THE BARBARY CORSAIR RAID ON ICELAND IN 1627

In the summer of 1627, Barbary corsairs from North Africa raided Iceland, killing dozens of people and abducting a total of almost 500 to sell into bondage in the slave markets of Salé (on the Atlantic coast of Morocco) and Algiers. This dramatic event is as familiar to Icelanders as the landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock is for Americans, or the defeat of the Spanish Armada is for the British, but, outside Iceland, the details of the 1627 corsair raid are virtually unknown. This is because many of the Icelandic primary source documents dealing with the Tyrkjaránið ¹ (as the raid is known in Iceland) have not yet been translated.

Those Icelandic documents include the following:

Reisubók séra Ólafs Egilssonar (The Travelogue of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson), a first-person narrative written by Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, one of the Icelandic captives transported to Algiers, completed sometime around 1628‑9 (the exact date is uncertain) after he returned from North Africa to Iceland. Reverend Ólafur’s chronicle existed only as handwritten copies until it was finally published in Iceland as Lítil Saga umm herhlaup Tyrkjans á Íslandi árið 1627 (A small story about the Turkish raid on Iceland in 1627) in 1852
Tyrkjaráns‑Saga (The Turkish Raid Saga), a narrative of the raid and its aftermath compiled from a variety of contemporary eyewitness accounts, written by Björn Jónsson in 1642
Tyrkjaránið á Íslandi 1627 (The Turkish Raid on Iceland in 1627), a collection of primary source documents relating to the raid, published in 1906-1909

Along with an Icelandic colleague, I edited and translated Reverend Ólafur’s narrative. That translation was published by the Catholic University of America Press as The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627 and is available on Amazon sites worldwide (The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson).

Reverend Ólafur provides a compelling, detailed account of what happened to him, but his narrative tells only part of the story of the Tyrkjaránið. Reverend Ólafur was captured, along with his pregnant wife and two small children, on Heimaey, one of the Westman Islands off Iceland’s south coast. The corsairs attacked other places too, though.

There were two separate raids that summer, one by corsairs based in Algiers and one by corsairs based in Salé. It was the Algerian corsairs who abducted the Westman Islanders. They also raided along the East Fjords, on Iceland’s southeast corner. The corsairs from Salé, meanwhile, raided along the coastline of the Reykjanes Peninsula, on Iceland’s southwest corner. They sacked Grindavík, on the southern shore, and (unsuccessfully) assailed Bessastaðir, where the Danish Governor of Iceland had his residence.

There are some descriptions of the Tyrkjaránið in English, but they tend to either gloss over too much or simply get the details wrong. Mostly, this seems to be because so few people read Icelandic, and so they have to rely on summaries and summaries of summaries, leading to a sort of ‘broken telephone’ process in which even the most basic facts get confused—like there being two separate raids. There’s no single English-language work, based directly in the original Icelandic sources, that adequately covers the details of both raids.

Well… no contemporary English-language work, anyway.

Way back at the turn of the century between the 1800s and 1900s, a Scotsman named Nelson Annandale took, as he put it, “a series of summer and autumn holidays spent, between the years 1896 and 1903, in the Faroes and Iceland.” He turned his experiences during those holidays into a book: The Faroes and Iceland: Studies in Island Life, first published in 1905. Chapter 3 of that book, titled “The Algerians in Iceland,” contains what I reckon is perhaps the most readable English-language overview of the Tyrkjaránið anybody has yet produced.

Unlike most other English-language writers on the Tyrkjaránið, Annandale worked directly from the original Icelandic sources. He did not read Icelandic himself. Instead, he got help from Icelandic friends who did the initial translation for him. He did not simply present a verbatim English rendering of the original Icelandic texts, though. As he put it, “To translate them literally, in extenso, could serve no useful purpose, for they abound in repetitions and uninteresting details.” Though his assessment of the original texts may be questionable (I certainly know some Icelanders who would disagree with him), his decision was a good one in terms of the narrative. Annandale offers an overview of the events of the raid that is almost novel-like in its readability. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to describe it as a “gripping read,” but it’s certainly one of the most interesting and easily accessible English-language descriptions of the Tyrkjaránið around.

Annandale did not get all the details right, though. Whether this results from miscommunication between him and the Icelanders in the process of translation, or of him adding elaborations of his own is hard to figure out. The end result, though, is that he’s not entirely reliable.

The Icelandic sources, for instance, say that the corsairs who raided Grindavík, on the Reykjanes Peninsula, were from “Kyle.” Of this, Annandale writes: “What town exactly this was it is rather hard to say. That it was not the historic Salee, which had then passed its zenith, is proved both by the description of its position and the fact that ‘Salee’ is also mentioned in the Icelandic records as a city of the pirates. On the whole, it would seem to have been further east than Tangier, and rather to have occupied the position of Ceuta; for it was well within the straits, some little distance from their opening into the Atlantic.”

Annandale is just plain wrong about this. Various parts of the Icelandic texts combined with the description of the place where the Grindavík captives were taken make it clear that “Kyle” is simply an Icelandic rendering of Salé.

So you can’t trust Annandale completely.

He did get most things right, though. And his version is so readable and so complete that it’s worth overlooking the errors.

Reading Annandale’s “The Algerians in Iceland” is the best way I know of (if you’re an English-language reader) to get a clear sense of what happened way back in that fateful summer of 1627.

Here’s a link to a pdf document containing Chapter 3 -“The Algerians in Iceland” from Nelson Annandale’s The Faroes and Iceland: Studies in Island Life.

Enjoy.

Nelson Annandale – The Faroes and Iceland Chapter 3

Tyrkjaránið is pronounced Tyrk-yar-rown-ith (with a voiced ‘th’ – as in the). The word translates as “Turkish raid.” Seventeenth century Icelanders, like seventeenth century Europeans in general, tended to refer to all Muslims as “Turks,” whether or not they were actually connected in any direct way with geographical Turkey.