This week, we continue the story of Jón Vestmann, the Icelandic teenager who was captured by corsairs from Algiers on the island of Heimaey, one of the Westman Islands off the south coast of Iceland. Last week, we followed Jón’s career as a corsair, his capture by the Knights of Malta, and his subsequent travels through Spain and France until he eventually fetched up in Denmark.
We pick up the story from there.
Jón arrived in Denmark sometime in late 1645 or early 1646 and was celebrated as a sort of national prodigal son, known as Jón Vestmann (“Vestmann” being a version of “Westman,” as in Westman Islands).
In Denmark, Jón was renowned not only for his colorful life but also for the skills and knowledge he possessed. He had clearly learned other useful things in Algiers besides chess. He is credited, for example, with introducing the wheelbarrow to Denmark.
Jón’s celebrity status created a problem for him, though. He was, after all, a renegade, someone who had forsaken his own religion and embraced Islam. Plus, as a corsair captain, he had preyed on European shipping—though it is not clear exactly how much of his corsair career he was forthcoming about.
There was nothing like the Spanish Inquisition in Denmark, but the church was not about to allow an apostate sinner free rein of the country. Kaspar Brochmann, the Bishop of Sjælland (the island on which Copenhagen is located) and the principal Bishop in Denmark, came out publicly against Jón, and there were calls for Jón to be publicly executed.
Fortunately, Jón had impressed important men in Copenhagen with his abilities—as he had in Algiers—and they came to his aid. In the end, he was forced to make a public confession of his sins to the Bishop of Sjælland in Holmens Kirke (one of the best-known churches in Copenhagen), but he was then reaccepted into the church (in 1646).
After this, the Bishop actually became and friend and supporter of Jón.
Jón, remember, had learned to make maps and charts while in Algiers—a rare and highly prized skill at the time. The Danish authorities realized that his cartographic abilities, combined with his first-hand knowledge of the Mediterranean waters, could be very useful to them militarily. A year after Jón’s readmission into the church, no lesser a person that the King of Denmark himself requested—i.e., commanded—Jón to create a series of nautical charts of the Mediterranean.
In return for doing this job, Jón was awarded a generous salary, a living allowance, and free lodging. Since he worked officially for the Danish navy, he was also granted a commission as a naval officer. All of this sealed his reputation (and his rehabilitation), and he became a universally respected and admired figure.
This was the high point of Jón’s time in Denmark. The image accompanying this post depicts Jón as he might have looked at that point in his life: confident, fashionably prosperous, dashingly handsome (for the time). He had royal patronage, he was admired by all, his future seemed secure.
And then it all came apart.
According to the story in the Icelandic sources, the cause of Jón’s fall was a woman—actually two women.
It started, apparently, when Jón had an affair with an older woman. This in itself would not necessarily have been a fatal problem. Thanks to the double standard about such things, men had affairs with women—older and younger—all the time without suffering serious consequences (unlike many of the women). The problem here was that this woman had a young daughter named Margarete (Margarete Pétursdóttir; her father was a ship’s captain).
Jón abandoned the mother for the daughter.
The mother, perhaps understandably, was furious.
In the winter of 1649, Jón had an accident and broke his thigh. There are no clear details about what sort of accident it was exactly or how it happened. One version of the story, though, has it that Margarete’s mother, in a fit of fury, shoved Jón down an icy slope, and that in the fall he broke his leg.
However it happened, the accident proved to be a serious one. The broken leg—the break may have been a compound fracture—became infected, and Jón was confined to his bed.
In a surreal twist, as he lay there, feverish and in agony, Margarete was brought to him, and the two were officially married. Margarete was pregnant.
Jón had been planning a trip back to Iceland in the summer, of that year, perhaps with his new bride. He never made it. He died, likely of sepsis, on March 26, 1649—three days after the bedside wedding. He was in his mid-to-late thirties.
Five months later, in August, Margarete gave birth to a baby girl who was baptized Margrét.
And so ended the life of Jón Vestmann.
Jón must have been an altogether remarkable man, intelligent, adaptable, unbelievably tough—a survivor. It is tempting to wonder what he might have accomplished if he had lived longer, or if he had never been captured in the corsair raid at all and had been able to lead the life he had planned.
We know about the life of Jón Vestmann because of the details provided in the Icelandic documents. There must, however, have been hundreds—thousands—of men (and women) like him, whose lives were violently uprooted in corsair attacks but who manage somehow to survive and prosper anyway. Their many stories, however, were never written down, and so they remain unknown to us.
Our loss.
Corsairs and Captives
Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates
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The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
The story of the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in 1627
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