(This post is a continuation of The Barbary Corsair Raid on Grindavík in 1627 – Parts 1 & 2. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)
Last week’s post covered the Salé corsairs’ arrival and their preparations for attacking the Grindavík area. This week, we follow their attack.
Even granting that Murad Reis, the Commander of the Salé corsairs, had to leave some men aboard his ship to guard his newly taken captives and to keep watch, he would still have been able to put ashore something close to fifty men, heavily armed no doubt, just as those who had overwhelmed the Danish merchant ship in the harbor had been—each man equipped with a musket, a pistol, and a sword.
In those days, Grindavík was an important community, but by modern standards it was not much of a settlement. There was no actual town as such. Instead, it consisted simply of the Danish trading post set close to the shoreline, some docks where the local fishing boats could be hauled up out of the water, some houses near the docks perhaps, and a scattering of outlying farms.
The Salé corsairs’ first move when they came ashore was to ransack the Danish trading post, no doubt on the advice of the captives they had interrogated.
When people think of early seventeenth century trading posts, they likely imagine the sorts of places that the English, the Dutch, and the French established in North America during this period to trade with the Indians for beaver pelts: sturdy wooden buildings encircled by protective log palisades. The Danish trading post at Grindavík, however, had no such fortification—since it served simply as a place to store and sell the goods imported from Denmark—and would have provided no defense. And the people living in the area would have been unable to protect themselves individually, since they had no weapons. So Murad Reis’s horde of fifty or so heavily armed fighters would have easily overwhelmed the place.
They must have expected the Trading post to be filled with a season’s worth of valuable trade goods. However, Lauriz Bentson, the Danish Factor, had clearly figured out that something was wrong when the men he had sent out to the corsair ship had not returned. He hastily removed as much of the merchandise in the trading post as he could and hid it. Then he and the other Danes with him—sailors from the ship and employees of the trading post—fled into the lava fields in the interior before the raiders came ashore. The inhabitants of any houses near the strand would have fled also. So the corsairs got little of value out of the trading post or the buildings nearby, and likely not a single captive.
After this disappointing beginning, their next move was to head inland and overrun the nearby farms. The standard way of doing this was to break up the main force into smaller groups and quarter the surrounding area. Since there was no means of communication between the local farmsteads other than word of mouth, if the corsairs moved quickly enough, they could swoop down upon the unsuspecting inhabitants of each farm and overwhelm them before they knew what was happening.
Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, the Icelandic pastor who suffered ruthless interrogation at the hands of the Algiers corsairs (see last week’s post), wrote that when the raiders descended upon Heimaey, they “rushed with violent speed across the island, like hunting hounds, howling like wolves.” Intimidation was the goal in a corsair attack. Murad Reis and his men would have moved out across the countryside quietly at first, not wishing to cause a general alarm. But the instant they spotted potential captives, they would have charged towards them en masse, brandishing weapons, shrieking and hollering—all in an effort to terrify their victims into immediate, cowering submission.
A certain amount of brute violence was inevitable during such attacks—anybody who resisted or opposed them would be ruthlessly dealt with—but in general Barbary corsairs did not want to seriously harm their victims. The point of such raids, after all, was not slaughter; it was to capture as many people as possible alive and uninjured, so that they would fetch as high a price as possible when auctioned off in the slave market.
The largest and most important of the local farmsteads that the corsairs would have come across in the Grindavík area was owned by the diocese of Skálholt, the seat of one of the two Bishops of Iceland. Located in Járngerðarstaðir (just on the southwestern outskirts of the modern-day town of Grindavík), it was a sizeable and prosperous place, and the tenant farmers who operated it for the Bishop were important people.
The matriarch of this family was Guðrún Jónsdóttir. It is hard to determine exactly how old Guðrún was, but she had three sons, the eldest of whom had just graduated from Skálholtsskóli, one of the two universities in Iceland at the time, which would have made him at least fifteen or sixteen (students graduated young in those days). So Guðrún was likely not much older than her mid-to-late thirties. She ran the Járngerðarstaðir farm along with her four brothers and her husband.
The band of Salé corsairs that descended upon the Járngerðarstaðir farmstead searching for captives and booty caught Guðrún unawares.
She had no doubt been out doing farm chores—supervising others rather than doing them herself—when she heard a commotion, looked around, and… to her horror, saw a mob of shrieking corsairs, bristling with weapons, charging down upon her. Along with Guðrún, the corsairs also captured a young girl, and probably several farm hands.
Women—and especially young girls—fetched high prices in North African slave markets, so the corsairs would have handled Guðrún and the girl very carefully.
As they were carrying them away from the farm, Guðrún’s brother, Filippus, tried to come to the rescue. He did not have any sort of weapon, though, and so stood little chance against the well-armed corsairs. They left him lying in the dirt, half dead, wounded and bleeding. As they turned from him, another of Guðrún’s brothers, Hjálmar, came galloping towards them on a horse. He had been out riding and heard the commotion. But he too was unarmed, and though he struck at the corsairs with his riding crop, they dragged him to the ground, where one of the corsairs stabbed him, and then a second and third also assaulted him.
Leaving Hjálmar lying mortally wounded beside his brother, the corsairs slung Guðrún and the girl up onto his horse and drove them down to the sea.
The corsairs looted the Járngerðarstaðir farmstead, taking everything of value they could carry and every person they found—man, woman, or child. Their captives included another of Guðrún’s brothers, Halldór, and some farmhands who were with him. Halldór and his companions, who had been a little ways off from the farmstead, made no attempt to flee when they saw the corsairs coming, for they did not imagine they would be kidnapped.
The southwest coast of Iceland had suffered pirate attacks before this, most noticeable by English pirates. In those attacks, only property had been taken. Barbary corsairs were a different kind of pirate entirely, though, and Halldór and his companions were unprepared for them. By the time they realized their mistake, it was too late. The corsairs trussed up Halldór and those with him and herded them all down to the sea.
The corsairs also captured Guðrún’s three sons: Héðinn, who was the youngest, Helgi, the middle son, and Jón, the eldest, who was a scholar (the one who had just graduated from Skálholtsskóli). Guðrún’s husband, Jón Guðlaugsson, was dragged down to the strand along with his sons and Halldór.
Jón Guðlaugsson was much older than Guðrún, and had been sick for some time. The corsairs had no interest in him, for they no doubt reckoned he would have little value on the auction block at the slave market and likely would not even survive the voyage to Salé, so they dismissed him. He collapsed to the ground, overwhelmed by grief and illness. Guðrún’s fourth brother, Jón, was one of the eight men who had originally rowed out to the corsair ship, where he now sat chained up in the hold.
So in a few brief hours, almost the entire Járngerðarstaðir farm family had been either killed or captured.
The Salé corsairs ferried all the captives they had taken across to their ship where it lay at anchor in Járngerðarstaðasund. Once on board, the new arrivals were forced down into the ship’s hold, where they were chained up beside the men already there. Shackles were fastened around everybody’s neck, linked to chains so heavy it took a strong man to lift them.
There was little the outnumbered, unarmed Icelanders could have done against such an unexpected and overwhelming attack.
The Salé corsairs set fire to the Danish trading post once they had ransacked it. This was standard Barbary corsair operating procedure. On Heimaey, the Algiers corsairs burned to the ground the Danish trading post and surrounding buildings at the harbor.
It was also standard corsair operating procedure to ransack and destroy any churches or chapels they came across. There was a church at Staðir, one of the other local farms, near the Danish trading post. The Salé corsairs vandalized it and tried to set fire to it. They would have done the same at the Járngerðarstaðir farmstead.
Chapels and churches were more likely to be wooden buildings, and so they burned like torches. The church at Staðir, however, was a sod building, so it didn’t burn well. Icelandic farmhouses too were mostly constructed of stacked layers of sod. They were difficult to set alight. Often the sod roofs could be scorched and the roof beams charred, but the houses themselves left basically intact.
Even if the Járngerðarstaðir farm buildings did survive the fire, however, they would have been ransacked, the doors shattered, the insides trashed, and possessions strewn everywhere.
When the corsairs departed, they left a smoking ruin behind them.
To find out what happened to the members of the Járngerðarstaðir farm family, go to the next post in this series.
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
The story of the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in 1627
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