Voices that will not be drowned

From treacherous selkies to guiding lights, why are there so many myths about women at sea? By Charlotte Runcie

‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea,” wrote Samuel Johnson. It is a test of spirit: venturing out on the waves, pitting yourself against nature’s strongest force, will either kill you or change you forever.

There are other things that change you forever. When I was expecting my first baby two years ago, I felt caught between adolescence and adulthood: there were new responsibilities looming before me, none of which I knew how to navigate, and I was scared. I was reading the literature of great sea adventures, listening to recordings of old sea shanties and looking at paintings of ships tossed on stormy waves.

Something of the seagoing experience chimed with what I was struggling to face. Even though Johnson saw the sea as a test of manhood, the risky adventures of these brave men felt like the closest thing to this uneasy new experience of womanhood that I was having, too. Everything was shifting in my life as I was preparing for pain and the unknown, and I didn’t have my sea legs yet. I wanted to find out how the sea has shaped our attempts to understand ourselves – men and women. How does the sea make humans what we are?

Women in real life haven’t traditionally been sailors, of course, because sailing in the days before the push-button navy was uniquely hard physical labour. But as soon as you start looking for women of the sea in art, writing and music, they are everywhere.

What struck me was that, so often, where women are mentioned in sea stories, they are supernatural. They are selkies, and sirens, goddesses and witches, mermaids and monsters, capable of superhuman feats of protection and destruction, terrifying or erotic or both. In the Odyssey, the sea witch Calypso keeps Odysseus prisoner as her sex slave. To survive the Sirens and their deadly song, Odysseus must block up his crews’ ears with wax while he lashes himself to the ship’s mast to stop the music from beckoning them all away.

In the Beowulf poem, the sterner test of Beowulf as a warrior isn’t the monster Grendel, but

Grendel’s mother, a great and terrible beast lurking in the depths of a sea cave. Morgan le Fay, the witch of Arthurian legend, was said to have conjured mirages of fairy castles in the sea around coastlines to confuse sailors and invite them to their deaths. In “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”, TS Eliot’s “sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown” tempt men to linger in the chambers of the sea, awaiting their own drowning.

I followed linguistic trails like shining wakes. The French words for sea and mother, la mer and la mère, sound alike. Sailors were men, but their ships were female; ships are always referred to as “she”. The figuring of vessels as women is an inverted image of women as vessels, I realised, as the weeks of early pregnancy ticked by and I felt constantly seasick, despite being firmly on dry land.

Some sea-women are maternal protectors. The Pleiades, the navigational sailing stars, are a constellation of seven mythical sisters, glittering night women showing sailors which way to go. In the Odyssey, Athena is a helper and guide for the men in their adventures on the water. Aphrodite was the Greek goddess of fertility and the open ocean, worshipped as the protector of femininity and the defender of harbours. She was born from the sea in a clam shell.

Later, the Virgin Mary took on a similar cultural role to Aphrodite as spiritual protector of ships and sailors. She has been known as Stella Maris, star of the sea, and glazed into stained glass surrounded by ships. The 16thcentury Spanish painter Alejo Fernández painted Mary as La Virgen de los Navegantes (The

Virgin of the Navigators), protecting the Christian colonisers of the Americas under her mantle as sailing ships float on calm waters below.

In the 19th century, a real-life woman was glorified almost to the extent of deification by the Victorians. Grace Darling, a woman in her 20s, was the daughter of lighthousekeepers off the coast of Northumberland, and during a violent storm she and her father bravely rescued some stranded survivors of a nearby shipwreck.

In the clamour to hail her as a heroine, her father’s role was all but forgotten. Artists painted

Grace as either in charge of the mission or alone, overcoming the waters like old images of

Aphrodite and Stella Maris. Wordsworth wrote a poem in her honour, describing her as “A guardian Spirit sent from pitying Heaven,/ In woman’s shape”.

Grace was bombarded with letters begging for locks of her hair and proposing marriage. Under strain, she died just a few years later.

Some of the characterisations of sea women highlight a few old stereotypes in suggesting the traits that women and the sea might have in common: changeability, danger, beauty, and a physical rhythm linked to the moon. Literature by men, in particular, has shown sea

The Virgin Mary inherited her role as protector of ships from Aphrodite