This week, we continue with the series of excerpts from Northern Captives and Stolen Lives, the books Karl Smári Hreinsson (my Icelandic colleague) and I published over the past couple of years about the Barbary corsair raids on Iceland in 1627.
This week’s excerpt is from Northern Captives. It begins a series of posts that describe the attack on Grindavík, in southwest Iceland, by Barbary corsairs from Salé.
On June 20, 1627, in the pale light of an early northern summer morning, a lone ship approached the Grindavík area, in the Reykjanes Peninsula in southwest Iceland, and made landfall at Járngerðarstaðasund, a sheltered bay near what is now the southwestern outskirts of the modern-day town of Grindavík.
Unbeknownst to those ashore, the newly arrived ship had crossed the North Atlantic from Salé, the notorious Barbary corsair port on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. During the summer shipping season, a variety of vessels from different countries regularly plied Icelandic waters—Danish and Dutch merchant ships, English fishing boats, the occasional whaler from France or the Basque Country. So the sudden appearance of a strange ship would not have caused any immediate alarm to people on shore.
Murad Reis, the commander of these Salé corsairs, was a hugely successful corsair captain. By the summer of 1627, he had been leading raids in the Mediterranean, along the Atlantic coast of North Africa and Europe, and in the English Channel for a decade, operating first out of Algiers and then Salé, where he had become Admiral of the Salé corsair fleet.
He had never led a raid this far north before, though, and the Icelandic waters would have been strange and unfamiliar to him and his crew. It was the height of summer. Northern Europe had long summer days, but nothing like Iceland’s. As the Salé corsairs sailed closer and close to the Arctic Circle, they would have seen the sun almost constantly in the sky, low on the horizon, dipping out of sight for only about three hours of twilight, and then rising to circle the horizon once more—resulting in almost perpetual daylight, no true night, and no stars to navigate by.
In the summer of 1871, William Morris, the celebrated English poet, textile designer, and reformer, visited Iceland. Here is his description of what seeing Iceland for the first time from the sea was like:
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The mountains look as if they rose straight out of the sea: they are all dark grey, turning indigo in the distance under the half-cloudy sky; but here and there the top of a conical peak will be burned red with fire, or a snow-covered peak will rise up: at last we see the first of the great glaciers that looks as if it were running into the sea, and soon there is nothing but black peaks sticking up out of the glacier sea.
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The Salé corsairs’ first view of Iceland would have been much the same, coming in by sail from the east as they did (as everybody did): rugged, dark rocky coast mottled with the white ice of the glaciers gleaming in the perpetual light of the northern summer.
The Salé corsairs cruised westwards along Iceland’s southern coast until they came to Grindavík.
Why Grindavík?
There are very few decent harbors along Iceland’s south coast, and much of the shoreline consists of either naked rocks or long stretches of black, volcanic sand beaches. Járngerðarstaðasund offered a sheltered cove with reasonably deep water and so was one of the better anchorages available. Both the fishermen and farmers of the Grindavík area made use of it. More importantly, perhaps, a Danish trading post was situated on its shoreline. Moreover, the Danish merchant ship that supplied that trading post lay at anchor there.
For the Salé corsairs, such a ship represented potential prey—likely the first they had seen since entering Icelandic waters. It would have caught their interest the same way a gazelle at a watering hole would have caught the interest of a hungry lion.
The Salé corsairs lowered their sails and quietly dropped anchor in the sheltered waters of Járngerðarstaðasund, near the Danish merchant ship. They put a ship’s boat into the water, and some of them rowed over to the Danish vessel to see how well it might be armed and to speak with the captain, who was on deck peering at them curiously. They explained politely that they were Danish whalers who had been off course for some weeks and asked if he might possibly have any provisions he could sell them. The captain said he had none.
After this exchange, the corsairs bid him goodbye and, without fuss, rowed back to their ship—having ascertained to their satisfaction that the Danish merchant ship had only the captain aboard and so would be easy to seize.
The residents of the Grindavík area—the native Icelanders and the Danish merchants and seamen among them—were totally unprepared for a hoard of Barbary corsairs from North Africa to suddenly show up. They knew about the existence of Barbary corsairs, of course, but they would never have expected to actually be attacked by such men—no more than we today expect to be suddenly attack by aliens from the stars.
So as the Salé corsair ship continued to lie quietly at anchor in Járngerðarstaðasund, those on shore—knowing no better—remained more curious than alarmed.
After a while, that curiosity got the better of them.
The resident Danish Factor, Lauriz Bentson, sent out a boat, with eight men in it, to see who these newcomers might be. These men were invited aboard the corsair ship when they drew close and hailed it, and they clambered aboard expecting to have a comfortable chat with the captain and crew of a merchant ship or a whaler passing through.
Instead, as they set foot on the deck, they were immediately swarmed and taken prisoner.
Barbary Corsairs typically kept their captives in chains down in the hold of their ship, and this was the fate that awaited these men.
First, though, they would have to be interrogated.
For more on the Barbary corsair attack on Grindavík, see the next post in this series.
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For those who may be interested…
William Morris’s description of the Icelandic coast comes from The Collected Works of William Morris, Volume VIII, Journals of Travel in Iceland, 1871-1873, p. 20.
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
The story of the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in 1627
Amazon listing