Review of “Woman, Captain, Rebel” by Margaret Willson, pub. Sourcebooks 2023

[sheenaghpugh]

Asleep but weather-awake
virile goddess and crew
 - from an anonymous contemporary verse about Thuridur

This is a biography of Thuridur Einarsdottir (1777-1863), an Icelandic fishing-boat captain who also farmed, traded and acted as a guide to travellers and tourists during her long life. In her time she was renowned, especially for her seamanship (in 27 years as captain she never lost a boat or a crew member) and not long after her death, Brynjulfur Jonsson, who had known her, wrote an account of her life. But later (male) historians, while not denying her seamanship and entrepreneurial intelligence, cast her dismissively as a troublemaking, slightly comical virago – indeed while seagoing fisherwomen had been fairly common in 18th and 19th-century Iceland, in the 20th century they were pushed out and the trade became wholly male. Thuridur fell out of common knowledge, a neglect this book aims to redress.

The ”troublemaker” epithet got attached to her because of her propensity for going to law to secure not only her rights but those of others she felt had been mistreated; she would not put up with injustice or bullying, of which there was a lot about in the dark days when Iceland was ruled fairly contemptuously by Denmark and seen as a sort of primitive colony. During Thuridur’s stint as a guide, Ida Pfeiffer, the famous 19th-century Austrian tourist, is one of her clients, and displays a typical middle-class West European superiority complex by marching straight into poor folk’s houses, without an invitation or a by-your-leave, to interrogate them on their way of life – one fairly itches to slap the woman and she is probably lucky Thuridur refrained from doing so. The reason Thuridur’s parish death record describes her, accurately, as “pauper and captain” is that she spent all her savings on a final court case to ensure that her disabled niece would receive the financial assistance she needed; she won the case, but in preventing someone else from dying a pauper she became one herself.

As for “virago”, that probably alluded to her style of dress. Most Icelandic seagoing women wore trousers at sea, for the good reason that they were a lot less cumbersome than long wool skirts, but Thuridur seems to have discarded skirts altogether except for church and grand occasions, for which she also wore a tail-coat and short top hat. There is no suggestion that she was gay; there were several men in her life and she had a child, who sadly died young. She simply seems to have preferred male attire, which considering how inconvenient female clothing was at the time is hardly surprising. Possibly many women would have, but few would have had the confidence and disregard of public opinion to go with their wishes.

Thuridur was famously “lucky” at the fishing, but less so on land.  Even though she was intelligent and enterprising, making a success of whatever she turned her hand to, something or someone always seemed to get in the way. In this she is rather like Grettir Asmundsson of the sagas, and indeed her story, with its close calls at sea, reverses of fortune and a vengeful family ghost called Mori, does read like a saga. And like them it is a page-turner; I defy anyone not to want to know what this resourceful, indomitable woman will be up to next. There is of course a long “my journey” preface, plus, at the end, “reading group notes” and an author interview, but they can all be ignored as usual, and on the plus side there are also thorough notes, a bibliography and an index. Not to mention a cracking story.