THE BARBARY CORSAIR RAID ON GRINDAVÍK IN 1627 – PART 7

(This post is a continuation of The Barbary Corsair Raid on Grindavík in 1627 – Parts 1 – 6. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)

Last week’s post described what happened to Guðrún Jónsdóttir and those with her after they arrived in Salé. This week’s post looks at the process by which Guðrún was ransomed. The key figure, as we saw in last week’s post was a Dane named Boeye Laurens.

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Boeye Laurens was a Danish Factor in Iceland. That is, he oversaw a Danish trading post there. During this period, Iceland was a Danish possession, and the Danes held a complete monopoly on trade. The only place Icelanders could legally buy imported goods was at a Danish trading post. Such posts were scattered all around the island, including in the West Fjords—where Boeye Laurens was headed when his ship was captured by Murad Reis and his corsairs.

Laurens had hired a Dutch ship—the Olijfboom (the Olive Tree)—to transport the season’s trade goods to Iceland. Using Dutch ships was such a common occurrence that the Icelanders of the time would not have thought it worth mentioning. It was important to the Dutch, though, for once the Olijfboom was captured, they had a ship and its crew to get back.

By the time of the corsair raid on Iceland, the Dutch had been negotiating with Moulay Zaydan, the Sultan of Morocco, and with the Hornacheros of the Qasba in Salé, for the better part of two decades. The States General had signed a formal treaty with Moulay Zaydan, in 1610, in which both parties agreed to refrain from attacking each other’s ships and to allow each other’s ships safe harbour in their ports. Over the years, however, there had been numerous breeches of this treaty, especially by the Salé corsairs, who kept preying on Dutch shipping.

The States General thus found itself involved in a continuing series of negotiations with Moulay Zaydan and/or the Hornacheros of Salé as they attempted to recover Dutch ships, crews, and merchandize that the Salé corsairs had seized. All this meant that there was a pretty much continuous Dutch presence—merchants, seamen, or envoys—in Salé.

When Murad Reis came in with a captured Dutch ship and crew, the local Dutchmen would have swung into action, waving the treaty in the face of the Hornachero Caïd in the Qasba and pushing to get the ship released and their countrymen freed. (The image at the top of this post is a depiction of what one of those Dutch merchants in Salé  might have looked like.)

It is not clear what happened to the Olijfboom and its crew. In the spring of 1627, the Hornacheros in Salé had declared their independence from Moulay Zaydan, so they likely did not feel themselves particularly bound by the stipulations of a treaty signed by a Sultan they no longer gave allegiance to. What the Dutch account excerpted in last week’ post makes clear, though, is that Boeye Laurens was successfully ransomed.

The “Portuguese Jew Belmonte” named in that Dutch account as the man who ransomed Laurens was almost certainly a member of a well-known and important Marrano family of Portuguese origin—who were now based in the Netherlands.

Marranos were Spanish and Portuguese Jews who, having been forced to become Christians, lived a secret life as still-practicing Jews. They were a sort of Jewish version of the Moriscos, and like the Moriscos, they were driven out of the Iberian Peninsula. The Spanish expelled them in 1492, the Portuguese in 1526. Many of the Portuguese Marranos fled to the Netherlands, especially to Amsterdam, where they could practice their religion without fear of persecution.

Among those Marrano expulsados was the Belmonte family. Diego Núñez de Belmonte, the founder of the Amsterdam community, was an important merchant who, among other things, brokered deals with Salé. In 1624, for example, he served as commercial agent for none other than Murad Reis and the Caïd of the Qasba when they negotiated with the States General for the purchase of a large supply of munitions, including 120 muskets, 1,000 kilos (2,200 pounds) of gunpowder, 200 spears, and 45 metric tons (44 Imperial tons/50 US tons) of cannon balls of varying sizes.

All of this is to say that the “Portuguese Jew Belmonte” was, for all intents and purposes, a Dutch commercial agent. It is unlikely that Diego Núñez Belmonte himself was in Salé to negotiate the ransom of Boeye Laurens, for Diego Núñez was based in Amsterdam and by this time was getting on in years (he died in 1629). The negotiations would have been conducted in his name, though, for it was a name that carried weight—both in Amsterdam and in Salé.

Boeye Laurens, like the other Danish Factors who oversaw trade in Iceland, was an important and wealthy man. The fact that no lesser a figure than Diego Núñez Belmonte became involved in his ransom is a testament to Laurens’ status. Nevertheless, on the journey to Salé, the Danish Factor would have been consigned to the dark hold of corsairs’ ship along with the rest of the captives. In that cramped space, he must inevitably have gotten to know his fellow sufferers—including Guðrún Jónsdóttir.

This brings us to the second part of the answer to the question of how a Dutchman came to ransom an Icelandic woman he did not know.

Even if Boeye Laurens was not personally acquainted with the Járngerðarstaðir farm family, he probably knew about them. They were, after all, one of the most prominent families in the Grindavík area, and they must have been well known to the Danish Factors there—and the Danish Factors no doubt talked to each other.

So Laurens would likely have known he was dealing with a family of considerable means. The issue of possible ransoms must surely have come up in the cramped hold, for the dire future looming ahead of them must have been on everybody’s mind. Laurens had contacts with the Dutch and was known to them as a man of means, since he had hired one of their merchant ships. He was thus an important man who had the resources to arrange his own ransom.

The members of the Járngerðarstaðir farm family must have hoped that he could help arrange theirs. In fact, it would be most surprising if they did not ask him to vouch for them and aid them in negotiations.

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For further details about Guðrún Jónsdóttir’s ransom, see the next post in this blog.