JÓN JÓNSSON: A CAPTIVE’S TALE – PART 5

(This post is a continuation of Jón Jónsson: a Captive’s Tale – Parts 1, 2, 3, & 4. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)

For Jón Jónsson, the brute fact of his servitude—of slavery in Algiers—was clearly something he struggled with. You can see this in a letter he wrote from Algiers in 1630, after he’d been a slave for three years. Towards the end of this letter, he writes:

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I witness, by God, that I do not have time to write to either the Bishop or Reverend Gísli Bjarnason, whose prayers from the pulpit I would gladly receive, nor to my dear teachers whom I mentioned before, and for that I ask their forgiveness.

I do not now live in freedom.

Heic mihi servitium video labore esse paratum;
Tu mihi libertas illa paterna, vale.

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Jón, remember, was an educated young man. He was a graduate of Skálholtsskóli, the school at Skálholt, in southeast Iceland. Skálholtsskóli was a university designed primarily for producing clergy. But it was no backwoods rustic schoolhouse, and certainly not the sort of place that produced close-minded zealots. The education Jón received there was wide ranging. The Latin quote above is clear evidence of this.

Here is an English translation of the Latin verse:

Here I see labour and slavery before me;
Farewell now to the freedom of our fathers that you enjoy

Jón is quoting here the first two lines of a celebrated elegy written by the classical Roman poet Albius Tibullus. This elegy, a stylized complaint about the cruelty of the poet’s lover, Nemesis, and the way the poet feels “enslaved” by his love for her, begins like this:

Hic mihi servitium video dominamque paratam;
iam mihi, libertas illa paterna, vale

Here’s the English version:

Here I see mistress and slavery before me;
farewell now to the freedom of my fathers

Jón replicated the original Latin verse from memory—except for minor changes. The most significant change appears in the first line, where he replaces “dominamque” (“mistress”) with “labore” (“work”). The sophistication of Jón’s education is apparent here: not only can he quote a classical Latin pagan poet from memory, but he can transform the poem to contrast the poet’s metaphorical slavery with his own literal slavery. Readers of Jón’s letter who knew the original Latin poem would have immediately understood the erudition he was displaying. They would also have understood—through the emotional resonance of the poem—just how much he was suffering in bondage. Jón, remember, came from a wealthy and important family. He had been about to embark on what both he and his parents no doubt anticipated would be a long and successful life when the Salé corsairs attacked Grindavík and took it all from him.

Elsewhere in the letter, he writes:

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Now, the doom of the Lord falls upon the children of God… Oh! Lord and master of Heaven and Earth, great and all-powerful God, you know best how your inscrutable will shall be done, that evil men might have dominion over your own children and uproot them, branch and twig.

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You can sense in these lines the ragged edge of despair that Jón was beginning to feel.

Things got worse.

The Icelanders spent eight long years enslaved in Algiers before the Danish Crown managed to send an official ransoming expedition.

Among the letters written by Icelandic captives in Algiers is one dated August, 1635, just about the time the Danish ransoming expedition was beginning its work. This letter is addressed to the “Lords in Copenhagen” (Iceland was a Danish possession back then). The letter is unsigned, but it was almost certainly written by Jón Jónsson. It contains the following near the beginning:

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The Lord who sits in judgment over the terrestrial globe, the moon, the sun, and all the stars in the firmament is witness to the sluggishness of the hearts of men, to their unscrupulousness, to the dwindling of charity, to the contempt men have for their poor brethren, and to their obliviousness of the last day of judgment. The blood of Abel is not yet cold, even though it was shed hundreds of years ago. It still reveals itself in bloody-handed violence and heartfelt tears sent up to heaven. Is there now no mercy, no charity, no awakened conscience? Are there no God-fearing men? Do we have no merciful King? Are we without righteous masters and defenders? Without God-fearing preachers? Without parents, friends and brothers, that they do not feel in their hearts our mortal distress and anguish? A blood-stained rod hangs over us, so that we suffer in despair and darkness in the power of the Turks, those destroyers, fettered by heavy chains in the dungeons of these false demons, as were those under the Pharos, while the captains’ flags and the standard of that seven-crowned dragon Mohammed fly over our heads.

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As you can see, Jón was not doing well. The creeping despair that is apparent in the earlier except has now morphed into seething outrage.

There was, in fact, a reason for this outrage beyond the general terribleness of the situation:

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God knows that it is a pain as sharp as a double-edged sword, and more bitter than death, yes, more hurtful than bloody injuries to know that those who have been here twice to Algiers with our ransom money have used it instead for trade to make profit for themselves, and have stolen our liberty, for they never admitted that they could free anyone, or even that they were here to do so. Instead, they told us to petition our gracious master the King, in the name of God, for our freedom, and then they filled simple minded, poor fellows with fair words and went on their way, one with hides, the other with chests of sugar, leaving behind them only the smoke of their lying words.

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There is no documentation for who the two men Jón mentions might have been. What they did is clear enough, though: they used ransom money in their possession to enrich themselves, at the captives’ expense, one buying hides, the other chests of sugar, to sell at a profit back in Europe.

No wonder Jón was so outraged. Imagine endure eight years of grinding slavery, and then, finally—finally!—a representative of the Danish Crown arrives with ransom money. Imagine the enormous surge of hope and joyous anticipation you’d feel.

Only to have the man use the money—the money that should have bought your freedom—to enrich himself.

Then imagine that happening twice.

There was a small shred of hope left, though.

A little later in the letter, Jón writes:

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It is obvious that those two men have cheated us. Now there is the third one left. Nobody knows what he will do.

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The “third one” was Wilhelim Kifft.

Kifft was the official representative of the Danish Crown. He came to Algiers equipped with a huge sum of money that had been raised, both privately and publicly, under the auspices of the Danish king. Unlike the other two men, he did spend the money in his possession on ransoming captives.

It took him the better part of a year, though.

Ransoming captives in Algiers was a tortuous, frustrating process. The captives’ owners had the whip hand, and they invariably drove the hardest bargains they could, sometimes changing the terms of the negotiations midway through the process to demand more money.

At the end of almost a full year—Kifft began the ransoming process in August, 1635, and ended in June, 1636—a total of 50 captives had been ransomed: 28 Icelandic women, 6 Icelandic men, and 16 Danish and Norwegian men.

The official record of this ransoming expedition survived. It contains the names of all the ransomed captives, the names of their owners, and the prices paid.

Jón Jónsson’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on the list. The name of his brother, Helgi Jónsson, is there, but Jón’s is not.

It’s not altogether clear why Jón wasn’t ransomed, though we have a hint in the “Lítill análl um Tyrkjans herhlaup á Íslandi anno 1627” (“A Short Chronicle of the Turkish Raid on Iceland in 1627”), which, in describing the Algiers ransoming process, observes that “a few people could not be bought because they were too expensive.” Kifft may have had a large amount of money at his disposal, but ransomed slaves didn’t come cheap. The priority was clearly to liberate the captive women, and a lot of the Icelandic male captives were left behind. Perhaps Jón was one of those “too expensive” captives. He was, after all an educated man and so a valuable commodity as a slave. Whatever the case, he was certainly not among those captives ransomed in 1635-36.

There was a second Danish ransoming expedition to Algiers a decade later, though, in the summer of 1645. A list of the manes of ransomed captives has survived. That list does include the name Jón Jónsson. You can make out the name in the image of the list below: the third name on the list, “Jon Jonson Islander.”

However, the name “Jón Jónsson” was very common at this time, and there’s no knowing whether the “Jón Jónsson” in the list is the no-longer-young scholar from Grindavík or somebody else entirely.

Jón’s brother Helgi was ransomed in 1635, remember. Icelandic records clearly show that he returned to Iceland, married, and had children.

There’s no trace of Jón in the Icelandic records.

So it seems that Jón was never ransomed and never made it back to Iceland.

He might possibly have converted to Islam in a desperate attempt to improve the conditions of this life. If he had done so, he would have dropped out of the Icelandic records. As Jón’s letters clearly show, though, he was a devout man. He’d been educated to become a clergyman, remember. So it’s not likely that he would have abandoned his religion.

In all likelihood, then, Jón ended his days unhappily as a slave in Algiers, having had his life stolen from him.

Like other tales of people from this period, this one has no happy ending.

Hard times indeed.

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For those who may be interested, the quotations from Jón Jónsson’s letters from Algiers come from the letters included in The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, translated from the original Icelandic by Karl Smári Hreinsson and myself.  The “Lítill análl um Tyrkjans herhlaup á Íslandi anno 1627” can be found at the beginning of Tyrkjaránið á Íslandi 1627 (The Turkish raid on Iceland in 1627), a book containing an extensive collection of narratives, letters, official correspondence, and other documents connected with the 1627 Barbary corsair raid on Iceland, edited by Jón Þorkelsson, published in 1906-1909. The 1645 list of ransomed Icelanders comes from the National Archives of Norway (Riksarkivet).

Also… in a future blog, we’ll look at the life of Helgi Jónsson, Jón’s bother. That’s a tale with a much better ending.