One May afternoon, Barbara Sjoholm set off in a launch called the Very Likely, from Roonagh Pier on Clew Bay in Ireland. She was headed for Clare Island, where the Pirate Queen, Grace O’Malley, had been born and where one of her castles still stood. Four months later, Sjoholm stood on the docks in Tromsø, Norway, high above the Arctic Circle, watching the coastal steamers come and go. In between, she voyaged on everything from tourist boats to local ferries to ships crossing the Norwegian Sea.

Her pilgrimage in search of stories of women and the sea took her many places entirely off the beaten path. One such place was the almost forgotten village of Whitehall, on Stronsay Island in the Orkney Archipelago, where the herring fleets had once employed thousands of men and women to gut and pack the herring. Another forgotten place was Husavik, a far island of the Faroes, where Sjoholm discovered the story of Gudrid, a ship owner and merchant, and one of the wealthiest women of the Middle Ages. Sjoholm traveled all over Iceland, including a village on a remote bay in the Westfjords where she interviewed an eighty-year-old maritime historian about women fishers past and present. She also traveled to a tiny spot called Drag in Norway to find out about the nineteenth-century Sami fisherwoman, Trouser-Beret.

Traveling far from the usual tourist destinations, Barbara Sjoholm encountered local people like Jim Robertson, the owner of a fudge factory who is a descendent of Christian Robertson, an Orkney shipping merchant, and Dorothy Thomsen, a former ship’s hostess, with a wealth of stories about shipboard life in the sixties. Sjoholm also retraces the route of the coastal steamer up the Norwegian coast, where she herself once worked–as a dishwasher–as a young woman.

The above map shows her travels in the wild and stormy North Atlantic and along the coastlines of the great maritime countries of northern Europe.