Grace O’Malley, The Pirate Queen of Ireland.
Angela Chantry is starting us off with a fascinating tale about a fascinating person! In a life stranger than any fiction, Grace O’Malley, daughter of a clan chief in the far west of Ireland, went from marriage at fifteen to piracy on the high seas. She soon had a fleet of galleys under her command, but her three decades of plundering, kidnapping, murder and mayhem came to a close in 1586, when she was captured and sentenced to hang. She was saved from the scaffold by none other than Queen Elizabeth herself – another powerful woman in a man’s world.