GUTTORMUR HALLSSON: A CAPTIVE’S TALE – PART 1

Guttormur Hallsson was a farmer in a place called Búlandsnes, near the town of Djúpivogur, on Berufjörður (Beru Fjord) in the East Fjords, on the southeast corner of Iceland.

It’s all too easy to think of farmers—especially farmers in the past (Guttormur lived in the early seventeenth century)—as ignorant peasants. Guttormur was far from that. He was an educated man: he’d attended school at Skálholt, in southwest Iceland, which was the seventeenth century Icelandic version of Oxford University, in England. As a result, Guttormur was literate and numerate.

He needed to be.

Guttormur was more than just a simple farmer. He owned and operated an estate. Doing so was a particular challenge in early seventeenth century Iceland.

Today, Iceland is a thriving European democracy with a high standard of living, and modern technology makes living close to the Arctic Circle on a remote island in the blustery North Atlantic quite comfortable. In Guttormur’s day, however, living there was a very different kind of experience.

Firstly, it was colder. The Little Ice Age—a period of colder temperatures that lasted from about the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries—was in progress. So the climate was more frigid than it is today, making the winters longer and grimmer, the North Atlantic storms more destructive, the summers less predictable, and the living conditions in general significantly harder—especially without modern technology.

Seventeenth century Icelanders survived by subsistence farming, herding livestock (some cattle and horses, mostly sheep), and fishing. They were able to grow some of the traditional European vegetables such as turnips, carrots, cabbage, and peas, but the colder temperatures meant that they could produce these only in relatively small quantities. More significantly, they were unable to sustainably grow any sort of grain. So flour—and thus bread—was an imported and expensive luxury that only the wealthy could afford on a regular basis. Mutton was a staple of the Icelandic diet, but the sheep flocks were vulnerable to the weather as well, and a bad summer could mean a severe scarcity of sheep—and so of mutton on the dinner table. Fishing was the most reliable means of subsistence (seventeenth century Icelanders ate a lot of fish), but it was a dangerous enterprise; men drowned regularly in the freezing, turbulent waters of the North Atlantic.

Also, Iceland had no forests (the original Viking settlers had cut down the native birch forests within a few generations of their arrival) and no reliable source of stone that could be quarried (the island is entirely volcanic). So seventeenth century Icelanders had to build their houses out of random chunks of lava, layers of stacked turf, and driftwood. Lacking firewood, they burned peat or dried sheep manure. Summer, with its long days of northern sunshine, was a busy season in which people spent most of their time outdoors rather than inside their houses. During the long sub-arctic winters, though, when the sun hovered over the horizon for only a few hours, creating little more than twilight, Icelanders sheltered in their houses while the wind howled outside, carding wool, making repairs to farming or fishing gear, and reading aloud to each other from the Sagas by the light of flickering oil lamps… waiting impatiently for the sun to return and for a new season to commence.

Not only did Guttormur have to manage all this, make sure that what crops they could grow were well tended, keep his wandering flocks of sheep alive, ensure that his little fleet of fishing boats and the men in them were safe, provide shelter and food and livelihoods for the small but thriving community that had grown up in Búlandsnes around his farm…

He also had to be an astute trader.

In a good year, garden vegetables, mutton, and fish might be reasonably plentiful. Good year or bad, though, nearly everything else had to be imported.

This need to import a wide variety of goods—both necessities and luxuries—put Icelanders at a severe economic disadvantage. Iceland was a Danish possession at the time, and from the early years of the seventeenth century onwards, the Danes maintained a complete monopoly over trade. Icelanders were obliged to buy the imported goods they needed at Danish trading posts, which were supplied with merchandise each summer by ships from Denmark. The Danish factors who ran these trading posts had complete control over the situation, and they ruthlessly pursued their own profits. As a result, they kept the Icelanders in chronic poverty.

So Guttormur had to face all of these varied challenges. He had to understand the weather, and the terrain around his farm. He had to be able to hike over to the Danish Trading Post in nearby Djúpivogur and deal cannily with the avaricious Danes. And beyond his responsibilities as a farmer, he also had to act as a sort of unofficial county judge, adjudicating local disputes to ensure the inevitable tensions of the small community in Búlandsnes didn’t get out of hand.

He did all this, and he did it well.

Life was good.

See the illustration above for a depiction of what Guttormur’s farmstead might have looked like.

And then, in midmorning on Friday, July 6, 1627… everything changed. ¹

A horde of Barbary corsairs appeared from nowhere and came hurtling down upon the farmstead “roaring like lions” — such is the expression used in Tyrkjaráns-Saga (The Turkish Raid Saga), a description of the event written in 1642.

Having a screaming pack of Barbary corsairs suddenly appear like that in their backyard would have been as shocking and terrifying for these seventeenth century rural Icelanders as an unprovoked attack by aliens from the stars would be for us today. More shocking. We at least can imagine an alien invasion, having seen it play out many times by now in the movies. Seventeenth century Icelanders would never have imagined being attacked by Barbary corsairs, whose hunting grounds were in and around the Mediterranean, 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) away.

But Barbary pirates had crossed that huge expanse of water. Led by a pair of Dutch renegades, two separate groups raided Iceland in the summer of 1627. The first group attacked the southwest coast. The second group attacked the southeast. Early in the morning of July 6, this group slid silently into the harbor at Djúpivogur and overpowered the sleeping skeleton crew aboard the Danish merchant ship anchored there. Then they took the Trading Post. Then they spread out and began raiding the countryside.

One of the first farms they hit was Guttormur’s.

They captured Guttormur himself, six of his farmhands, a young boy, three old women, and two of the farm maids. Binding their captives’ hands behind their backs, the corsairs hustled them overland to Djúpivogur, where they were ferried across to one of the corsairs’ two ships anchored there in the harbor. Once aboard the ship, they were herded down into the dank darkness of the ship’s hold and placed in chains.

It was the end of their lives as they had known them.

In perhaps the space of a couple of hours, Guttormur had gone from prosperous farmer and community leader to being a prisoner of the dreaded Barbary corsairs. He must have lain there prostrate in darkness on the dank, ill smelling planking, weighed down with cold iron chains, overcome by the sheer brute shock of the dreadful blow that had descended upon him.

As the day progressed, more prisoners were shoved down into the hold and chained alongside the Búlandsnesers. And more still…

This went on, day after day, for two weeks, as the corsair ships cruised down the Icelandic coast, raiding one community after another. Finally, their holds crammed to capacity with human cargo, the ships left Icelandic waters and set sail for their home port.

Algiers.

See Guttormur Hallsson: a Captive’s Tale – Part 2  for what happened to Guttormur when he reached Algiers.

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1. The date of July 6, 1627, is a Julian date. That is, it’s calculated using the Julian calendar (named after Julius Cesar), which was replaced throughout Europe by the Gregorian calendar (named after Pope Gregory XIII), starting in the late sixteenth century. The process of adopting this new calendar didn’t go smoothly, though. Pope Gregory was, of course, Catholic. Catholic European countries like Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, etc. adopted the new calendar immediately. Protestant countries such as England, the Republic of the Netherlands, and Scandinavian countries like Denmark resisted for more than a century. Denmark didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1700. Since Iceland was a Danish possession throughout the seventeenth century, all the dates given in Icelandic documents from this period are Julian.

To convert seventeenth century Julian dates to Gregorian dates simply add 10. So July 6, 1627, Julian is July 16, Gregorian. This calendar issue doesn’t really matter all that much unless you’re comparing documents written by different people from different European countries before the universal adoption of the Gregorian calendar. If you don’t keep careful track of the type of calendar each writer is using, you can end up misinterpreting or misrepresenting the sequence(s) of events being described in the documents.