In the year 1530, a young princess was born by the sea to a powerful Irish chieftain and dreamed of traveling far from home. Her name was Grace O’Malley.
The story goes that when Grace was a little girl, she wanted to sail with her father on a trip to Spain and see the ports of a foreign country. But he only told her that her long red hair would catch in the ship’s riggings. Besides, wouldn’t she be happier staying home with her brothers and waiting for him to return?
In response to this, Grace just cut all her hair off that night and demanded again at breakfast to be brought along. Despite her father’s embarrassment with his impulsive little bald-headed princess, she got nicknamed Gráinne Mhaol, meaning bald or cropped-hair (Anglicized into Grace O’Malley), and pretty soon the name stuck.
Grace grew up clever, bold, quick to learn and awfully pretty, and at sixteen she married another Irish chief, with whom she had three rowdy red-headed children. She lived as the lady of the land for some twenty years and prospered.
But in 1565, Grace’s husband was murdered in an ambush by one of the enemy clans, and she retreated back to her family’s lands to recuperate. It was there that she fell in love with a shipwrecked sailor and shortly took up with him, only to lose him as well, less than year after her husband’s death, to another warring family, the McMahons.
That was when something in Grace snapped. The proud ruler who had reigned peacefully for two decades had been stepped on too many times, and the young princess who’d taken a knife to her own hair just for a taste of adventure emerged once again.
Grace organized a group of loyal soldiers and led them in an attack against the McMahon family at Doona Castle. It was a bloody night for the castle residents, and by the next morning, Grace had earned herself a new nickname – The Dark Lady of Doona.
A year later, she was still unsatisfied with her revenge on the McMahon family and attacked them again, this time seizing and taking the castle for herself. Her reign as the sea queen was just beginning.
Grace now owned castles from her first two marriages, her ancestral home and the castle at Doona, all bordering the sea, and she used this string of fortresses to control the British waters. No one was safe from her network of pirates. English, French, Spanish and especially the traitorous Irish who had once tried to oppose her on land – all were captured, raided and pillaged by this woman-led army.
One story even tells of a Turkish boat attacking Grace’s flagship where she was resting one day after giving birth. Her response? She handed her son to a nearby maid, put some pants on and barged onto the deck with two blunderbusses, immediately killing two leading officers and scattering the Turkish command.
(She won another ship that day.)
However, by 1593, Grace had a new enemy. It wasn’t just the private ships sailing the open sea anymore; it was the English empire itself, under the surging power of Queen Elizabeth I.
Elizabeth was tired of losing trade and opportunity to the Irish pirate and set bounties out on Grace’s sons. When they were taken captive and brought to London, Grace sailed into town soon after, intent on getting back what was hers.
The English court expected a stupid, grubby pirate to come begging for her children, only to be executed, but Grace never failed to disappoint. She strolled into Greenwich Palace in a fine gown and spoke to the Queen only in Latin, much to the disappointment of some lesser-educated nobles.
After much discussion with the Queen, Grace walked out of the palace that afternoon not only with her own life and the lives of her sons, but with the guarantee that Elizabeth would remove English officials from Grace’s neck of Ireland and stop interfering with her piracy.
Grace remained Sea Queen of the English Channel for the next ten years, leaving behind her a dynasty of seafarers and the legacy of a beloved Irish folk hero. She died in 1603, the same year as her rival, Elizabeth.