THE BARBARY CORSAIR RAID ON GRINDAVÍK IN 1627 – PART 6

(This post is a continuation of The Barbary Corsair Raid on Grindavík in 1627 – Parts 1 – 5. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)

Last week’s post described the arrival in Salé of the captives from Grindavík. This week’s post follows what happened to Guðrún Jónsdóttir and those with her after they arrived.

The Grindavík area contain three separate farmsteads: Staður, Járngerðarstaðir, and Þórkötlustaðir. These were more than just simple farms; each was a sort of miniature community, with a main building (or cluster of buildings) at the heart of it and scattered outlying structures housing various sorts of people connected with the farmstead—fishermen, tenant farmers, shepherds, etc.

The most productive of these farmsteads was Járngerðarstaðir (the name means “iron-making place,” for tradition has it that there had been an iron smelter there during the Viking settlement period and on into the Middle Ages). It was owned by the church, but it was operated by an important and influential local family—the Járngerðarstaðir farm family.

As we saw in earlier posts here in this blog, six members—two generations—of the Járngerðarstaðir farm family were captured in the Salé corsair raid.

During the seventeenth century, tens of thousands of Europeans were seized in innumerable corsair raids. The vast majority of them disappeared without a trace, and their lives remain entirely anonymous and unchronicled. The Járngerðarstaðir farm family, however, is an exception to this. Two of the family members captured in the raid left behind written documents, and from these, and from other contemporary sources, it is possible to piece together what happened to them all.

This story has never previously been told. All the parts of it were there in the historical record, but Northern Captives represents the first time that the various bits and pieces have been strung together to form a coherent narrative.

Here in this blog, we will not follow what happened to all the members of the family. This series of posts, after all, consists of excerpts from Northern Captives, not the entire text.

We will follow what happened to Guðrún Jónsdóttir, the matriarch of the Járngerðarstaðir farm family and those with her.

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When the raid occurred, Guðrún’s oldest son had recently graduated from Skálholtsskóli (Skálholt’s School), one of the two elite institutions of higher learning in Iceland at this time that educated the sons of well-to-do and important families to prepare them to hold official positions in the church and the government and to serve as pastors. He would likely have been around sixteen or seventeen (students graduated young in those days). So Guðrún was probably not much older than her mid-to-late thirties.

When the Grindavík captives arrived in Salé, remember, they were hustled through the rowdy, gawking crowd at the docks and locked away together in a building that served as a prison for them while the various formalities were taken care of in preparation for their sale as slaves.

Guðrún, however, was not among that group. She, her youngest son Héðinn, and the young girl captured with her (whose name was Guðrún Rafnsdóttir) were brought to a different place entirely, a private house owned by a man described in the Icelandic text simply “a Turk.” The word “Turk” back in those days was used as a generic term to describe pretty much any sort of Muslim, so it is unlikely that the man was actually from Turkey. Most probably, he was one of the wealthy backers of Murad Reis’s expedition to Iceland, and he saw in Guðrún a potential profit to be made—from ransoming her.

It is unlikely that she was the only woman among the sixty or seventy captives Murad Reis brought back to Salé, but she seems to have been the only woman of means.

The Icelandic documents do not specify the ages of either Héðinn or Guðrún Rafnsdóttir, but they were almost certainly young children.

North African slavery was guided by rules and restrictions spelled out in the Korean. Only captives taken in a ‘just’ war—that is, a licit jihad against infidels sanctioned by sharia law—could be enslaved. Once these captives became slaves, there were restrictions on how they could be treated, including a stipulation that a mother could not be separated from any child of hers who was under the age of seven. Since the corsairs allowed Guðrún to keep Héðinn with her, he was likely seven or under. The fact that Guðrún Rafnsdóttir went along with them likely means that she, too, was around that age.

There is no actual documentation for it, but Guðrún Rafnsdóttir was likely Guðrún Jónsdóttir’s foster daughter, for it was quite common in those days for well-to-do Icelandic families to foster children.

For three days, Guðrún and the two children stayed in the house they had been brought to. Food was given to them, but they had to fetch their own water—under guard. Beyond this, there are no further details available about Guðrún’s time in Salé. All we know is that she did not stay there very long, for she was quickly ransomed.

Her ransom provides a perfect example of how the ransoming process worked in North Africa.

The obvious expectation, of course, is that Guðrún would have been ransomed by family members back home in Iceland. But this is not what happened.

Her ransomed was paid by an unnamed Dutchman in Salé.

Why would a Dutchman in Salé go out of his way to finance the ransom of an Icelandic woman he almost certainly did not know personally?

There are two parts to the answer to that question.

First, while still in Grindavík, Murad Reis and his crew enticed a Danish merchant ship into the harbor and captured it and its crew. This ship had been headed to the West Fjords, in northwest Iceland. Murad Reis put a skeleton crew aboard it and sailed it back to Salé.

It turns out, however, that this was not a Danish ship at all. It was Dutch.

We know this from a Dutch chronicle which contains a brief mention of Murad Reis—referred to by his Dutch name, Jan Janszoon van Haarlem—and the Salé corsair attack on Grindavík:

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As the Admiral of the sea, Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, did not find anything valuable in the Strait of Gibraltar, he set out to sea with a ship, on which there were nine Englishmen who had been slaves, and went to Iceland at 66 degrees. There he found a little ship in the harbour of Grindewijck, which he took, killing two brothers who were on board before he took it. And from the land there he took twelve people, among whom was a woman with three sons and two brothers, whose two other brothers had been killed by the pirates. As he was set to depart from that place, the ship the Olijfboom [Olive Tree], sailing from Copenhagen, ran into him. The captain was Claes Gerritsz. Oly, from Medemblik, with twelve men on board. Jan Janszoon captured these men and took them with him, but he gave the nine Englishmen the little ship that he had taken first, which was full of fish. They kept what the pirate gave them, and they sailed in that ship back to England. Having come to Salé with his captives, Jan Janszoon sold 24 people there as slaves. Among them was Boeye Laurens from Copenhagen, who was ransomed and freed by the Portuguese Jew Belmonte and brought to this land, so gaining his freedom.

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It is not clear what source(s) this account is based on, but though his details seem a little skewed, the writer is clearly describing the capture of the Járngerðarstaðir farm family. The woman with “three sons and two brothers” is obviously Guðrún. The “two other brothers… killed by the pirates” are Philippus and Hjálmar, the brothers who were mortally wounded in the corsair attack.

So while there may be a little confusion (no brothers of Guðrún’s were killed aboard the Danish merchant ship in the harbor that the Salé corsairs captured), the essentials of the story right.

So how does this relate to Guðrún’s ransom?

“Boeye Laurens from Copenhagen” was the ‘Dutch connection’ Guðrún needed in order to arrange her ransom.

For further details about how Guðrún Jónsdóttir was ransomed from captivity in Salé, see the next post in this blog.

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For those who may be interested…

The long quote about Jan Janszoon’s actions in Grindavík comes from Nicolaes van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael alder ghedenck-weerdichste geschiedenissen, die hier en daer in Europa als in Duijtschlant, Vranckrijck, Enghelant, Spaengien, Hungarijen, Polen, Seven-berghen, Wallachien, Moldavien, Turckijen en Nederlant van den beginne des jaers1621 (Historical Narrative of Recent Events that Have Happened Here and There in Europe, as in Germany, France, England, Spain, Hungary, Poland, Rome, Walachia, Moldavia, Turkey, and the Netherlands, from the Beginning of the Year 1621), Het elfde deel (Eleventh Part), entry dated December, 1627, p. 62 verso.

Historisch Verhael is a twenty-one-volume series, published periodically between 1622 and 1632, that contains descriptions of a wide selection of contemporary events occurring in the Netherlands, in other parts of Europe, and in the New World.