Grace O’Malley – ‘She-King of the Irish Seas’
The feminist folklore of Grace O’Malley begins in her childhood, when she begged her chieftain/pirate father to take her along on an expedition to Spain. When he refused, saying ‘her hair would get caught in the ropes’, Grace chopped off her mane. Bam! From now on, she was known as ‘Granuaile Mhaol’ , Irish for ‘Grace with the cropped hair’.
Grace was born in 1530 into a very powerful clan that ruled over the coastline of western Ireland. I assume that she received a formal education, since she spoke Latin with Queen Elizabeth during their legendary meeting in 1593. But we’ll get to that in a second! First, we watch Grace grow into a fearless leader of pirates, inheriting the enormous O’Malley fleet after her father’s death (while bypassing her brother). Yes, she got married at 16 and had three children, but that didn’t stop Grace from pirating and plundering. There is a story of Grace wrapped up in a blanket right after giving birth, firing a blunderbuss at merciless attackers of her ship. Cue Beyoncé singing: “Strong enough to bear the children, then get back to business.”
After her husband was killed in an ambush by a rival clan, Grace fell in love – how romantic! – with a shipwrecked sailor. But when he too got killed, the furious pirate queen led a brutal attack on his killer’s castle at Doona and murdered everybody in it. ‘The Dark Lady of Doona’ became one of her monikers. Her third husband was boring, so she locked him out of their castle, stuck her head out the window and shouted: “I dismiss you, Richard Burke”. End of story. In the mean time, Grace continued to seize English vessels and their cargo, much to the chagrin of Queen Elizabeth I of England who had been trying to bring the Irish clans under English rule. The fight was on.
Grace and Elizabeth actually had a lot in common. Both were warrior queens and strategic geniuses; both were women surviving in a men’s world. But while Elizabeth sent her ‘sea dogs’ – privateers like her beloved Francis Drake – to do her plundering for her, Grace proudly and aggressively led her own battles. When the two queens finally met, there was mutual respect. The Queen of England made a proposal: any captured members of Grace’s family would be freed, if the pirate queen promised not to join any Irish rebellions.
Grace agreed and set off back to Ireland… where she promptly joined an Irish revolt and continued to live a long, rebellious life. She died in 1603, the same year as Elizabeth; their fates intertwined till the very end.
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