1916 published a small book called
Dundor-Heikka,
or
Tales of the Lapps in Their Own Words.
It was mostly written in dialect and I found it difficult to wade through, but I did find two chapters about an expedition Inga Bjørnson took in search of the descendants of the famous Trouser-Beret. Inga had heard the tales about Beret; she knew she was a boat captain who rowed to the Lofoten fishing. “It wasn't difficult for Beret to find a crew to go with her,” she wrote, “because she was so lucky with the sea. She could make the waves go quiet.” After much searching, Inga tracked down the granddaughter of Beret, who told her many stories: how good-looking and strong Beret was, how she rode a white horse, how in addition to being a captain, she was also a peddler, a midwife, a butcher, and a shooter of bears. “She was better than a
man,” said Beret's granddaughter, adding that Beret lived in a loving relationship with her husband and six children.

“I have good news for you,” said Lars, after we'd been talking hard for an hour or two. “I discovered that the great-great-grandniece of Beret lives just across the fjord, in Kjøpsvik. Her name is Hilgunn Pedersen and she's the town's local historian. I called her and told her about you, and she said that if you wanted to come over to Kjøpsvik, she'd tell you all she knows about Buks-Beret. And if you want, she'll take you to the place Beret lived.”

I immediately agreed. Not only was I delighted by the chance to talk to a relative of Beret, but leaving Drag also meant I wouldn't have to listen to Absolut Vodka for sixty percent of the evening.

“W
ELL, THE
first thing to understand is that Buks-Beret didn't live on the Tysfjord at all,” said Hilgunn Pedersen. “She lived on the Efjord and that's where my father and his father were born, and I was born there, too.” To many of us, one fjord above the Arctic Circle may be just like another, but to a historian with Hilgunn's love of facts, not to mention family pride, such a mistake was grave. That Trouser-Beret had been claimed by the Tysfjord Sami had opened the way for other serious errors about the legendary character to creep in, for instance, that Beret's husband went fishing with her, as her first mate.

“He never went to sea,” said Hilgunn. “He was from inland Sweden, a carpenter who learned to be a boat builder. He wasn't used to the sea. Besides, he had to stay home and take care of the children while she was out fishing for months at a time.”

We were sitting around a low table in Hilgunn's living
room, with a pot of coffee, papers, and books spread out before us. Sven, Hilgunn's housemate, eighty years old, leathery brown, and silent, sat watching TV in a recliner nearby. On the way from the ferry Hilgunn had managed to tell me some of their story. Sven and Hilgunn's late husband had worked together in the cement factory nearby. Sven had nursed his ailing wife for six years; after she'd died, he started to help Hilgunn nurse her bedridden husband, who was ill for eleven years. Now Hilgunn and Sven lived together, and were planning to move this fall to the Canary Islands.

Books on learning Spanish lay here and there around the room, and a computer sat in the midst of piles of genealogical records and papers. Hilgunn was in her sixties, blond and lively, with wide cheekbones and curious eyes. Hilgunn's grandfather was full Sami; she hadn't realized she had Sami blood until she eventually went to school. It wasn't, in the fifties in Norway, something of which to be particularly proud. Now Hilgunn is the unofficial local historian and genealogist, who knows an enormous amount about how the Sami lived and who was related to whom. Like Thorúnn Magnúsdóttir in Iceland, she based her research on old tax and property records, the bound volumes of marriages and christenings. She'd become a pro at reading wavery old script, which is how Lars Børge Myklevoll at the Árran Center had first come to know her.

“People just repeat the same old stories. If they bothered to look, they'd easily find out the truth. The records are there. People just don't want to do the research,” she complained good-naturedly.

She spoke English very well, and I was glad, for the stream of history pouring out would have been a chore to get down fast enough while translating from Norwegian to my language.
Although I'd learned Norwegian in my twenties and could read it well, it always took some time to get up to speed when I visited the country.

According to Hilgunn, Trouser-Beret was born Beret Johanna Paulsdatter in 1794 in Kvæfjord, not far from Harstad. Her father was a nomad reindeer herder, who had followed the traditional yearly migration of the reindeer over the mountains from Sweden to the fjords and islands of Norway and back again. At some point, he decided to stay in Norway and raise his family there. Beret came to the Efjord with Peder Thomassen in 1824, and she died there in 1868. She had seven children (one died very young).

Every winter she went fishing with a Sami crew, and apparently everyone was eager to row with her, for it seemed she was able to quell the waves with a look. They said she was the most capable in the whole fjord and gave orders in a way that they all felt scared of her, with one hand on the tiller and the other on an oar, rowing backward. She wore a full suit of skins. When she traveled as a peddler, she wore Sami dress and mounted a white horse. She helped at many births, both animal and human. She owned a mill for grinding as well. “She was said to be clean and reliable, and to always keep her word.
What she said was akin to Amen,
” Hilgunn finished up.

“There were other women who fished around her, who supported themselves by fishing,” Hilgunn added. “I've run across them in the records. There was another one they called a Buks-Beret around here. She was Birgit Pedersen, a widow with a daughter. It was a derogatory name of course; all around the north of Norway, if a girl got out of line, was too tomboyish, that's what they called her: Trouser-Beret. I was called that myself. But let's go out for a drive; we'll look at where Birgit Pedersen lived.”

It was about eight at night, still full daylight, but with the look of light filtered through ice cubes. The granite mountains around us slipped iron toes into the blue-gray fjord waters, and everything shivered. The landscape was alive. Hilgunn knew the history, and the geology, and the culture of the Sami, how they spent the winters in the outer fjords and summers at the fjord bottoms. They didn't have a concept of owning land, and for a long time coexisted with the Norwegians without sharing their values. The Sami continued to dress as before, to speak Sami and to make by hand many of their possessions. Because of their nomadism, the Sami were often doubly taxed, by the Norwegians and the Swedish governments. The earliest written reference to the Sea Sami is from 1584. It's an account of driving off a Swedish tax collector. Their nomadic life didn't fit with the tightening of the borders and with the eventual divisions of the North into separate countries. The reasons for suppressing the language and culture of the Sami came to be ideological, but for centuries the two peoples, Scandinavians and Sami, had lived side by side.

Hilgunn had me in the front seat; she spoke nonstop. Sven sat in back, preoccupied with his own thoughts. He hadn't said a word since I'd met him more than three hours earlier. The landscape was pearl gray and pewter blue in the lingering twilight. The white of the stunted birches was unearthly. Without sunshine, the North is dreamy, refrigerated, ancient. We stopped at a small bay where Birgit Pedersen had lived and fished with her daughter Benedikte. “Of course there were women fishing all along the coast,” said Hilgunn as we got out of the car and looked across to the house where the women had lived. “They're in the tax records. If you were a widow—and many women were—you had to live somehow. There were
other women who lived alone, or never married, or who fished with their husbands.”

We got back into the car, Sven still inscrutable. He had a large, beautiful hooked nose that, with his very brown skin, wrinkled yet also drawn tight over his face, made him look like an American Indian. I said to Hilgunn, “You said you fished as a girl. Who taught you?”

“Taught me?” she laughed. “I remember fishing at five years old. It was one of my first memories, how I managed to catch a fish, but it was too heavy for me to get in the boat; my father had to help. I was going out in a boat by myself and with my younger brother by the time I was ten. Sometimes we would go long distances. My father went to the Lofoten fishing in the winter. When I was fifteen my father asked me to go with him to Lofoten. We went for two weeks, then came home, then went out again. This was 1951. There were no other girls on boats. In the evening men from other boats would come by to look at the man who brought the girl fishing. I was a Buks-Beret. My biggest problem aside from the hard work—we had to haul the long lines of cod up by hand in those days—was peeing. There was just a bucket. Usually I waited till night. Luckily it got dark early. I envied Buks-Beret's
tissehornet,
her peeing horn. I used to hear that it had stayed in the family, but I don't know who has it.”

For this is also part of the Trouser-Beret legend, that Beret had a reindeer horn with a hole at one end attached to her belt, and when she felt nature's call on the boat, she would use it.

Back in Kjøpsvik, Hilgunn prepared sandwiches and we watched the news. There was a long story about an eighty-five-year-old man in Oslo who'd fought off a burglar. They interviewed the fellow from his hospital bed. “I told the boy who
attacked me that only one of us was getting away alive. That scared him. He didn't think I had it in me.”

Sven watched contentedly.

I
SPENT
the night in a pension a few blocks away from Hilgunn's house, and the next morning set out with Hilgunn and Sven to the Efjord, where Hilgunn had been born and where Beret had built a house.

Hilgunn turned out to be an amateur geologist as well, whose rock collection was now on display at the Kjøpsvik community center. The area around the Tysfjord is a kind of chalk, she told me, which means this region was once covered by a shallow sea. They're still finding fossils of fish and birds in the mountains. When we'd stop the car for a look and I'd pick up a piece of rock, Hilgunn would often say, this is malachite, or quartz, or there's copper in this, too. The mountains didn't look to me like chalk, but they were, ancient and full of caves. In some of the caves researchers had found strange undersea fish skeletons; in other caves archaeologists discovered rock drawings from thousands of years ago.

Since we'd begun our journey, Hilgunn had mentioned the dates when this tunnel was built, when that road was completed. Some were as recent as the last five or ten years. “Before the roads,” she said, “we traveled by boat. That was in my lifetime. Just imagine how people lived until fifty years ago.” Desolate as it looked, this landscape was deeply inhabited, though it took a guide to help me see it. Hilgunn was always pointing to a cleft in the rock and naming it, or telling me that here was the pass through which the Sami herded their reindeer. The landscape, too—bogs, rock with heather and moss, waterfalls, coastal pine
(some of the trees were short but five hundred years old), birch forests—was mysterious, nonhuman, crystallized into quartz.

We passed through a long tunnel and came out on the other side to the Efjord. The mountains in the distance were black, jagged, forbidding. This mountain chain between Norway and Sweden is called “the Keel” for it resembles the keel of a ship. The Sami had been famous for their shipbuilding craft; some say it was the Sami who built the longships that took the Vikings all over the world. Throughout the Tysford region, the Sami lived by boatbuilding from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, says A.W. Brøgger in
Viking Ships,
and the origins of their skill with boats goes back even farther. Old illustrations showed the Sami sewing their boats together with sinew, not hammering nails into them. Rock carvings from the Bronze Age suggest that the ancestors of the Sami had a boat culture; the boats depicted had ribs of wood and were skin-covered, usually with sealskin.