Tag: historical heroines

Queen Lakshmibai: India’s Joan of Arc

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“Being young, vigorous, and not afraid to show herself to the multitude, she gained a great influence over the hearts of the people. It was this influence, this force of character, added to a splendid and inspiring courage, that enabled her to offer a desperate resistance to the British…. Whatever her faults in British eyes may have been, her countrymen will ever believe that she was driven by ill-treatment into rebellion; that her cause was a righteous cause. To them she will always be a heroine.”
  — “History of the Indian Mutiny” by Sir John Kaye and Colonel George Malleson

The notion of a warrior woman, who leads the fight against occupying forces is something which quite a common trope of legend and lore worldwide. The family tree includes the likes of Boudicaa in Roman England, through Vietnam’s Trung Sisters, Martha Christina Tiahahu of Indonesia – and, of course, Joan of Arc in France.

Lakshmibai is far from unique in Indian history as a warrior woman. The line probably starts with Rudrama Devi, who reigned in her own right over the Kakatiya kingdom for three decades during the late 13th century. In terms of rebellion against the British, who began occupying parts of India from around 1757, Lakshmibai was preceded by Rani Velu Nachiyar. After Nachiyar’s husband was killed in 1772, she raised an army and allied with other monarchs to fight the British.

Half a century later, in 1828, Manikarnika Tambe was born – the girl who would become Rani Lakshmibai. Her mother died when Manu, as she was known, was still a toddler. She was therefore brought up more by her father, who worked for local ruler Baji Rao II. This may explain why her upbringing was non-traditional, Manu learning how to wield a sword, as well as archery and horsemanship. But barely after becoming a teenager, at the age of 13, she was married to the Maharaja of Jhansi, Raja Gangadhar Newalkar. As was tradition, she took a new name: Lakshmibai, in honour of the Hindu goddess of wealth, fortune and prosperity, Lakshmi.

She was not able to provide him with a heir, their only child dying while only a few months old. Instead, shortly before the Maharaja’s death in 1853, they adopted a son. And that’s where Lakshmibai’s problems with the British started. For the British East India Company refused to recognize the adopted son as heir to the throne, applying what was called the ‘Doctrine of Lapse’ and annexing the state of Jhansi to its territories. The following year, Lakshmibai was literally pensioned off, being given a stipend and ordered to leave the palace. Despite this, she does not seem to have initially harboured strong anti-British feelings at this point.

“Her two qualities worth mentioning are her bravery and her generosity. Mostly, she was dressed in male attire. She used to wear a pajama with a vest of dark purple colour. On her head, she wore a turban like cap. On her waist would be a duppatta-like cloth in which a sword would be tucked.”
  — Vishnubhat Godse

In June 1857, rebel soldiers seized the fort at Jhansi and massacred, not only the officers garrisoned there, but their families. After the rebels left, Lakshmibai took over, running Jhansi on behalf of the British until they could send a superintendent. That’s not exactly Joan of Arc-like… Instead, she fought off efforts by the rebels to claim the Jhansi throne for her husband’s nephew, as well as an attempted invasion by neighbouring states. It’s possible the latter enemy’s alliance with the British helped sour relations between them and Lakshmibai, though she still seems to have intended to act as a caretaker to this point.

But clearly something changed her mind. For when the British eventually showed up, in March 1858, she declined to hand over the fort, instead issuing a proclamation: “We fight for independence. In the words of Lord Krishna, we will if we are victorious, enjoy the fruits of victory, if defeated and killed on the field of battle, we shall surely earn eternal glory and salvation.” Brave words, though with hindsight, basically saying, “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough,” to the British, at the point of basically peak Empire, might not have been the wisest of tactics…

The British laid siege to Jhansi, and the last hope of rescue ended when an approaching force of 20,000 supporters, under the command of Lakshmibai’s childhood friend, Tatya Tope, was headed off and beaten at the Battle of Betwa River. After ten days, the walls were breached, and the British entered. There is some debate over what happened to the civilian population thereafter. Some reports indicate all were massacred, but Brahmin priest Vishnubhat Godse gave an eye-witness account which said, “All men between the ages of five to thirty were searched out and killed… But the British did not kill women; they stood at a distance from women and told them to hand over whatever gold and jewellery they were wearing.”

Legend states that the queen leapt from the fort on a horse, with her adopted son strapped to her back. Godse’s account is slightly tamer: “She wore male attire, riding shoes and armour covering her whole body. She did not carry even a paisa coin on herself. With a resounding ‘Jai Shankar’ war cry, she descended from the fort and, crossing the city, went out through the north gate. The Company cavalry chased them for about a kos and a half (3 miles). Thereafter, [Lakshmibai]’s horses were no longer in sight.” She regrouped with the remnants of Tatya Tope’s forces, but they were again beaten by Imperial forces, and forced to flee once again.

Two months later, on June 17, she fought her final battle, her army going up against the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars. Again, what exactly happened to Lakshmibai has been clouded through the mists of time and folklore. One story says she dressed as a cavalry officer and attacked the hussars; unhorsed, she was wounded, but fought on, firing at her opponent with a pistol, before being shot by his rifle. Godse’s account is almost terse, saying she was “wounded by a bullet, but she continued to fight. Just then, her thigh was wounded with a sword and she fell off the horse. Tatya Tope rushed forward and held her dead body.”

“The high descent of the Rani, her unbounded liberality to her troops and retainers, and her fortitude, which no reverses could shake, rendered her an influential and dangerous adversary.”
  — Sir Hugh Rose

Her post-rebellion legacy was a complex one. Some English writers maligned Lakshmibai, blaming her for the massacre by the rebels at Jhansi – in particular army doctor, Thomas Lowe, who called the queen the “Jezebel of India.” However, Sir Hugh Rose, commander of the British forces who took Jhansi spoke of her in much kinder terms, calling her “Personable, clever and beautiful,” “The most dangerous of all Indian leaders,” and “The bravest and best military leader of the rebels”.

She became a character in a number of English novels, such as The Rane: A Legend of the Indian Mutiny written in 1887 under the pseudonym of “Gillean”, by British officer John Maclean. In it, she seduces an agent of the empire, reinforcing Lowe’s negative depiction. Yet others were more sympathetic, such as Michael White’s Lachmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi, published in 1901. For example, that version of her story absolves Lakshmibai of responsibility for the rebel massacre, blaming a treacherous Muslim associate instead.

In India, of course, there is no such divergence, and she is revered to this day. There are many statues of her, typically on horseback with her son on her back, as the stories depict. She has been honoured in poem and song, and multiple films and TV series. The first was 1953’s  Jhansi Ki Rani, released in an English dub three years later as The Tiger and the Flame. The first Technicolor film to be made in India, it was also the most expensive Hindi film made to that point. The makers brought in talent from Hollywood, such as Ernest Haller, Oscar-winning cinematographer for Gone With The Wind, and editor Russell Lloyd, who had also worked with Vivien Leigh, on Anna Karenina in 1948. However, this version proved to be a flop at the box-office.

There have been three television series and two further movies based on the life of the queen. [Some of these adaptations and versions will be reviewed here shortly, and will be listed below] Still to come, and potentially the biggest in the West, is The Warrior Queen of Jhansi, originally titled Swords and Sceptres. In this, Devika Bhise (shown above right) plays Lakshmibai, with Rupert Everett as Sir Hugh Rose, and the supporting cast including Ben Lamb, Derek Jacobi and Jodhi Ma. This picked up distribution through Roadside Attractions in June, and is supposedly scheduled for a fall 2019 release – though no date has been fixed as yet. I’m curious to see how it performs, and if it will help Lakshmibai become as familiar an icon here, as she is in India.

Lakshmibai on the page, screen and TV

Johnnie Mae Gibson: FBI

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★★
“Not-so fair cop”

This 1986 TV movie was the first film made about an FBI agent while they were still active. Gibson was the fifth black female agent in the bureau’s history: she broke new ground by being the first such assigned to the Fugitive Matters department in the Miami branch, and was also the first to reach a supervisory level within the FBI. That would, however, be well after the story told in this film. It covers how she came to join the FBI, and her first major undercover operation, taking down a gun-running ring operated by ex-NFL star, Adam Prentice (Lawson). However, Gibson starts to find the lines between real-life and undercover work blurring, and begins feeling genuine affection for her target. This doesn’t sit well with her partner, TC (Rollins). If it sounds all very by the numbers… It is.

No less stereotypical are the other black men in Gibson’s life. Most notable are her sternly disciplinarian father, who thrashes Johnnie after she accepts a Thanksgiving gift on a surplus turkey from some white folks, and Marvin (Young), the husband she meets at college. The latter is thoroughly unimpressed when she announces – in a staggeringly clunky fashion, showing up in full uniform – that’s she going to join the police force. You can imagine his reaction to her becoming an FBI agent, and his perpetual whining is perhaps the film’s most annoying aspect. Though it has to be said, when it comes to caring for their daughter, Gibson is very much the absent mother.

All the background stuff is bounced over so quickly as to be little more than a parade of cliches. Yeah, we get it: she had to overcome some obstacles. Though based on the evidence here, racism wasn’t really one of them, and the way sexism is depicted has some flaws, for example when a fellow trainee at Quantico kicks her ass repeatedly in hand-to-hand training. For this begs an obvious question: would a criminal in the field go easy on an FBI agent trying to arrest them, because they were a woman? Of course not. From that viewpoint, this incident was actually less sexism than a reality check. It could have been welcomed as such, showing Johnnie she needs to use her brain rather than brawn, rather than a simplistic message of The Man Keeping A Woman Down (literally).

The undercover case is not much better in this department, trotting out the usual tropes before suddenly exploding into a gun-battle at the end, which even Gibson, in interviews at the time it was shown, noted was entirely fictional. The TV movie seems particularly guilty of trying to cram too much in, and would have been better served by focusing either on its subject’s journey to becoming an agent, or on her work thereafter. By attempting to cover both, it succeeds in covering neither adequately. While the subject is undeniably worthy, I can’t say that this treatment feels as if it does her justice.

Dir: Bill Duke
Star: Lynn Whitfield, William Allen Young, Howard Rollins, Richard Lawson

Agent High-Pockets, by Claire Phillips

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

In September 1941, the author returns to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, starting work as a nightclub singer and falls in love with American GI, John Phillips. Which is unfortunate timing, because soon after, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, kicking off the war in the Pacific. A hasty marriage to John follows on Christmas Eve, but Japan invades, and Claire’s husband becomes a prisoner of war. Left to fend for herself, after a period spent hiding out in the countryside, she returns to Manila, adopting the persona of Dorothy Fuentes, born in the Philippines of Italian parents. In order to help the resistance, she opens a venue, Club Tsubaki, aimed at officers of the occupying forces.

This has a nice irony, since the profits from the business are used to fund both humanitarian work for the POW’s held on the islands, and the growing guerrilla forces up country. Additionally, “Dorothy” – also known as High-Pockets, for her habit of keeping valuables in her bra! – keeps her ears open, and becomes skilled at extracting useful intelligence from her patrons, though a combination of flattery and alcohol. This information, about troop movements, industrial facilities, etc. is then funneled back to the Allies for use in the conflict over the next couple of years. It’s a risky business, and eventually, the Japanese break up the ring, arresting those involved. Claire has to withstand torture and hellish prison conditions, before being sentenced to 12 years for her activities.

Fortunately, there is a happy ending here, since the Americans re-took Manila, freeing our heroine after a rough eight months, during which time she lost about 35% of her body weight. After the war she was awarded the Medal of Freedom, and a movie was made of her story – I Was an American Spy, starring Anne Dvorak as Claire. There are some doubts as to the accuracy of her account: a post-war claim for compensation was severely reduced, with many of her statements “later found to be without foundation,” the court even concluding there was “no corroboration of her testimony that she was married.” So we should likely take this her tale here with a pinch of salt as to the details, though the basic elements seem credible enough.

It takes a while to get to the good stuff, with rather too much about her social life, etc. Even after the invasion, she spends a good while suffering from malaria in a hut. The more it goes on, however, the more this improves, as you began to understand the daily terror of living in occupied territory, where every night could be your last, and any knock on the door might be the dreaded kempei, the military police. It’s also fascinating to read her techniques for extracting useful information from her clientele with seemingly innocent questions like “How many will be in your party? I must know so that I can reserve places.” Her matter-of-fact recounting the horrors of prison life is also memorable, such as the incident where a fellow prisoner caught and skinned a cat, eating it raw. Worst of all is the sentence which follows: “There was another cat on the premises, and I began to look at it longingly.”

To modern ears, there is something of a not-so casually racist tone here, Phillips spattering the text with references to “Japs”, “Nips”, etc. and mocking their efforts to speak Engrish [how’s her Japanese, I wondered…] However, given the war circumstances and situation – this was an invading force after all – we need to put this in context. This was a time, after all, when Hollywood was making cartoons like Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. We probably shouldn’t condemn the author by applying modern standards to an entirely different situation, to which they do not fit.

Author: Claire Phillips
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as a paperback or e-book.
a.k.a. Manila Espionage

Cattle Annie and Little Britches: Fact vs. fiction

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“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
  — The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The fact

There’s something satisfyingly circular about the story of Cattle Annie and Little Britches. Two teenage girls, inspired by the questionably accurate literary exploits of Western outlaw derring-do, leave their homes and families to join those outlaws. They end up becoming the stuff of these same legends themselves, with their story being turned into a Hollywood movie (see below). Art imitating life imitating art.  Given this, discovering the truth behind the myth is almost impossible, with sources telling different versions, and often contradicting each other. As such, take what follows as a best guess…

Annie was originally Anna Emmaline McDoulet, born in November 1882: some say she was the daughter to a Kansas justice of the peace, J. C. McDoulet – clearly giving her something to rebel against! – while other versions have her father a poor preacher-lawyer. After a spell working various menial jobs, she turned to crime. Initially selling liquor to Indians (something outlawed at the time), she graduated to rustling livestock, likely leading to her nickname. Meanwhile, Jennie Stevenson (a.k.a. Jennie Midkiff and Jennie Stevens), was three years Annie’s senior, and had been married and separated twice while still a teenager.

In the early eighteen-nineties, Oklahoma was still a territory, not a state – it wouldn’t become one until 1906 – and was still very much the Wild West. Bill Doolin was initially a member of the Dalton Gang but after a failed attempt to rob two banks simultaneously left four of the group dead, Doolin put his own team together, known as the “Wild Bunch”. They began a string of bank and train robberies, and in September 1893, were involved in a shootout called the “Battle of Ingalls,” which left three marshals dead. At one point were the most feared gang in the West, in part due to the efforts of dime-novelist Ned Buntline, who brought a (doubtless romanticized) version of their exploits to a popular audience.

As mentioned above, some credit Buntline’s work with inspiring our heroines to a life of crime, though as Oklahoma residents, they would likely have been well aware of the Doolin gang anyway. Another account indicates the young women met members of the Doolin gang at local dances, “and became wildly excited at the stories of the wealth and fame that would be theirs if they should turn to banditry.” [The same source notes sniffily, “Not only did they dare to wear men’s pants…but rode horses as men rode them, astride”!] Regardless of the cause, Annie and Jennie became members of the gang, with the latter being named Little Britches by Doolin.

It’s unclear what the role of the girls was, but it makes sense they would have been suited to reconnaissance work, and supplying intelligence about law-enforcement activities to Doolin. For who would suspect two teenage girls of being outlaws? However, legend says, there was more to it. and the only known surviving photo of the two (above right) does suggest active participation: “Cattle Annie led her own gang of men and Little Britches was her lieutenant. Cattle Annie wore a cowboy hat and dressed and carried a rifle. Little Britches wore a cowboy hat and men’s trousers, vest and jacket, and a cartridge belt and a double holster with two six guns. Both of these ladies were tough, they carried guns like other women carried parasols, and strong men quailed when they walked into a saloon.”

In August 1895, the law finally caught up with the pair. Little Britches was arrested first, but initially escaped custody during a meal break: “She darted through the back door of the restaurant and quickly tearing off her dress, seized a horse and, mounting it, rode off.” Freedom was short-lived. For the following night, just outside Pawnee, Oklahoma. United States Marshal Bill Tilghman and Deputy Marshal Steve Burke raided the ranch where she was hiding out with Cattle Annie. With some difficulty and after an exchange of gunfire, the lawmen managed to arrest them both. Both were convicted as horse thieves and sentenced to serve their time back East, at the Farmington Reform School, in Massachusetts.

Little Britches was released early, for good behaviour, in October 1896, with Cattle Annie following 18 months later, in April 1898. Both women eventually returned to Oklahoma, married and gave up the outlaw life – though Little Britches largely dropped out of the public eye, and her eventual fate is unknown. Annie was wedded twice, having two sons with her second husband, and living in Oklahoma City from 1912 until her death in 1978 at the age of ninety-five. Her obituary in The Oklahoman made no reference to her outlaw escapades, instead saying simply, “She was a retired bookkeeper and member of American Legion Auxiliary and Olivet Baptist Church.”

The legend

★★★
“All legends end in bullshit.”

One of the subjects here almost lived long enough to see her story on the big screen: the woman who was Cattle Annie passed away only three years before the movie version was released in April 1981. Playing her was the daughter of Christopher Plummer, Amanda, in her screen debut (she already had stage experience off-Broadway), while the role of Little Britches went to another near-newcomer who would also go on to fame in her own right, Diane Lane. It was based on Robert Ward’s book – he co-wrote the screen-play – and seems to take a fairly fast and loose approach to the facts of the pair’s lives. Though given the huge uncertainty involved in those, it’s hard to complain too much.

For example, rather than being born and brought up in Oklahoma, the duo are portrayed as making their way out to California to seek their fortune, when they’re forcibly detoured to Guthrie, OK, There, they encounter Bill Doolin (Lancaster) when he and his gang visit the town. Annie falls for gang member Bittercreek Newcomb (John Savage) and they end up being taken by him to the gang’s hideout. Their knowledge of the Doolin Gang is entirely based on the embellished stories they’ve heard about them, and they’re disappointing to find reality comes up short.

The man they encounter, and whose gang they join, is considerably older than the real person. Lancaster was 67 at the time, while Doolin was in his late thirties. The girls are also played significantly older: 23 during filming, Plummer was a full decade older than the real Cattle Annie. The cinematic Doolin seems increasingly weary of the whole outlaw thing, of being pursued by the relentless Bill Tilghman (Steiger), and has little or no interest in living up to his own mythology when he meets the pair. But Cattle Annie’s belief in the legend, at least somewhat reignites the fire. Though after his capture, Doolin returns to fatalism, and it’s up to the girls to stage a rescue mission, when the rest of the gang would just let their leader hang.

You get something of the hardscrabble life about the pair, and how the outlaw life is one of the few routes by which they could escape their grinding poverty. As Annie says after their failed initial attempt to follow Doolin, “I’ll not be a white nigger slave woman! I’d rather burn like a fire!” But there isn’t an enormous amount going on, and the film seems to contain a fair bit of filler, such as an impromptu game of baseball, using equipment looted during a train robbery [As a baseball fan, seems doubtful the entire group of adult men would be so oblivious of the sport as they appear. This was the mid 1890’s: the National League had been running for close to 20 years, with a team in St. Louis, one state over] Though as a meditation on the dying embers of the “Wild West,” and the gap between heroic fiction and slogging through endless rain and mud, it’s effective enough, and you can see why both young leads would go on to greater fame.

Dir: Lamont Johnson
Star: Amanda Plummer, Diane Lane, Burt Lancaster, Rod Steiger

No Man Shall Protect Us

Video

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★★★½
“Well-manicured fists of fury.”

In the years leading up to the Great War, the suffragette movement in Great Britain was one of the great social causes. Led by Emmeline Pankhurst, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU) engaged in a campaign of protest and civil disobedience, intended to draw attention to their demand to give women the vote. Their actions were not without reaction by the authorities, however, with the activists frequently being harassed and arrested. To combat this, the WPSU established the “Bodyguard Society”, a group of women trained in self-defense, who could give as good as they got.

The preferred style was jiu-jitsu – or “Suffrajitsu” as it was nicknamed – which had arrived in Britain in the eighteen nineties, and the woman who taught it to the WPSU volunteers was Edith Garrud, who ran a school with her husband in London. Her role, and the talents of her pupils were clearly well-known by 1910, when the cartoon below appeared in satirical magazine Punch. As the struggle for votes increased in intensity over the coming year, the role of the Bodyguards in protecting the WPSU leaders increased. This reached a head in the infamous “Battle of Glasgow”, when a meeting in the Scottish city descended into violent disorder when local police tried to arrest Pankhurst.

This documentary tells the story of the Bodyguards, a facet of the movement somewhat overlooked in the historical record. It uses the standard documentary approach involving archival footage and a narrator (Bourne), but also contains re-enactments, both of interviews with actresses portraying Pankhurst (Miller), Garrud (Baker), etc. and some of the incidents described. The former generally prove rather more successful than the latter, because the film doesn’t have the budget to stage them credibly. For example, as depicted here, the Battle of Glasgow appears to have involved no more than half a dozen people, rather than 30 Bodyguards taking on 50 policemen (on a stage where the flower garlands were booby-trapped with barbed wire!).

On the other hand, the archival footage is fascinating and well-integrated, while the character interviews do a really good job of capturing the atmosphere of the time, and the passion of the suffragettes. [Though quite where the man playing the Glasgow Chief Constable gets his accent from, I’m less sure. It sounds like it was dredged from the bottom of the the Irish Sea, somewhere between Dublin and Scotland!] At 50 minutes, it’s a brisk watch, and I was left wanting to find out more about the topic, which is always a good indicator a documentary has done its job.

Credit goes to the makers for releasing the finished version online: you can check it out below. If you find your interest too has been piqued, Wolf has a website where you can satisfy that craving, including information on the graphic novel he authored, covering the same subject. While the suffragette movement largely took a back seat once the Great War started – proving women’s capabilities in ways protest marches could never hope to achieve – this shines an admirable light on an aspect which deserves to be better remembered.

Dir: Tony Wolf
Star: Debra Ann Miller, Lynne Baker, Lizzie Bourne, David Skvarla

The Legendary Adventures of the Pirate Queens, by James Grant Goldin

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

“Two women with swords was a sight that none of Vane’s men had ever imagined. It was like seeing a two-headed snake; one such monster would be a freak of nature, while two would indicate a terrible new species.”

Readers of the site should already be aware of Anne Bonney and Mary Read, as we covered them in our piece about women pirates a while back. They’re a good candidate for a story, because the known facts about them are relatively scant, allowing lots of scope for an author to fill in the blanks, however they wish. Goldin has no qualms on this front, freely admitting in the prologue, “A lot has just been made up.” This isn’t a bad thing, providing you’re looking for the “serio-comic novel” this is, not a recounting of the historical record. While based on the facts, and including both persona who existed and events which took place, Goldin does a good job of weaving them into a more complete narrative which, if unprovable at best, could have been how things happened.

After spending time in the military, and also becoming a widow, Mary Read is masquerading as “Martin” on a Dutch ship in the Caribbean when it is is captured by Calico Jack Rackham and his pirates. S/he and another member of the crew, Peter Meredith, defect to Rackham’s crew, where Read meets Bonney, the Captain’ lover. Subsequent issues include an encounter with Bonney’s ex-husband; Read’s daring rescue of Rackham and Bonney from New Providence, where Governor Woodes Rogers is trying to rid the colony of pirates; and the return of Rackham’s former boss, Captain Charles Vane. It ends with a grandstand finale, in which Vane seeks to recapture New Providence, only to find his ship facing a rather better-armed Spanish ship with the same aim, as Read (by this point “outed” as a woman) and Bonney try to spike the fortress’s guns.

Indeed, about all there isn’t, is much in the way of actual piracy, though only after it was all over did I notice this omission. And it’s occasionally educational. I never realized pirates were so… democratic. For according to the articles the crew sign, “The Captain shall be chosen by majority vote of the Company, and shall have supreme power during a battle. But before and after, every man shall have an equal vote in affairs of moment.” Who knew? [I’m presuming this is accurate, anyway: googling “pirates majority vote” led me down a rabbit-hole involving the Pirate Party of Iceland…] It makes for a fast, light read, driven by a bunch of engaging central characters who sound like they would be fun to be around, with unconventional quirks that play against pirate stereotype, e.g. Rackham’s desire to be considered witty.

Perhaps they’re too engaging? For the book sometimes feels in need of a true antagonist to balance the scales, a really hissable villain, with Governor Rogers and Captain Vane both turning out to be not entirely bad after all. Meredith also comes over a bit underdeveloped, a milquetoast romantic interest for Mary; it occasionally seems as if he’s there mostly to defuse any potential lesbian subtext between her and Anne. On the other hand, the relationship between Jack and Anne is spot-on, a fiery combination of steel and gunpowder which can go from volcanic passion to equally fiery confrontation in the blink of an eye. The novel was based off a script Goldin wrote for a prospective TV series, which makes sense, as it come across as visual in style, with the battles unfolding easily in your mind’s eye. Shame it wasn’t picked up: he says, “I really think the story bothers producers on some level. I also do think that, even now, the shadow of Cutthroat Island is long and dark.”

Still, we will always have the novel, and it was refreshing to read something which, for once, worked perfectly as a standalone story, rather than dropping the reader off a cliff-hanger, with an exhortation to buy the next in the series. A sequel is planned down the road, but Goldin got distracted by another series, on the children of the Norse gods. That should hopefully be finished by the end of 2018, then he promises to work on the further adventures of Anne and Mary. I’m looking forward to that.

Author: James Grant Goldin
Publisher: Basilisk Books, available through Amazon as both an e-book and a paperback.
A free copy of the book was supplied to me, in exchange for an honest review.

The incredible, true survival story of Juliane Koepcke

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Surviving when the plane in which you’re flying, disintegrates around you at a height of 10,000 feet is remarkable enough. When you land in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, one of the most hostile environments on Earth, and have to make it alone for more than a week, with virtually no resources, as you try to find your way to safety, that’s astonishing.

If you’re a 17-year-old girl? It’s off the charts amazing.

Admittedly, Juliane Koepcke was not your average teenager. Indeed, she could hardly have been better prepared for her ordeal. Her family moved to a research station in the Peruvian rainforest when she was 14, so her father, zoologist Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, could continue his work. Juliane was initially home-schooled, and the curriculum covered much more than the traditional three R’s. She said, “I’d lived in the jungle long enough as a child to be acquainted with the bugs and other creatures that scurry, rustle, whistle, and snarl. There was almost nothing my parents hadn’t taught me about the jungle.” However, she was required to complete her education in the capital Lima. On Christmas Eve, 1971, she and her mother prepared to fly back from there to Pucallpa, the nearest airport to their home.

They would never arrive. The pilot made an ill-advised decision to fly through a thunderstorm, in a poorly maintained plane [the airline, LANSA, had a bad reputation for mechanical reliability, and would cease operations a few weeks later]. A lightning bolt hit the craft, igniting a fuel tank in the wing, and triggering catastrophic structural failure. Juliane fell two miles, still strapped to her seat; the protection it offered, together with the somewhat cushioned landing offered by the rainforest canopy, is likely why she became the sole survivor. She was not uninjured: she had a broken collarbone, a serious gash on her leg, a partial fracture of her shin and a torn knee ligament. Given the circumstances, though, it could have been much worse.

That was brought home later, after she came across some other victims: “When I turned a corner in the creek, I found a bench with three passengers rammed head first into the earth. I was paralysed by panic. It was the first time I had seen a dead body. I thought my mother could be one of them but when I touched the corpse with a stick, I saw that the woman’s toenails were painted – my mother never polished her nails.” With her sole piece of regular food a bag of candy, she had to try and make her way out. The key to her survival was finding a tiny rivulet, and following it downstream. She knew that this trickle would flow into a larger creek, and this in turn would join a river: eventually, she’d find people. Her quest was helped by hearing the call of a hoatzin, a bird Juliane recognized as nesting near open water.

Her wilderness knowledge helped when she reached the river too. The undergrowth along the bank was too dense to allow for progress, so Juliane opted to float down the middle. There, she knew potentially lethal stingrays won’t go, preferring the shallows, and also that piranhas are not a threat in quickly-moving water. But a cut on her arm had become infected with maggots, forcing her to extreme measures, after Juliane found a boat with a motor and a barrel of diesel fuel. “I remembered our dog had the same infection and my father had put kerosene in it, so I sucked the gasoline out and put it into the wound. The pain was intense as the maggots tried to get further into the wound. I pulled out about 30 maggots.”

She opted to spend the night there – her tenth in the jungle since the crash – and that proved to be her salvation. For she had stumbled across a seasonal camp belonging to some loggers, who were astonished to show up the next day and discover a blonde woman in their camp. Juliane recalls, “They believe in all sorts of ghosts there, and at first they thought that I was one of these water spirits called Yemanjá. They are blondes, supposedly.” They had heard about the crash on the radio, and took her downstream in their boat, to a local hospital that could tend her injuries, which now also included second-degree sunburn.

The authorities hadn’t been able to locate the crash site, but with Juliane’s help, they found it, and her mother’s body was eventually recovered on January 12, more than three weeks later. The creepiest thing? “My mother wasn’t dead when she fell from the plane. My father thought she’d survived for nearly two weeks – perhaps up to January 6, because when he went to identify her body it wasn’t as decomposed as you’d expect in that environment – it’s very warm and humid and there are lots of animals that would eat dead bodies. He thought she’d broken her backbone or her pelvis and couldn’t move.”

Juliane helped advise the makers of a movie based on her experiences (Miracles Still Happen, see below, or review here) and returned to the area in the early eighties, to study the area’s native bats. But it was close to two decades before she began to achieve closure. She returned to the crash site with German film-maker Werner Herzog, as part of his documentary Wings of Hope about her ordeal. Herzog was particularly well-suited to make the film, because when he was location scouting for his movie Aguirre, Wrath of God, he had initially been booked on the flight which crashed – only being saved by a last minute change in plans. Following that, Koepcke was able to write her own story, published as When I Fell from the Sky in 2011.

Below, you’ll find first Werner’s Herzog’s documentary Wings of Hope, and then the Italian feature film Miracles Still Happen, starring Susan Penhaligon, offering both factual and fictionalized versions of her remarkable story of survival. It’s truly one of the most incredible ever experienced and a testament to how knowledge can make all the difference between life and death.

Neerja

  By

★★★★
“Sticks to the plane truth.”

Time to set up GirlsWithoutGuns.org, perhaps. For this film brings home that among the most courageous of heroines are the unarmed ones – especially when facing people who are not. Such is the case with Neerja Bhanot, the 22-year-old head purser on Pan Am Flight 73 from Mumbai to New York in 1986. Just before takeoff after a stop in Karachi, the plane was taken over by hijackers from the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization, who intended to divert it to Cyprus. Bhanot alerted the pilots, allowing them to escape and thwarting that plan. She then discarded the passports of American passengers, stopping the terrorists from targeting them. When they believed Pakistani forces were about to storm the plane, she opened the emergency exits, help shepherd passengers out, and sheltered children from the terrorists’ bullets.

Yep, there are good reasons she became the first female recipient of India’s highest decoration for bravery in peacetime, the Ashok Chakra Award, and the youngest ever. Wisely, the film opts for a largely straightforward retelling of the events of those 24 hours, beginning with Neerja’s exuberant attendance at a birthday party the previous evening, through her trip to the airport and the mundane processes of the early, peaceful leg of the flight, before all hell comes storming up the stairs into her aircraft. Against a solid background, the only element which rings significantly false is the note given to her by a friend at the airport: its clichéd contents perhaps explain the disclaimer before the movie, about “Any resemblance to persons living or dead…”

Otherwise, however, it seems to stick to the truth, as far as my post-film Googling has been able to tell. Yes, Neerja was a part-time model as well as an air hostess. She also had already been through an arranged marriage which failed, to an apparently abusive husband (though here again: “Any resemblance…”). But it’s her amazingly calm, yet smart approach in the face of the four hijackers that is most incredible, with death never more than a hair-trigger’s breadth away. This hellish and escalating claustrophobia of the incident is the film’s strongest suit. Madhvani plays it expertly to a crescendo, as the hijackers become increasingly irritated by what they perceive (not incorrectly) as stalling tactics by the authorities in response to demands for new pilots.

It’s likely one of those cases where less knowledge may be useful in appreciating it. For I’m sure most of the original Indian audience was already well aware of the story here; in contrast, as someone who hadn’t heard about it before, I found myself holding my breath on more than one occasion, with no clue of how it would end. As we enter the New Year of 2017, it certainly qualifies as one of the strongest entries of 2016, even if – or perhaps because? – the movie goes in a different direction from the more-traditional kind of action heroines, which we usually cover on this site.

Dir: Ram Madhvani
Star: Sonam Kapoor, Shabana Azmi, Yogendra Tiku, Abrar Zahoor

Forest Child, by Heather Day Gilbert

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

“A cleaved head never plots.”

“I swear to you, this death will be avenged. And not in the afterlife.” –Freydis Eiriksdotter

Most readers with any knowledge of early American history are aware that Viking sailors, faring south-westward from Greenland, discovered mainland North America around the year 1000 A.D. No lasting settlements were made, but archaeologists have excavated the temporary settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in present-day Newfoundland (probably the one referred to in the sagas as Straumsfjord). Our main contemporary historical sources for the Viking voyages to “Vinland” are two oral Icelandic sagas, committed to writing about 250 years after the events, which differ in details but basically present a common core of factual information. (The skalds who composed and transmitted the sagas weren’t composing fiction; they were recording history for an aliterate society, although they sometimes garbled or misunderstood details.)

Evangelical Christian author Heather Day Gilbert has taken these sagas, coupled with serious research into the Viking history and culture of that era, plausibly reconstructed a unified picture of the events they present, and brought it to life in a masterful historical series, The Vikings of the New World Saga, consisting of two novels, God’s Daughter and this sequel. Faithful to known facts, she uses her imagination to flesh them out, and to reconstruct believable personalities for the major and minor players in the events. (I’ve read modern re-tellings of the sagas, though not the sagas themselves, and could recognize persons and events in both books.) The first book focused on Gudrid, former pagan priestess (now a Christian) and healer; I wouldn’t really characterize her as an action heroine, though she does pack a blade and is psychologically prepared to fight if she has to. However, this one focuses on her half-sister-in-law by a previous marriage, Freydis, out-of-wedlock daughter of Eirik the Red, and she’s most definitely a butt-kicking lady.

Historical fiction about real-life people uses imagination to reconstruct the details history leaves out, and especially the inner personalities and motivations that history may record imperfectly or not at all. The Icelandic sagas don’t remember Freydis kindly: she’s depicted as a vicious, treacherous psychopath who becomes the New World’s first mass murderer. BUT…. 1.) No historians, medieval or modern, are wholly free from biases that shape their reaction to their material. Gender relations in early Scandinavian/Germanic and Celtic society, as reflected in these books, were comparatively more egalitarian and meritocratic than those of the “civilized” states of southern Europe. By the 13th century, though, when the oral sagas were being committed to writing, the more patriarchal and stratified attitudes of the latter were re-shaping thought and practice in the northern lands. To these historiographers, a woman who clearly didn’t fit their picture of proper gender roles may well have been seen as an obviously deviant villainess by definition, whose actions called for censorious treatment. 2.) Even some of the details recorded by the saga compilers themselves, if one reads between the lines, cast doubt on the supposedly innocent and pacific intentions of Freydis’ adversaries. And 3.), the two key conversations in the sagas that cast Freydis in the worst light, taken at face value, were totally private conversations that none of the original tellers of the material could actually have been privy to. They’re imaginative reconstructions, just as much as Gilbert’s dialogue is –and they’re reconstructions created by writers with an ideological agenda of their own.

Gilbert follows the factual account of events in the sagas faithfully (even including the two conversations I find suspect). But she fleshes out the picture with a more sympathetic vision, and a broader reconstruction of a plausible context, that gives us a very different picture of what (may have) actually happened on the Vineland coast a thousand years ago. The Freydis who emerges here isn’t an evil harridan, and isn’t psychotic. What she is is a tough-as-nails young woman who’s the product of a society that puts a premium on physical courage and fighting ability, who’s had to fight tooth and nail for anything she’s ever gotten, who didn’t feel loved as a child, never knew her birth mother, and doesn’t show love or give trust very easily, a female warrior (in her culture, that wasn’t a contradiction in terms) who killed men in combat while she was still in her teens, who doesn’t readily take orders from any man, woman, or deity, and who isn’t a total stranger to the effects of the special kind of dried mushrooms imbibed by Viking “berserkers” –which are as potent as modern-day “angel dust,” and just as dangerous. She’s also a smart, competent woman (it says something that she’s the expedition leader here, not her husband) with principles as strong as steel, and deep reserves of love and loyalty. And like all of us, she’s a woman on a spiritual journey … which might not end where it began. In real life, the Vikings of succeeding generations never forgot her. Modern readers probably won’t, either.

Gilbert brings Freydis’ world vividly to life here, without employing info-dumps or cluttering the narrative with excessive details. (She includes a family tree for Freydis and a short list of other characters in the back, along with a short glossary of Viking terms used in the text; but I personally didn’t need the former, and with my Scandinavian background, the latter only included a couple of words I didn’t know –and I’d roughly deduced the meanings of those from the context already. Even readers who haven’t read much about Vikings, I think, could guess the definitions of all these terms the same way.) This is a very taut, gripping read, with a lot of suspense in the first part even when you know the general outline of the history, and the plot continues to hold dangers and surprises up to the denouement and beyond. It’s written in first-person, present-tense, which puts us inside Freydis’ head and bonds us to her quickly. As in the first book, the characterizations are believable and vivid. All told, this is historical fiction at its finest! I give it my highest recommendation, and I’m looking forward to reading more of Gilbert’s work.

I would strongly advise reading both books in order; they have many of the same characters, and it will help you as a reader to come to this book with the better and deeper understanding of the relationships, personalities and general situation that reading the first book will give you. Action heroine fans usually like other kinds of strong heroines as well, and Gudrid easily fits into that sorority.

Full disclosure: I was gifted with a free copy of this work by the author, just because she knew I wanted to read it. I wasn’t asked to give a favorable review (or, really, any review at all) –that had to be earned, and it was earned in abundance.

Author: Heather Day Gilbert
Publisher: WoodHaven Press, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Girl King

  By

★★½
“Queen of Arts”

girlkingThis isn’t the first biopic about Christina, Queen of Sweden from 1632 to 1654. Most notably, Greta Garbo played the role in 1933’s Queen Christina, though one sense the focus here is rather different. Certainly, she’s an interesting character, the only child of King Gustav II Adolph. She became queen at age six on his death, then was brought up as if she were a prince, taking over actual rule on turning 18. She caused major ructions with the established order with her plans to end the Thirty Years’ War, educate the population and turn the capital city, Stockholm, into the “Athens of the North”. It didn’t help her case in a strongly Protestant Sweden and a very fraught religious time, that she was influenced by Catholic writers such as René Descartes. Nor her reluctance to marry, or the (according to this telling) passionate relationship with one of her ladies-in-waiting, Ebba Sparre (Gadon).

This focuses on the period between her 18th birthday in 1644 and abdication a decade later – she left the throne to her cousin, turned Catholic and headed off to live the rest her life in Italy. The film suggests this was largely a reaction to an enforced separation from Sparre, which is depicted as causing Christina a breakdown. [The mentally-fragile apple depicted, apparently didn’t fall far from the tree. Her mother was barking mad, who preserved her husband’s embalmed corpse for two years after his death and, again per the movie, made Christina kiss it good morning and good night] That seems a little too trite of an explanation, for someone who spoke nine different languages and was as much driven by admiration for her “virgin queen” predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I of England, as any passion.

It’s more successful in documenting the struggle between Christina and the nobles who had no interest in an educated underclass, or even peace, the loot “liberated” from enemy countries being a major source of income. Mind you, the peasants aren’t necessarily interested either: an amusing scene has the monarch about to quote Marcus Aurelius to them, when she’s interrupted by an offer of free beer from a rather more down-to-earth adviser. The tension between a high-minded – possibly too high-minded? – queen and the realities of 17th-century European politics, would have benefited from additional exploration.

It would likely have been preferable to a rather uninteresting love affair, one which seems to say more about 21st century sexual politics than anything at that point. While I generally liked Buska’s performance, there were a couple of points I felt like I watching a modern teenager, rather than one of the most well-educated women of her time. I have to think there was rather more to Queen Christina, than the slightly-unstable lesbian portrayed here, but the true depth of that character only occasionally pokes its head over the large dresses and even larger wigs seen here.

Dir: Mika Kaurismäki
Star: Malin Buska, Sarah Gadon, Michael Nyqvist, Lucas Bryant