ENSLAVED: THE STORY OF THE BARBARY CORSAIR RAID ON EAST ICELAND IN 1627 – PART 2

This week, we continue with another excerpt from Enslaved: The Story of the Barbary Corsair raid on East Iceland in 1627

This book, remember is now available on Amazon. Here’s the link to the Amazon listing:

Enslaved – Amazon listing

Enslaved focuses on the raid, by corsairs from Algiers, on the East Fjords area of Iceland (the southeast quadrant of the island) and on what happened to the Icelandic captives when they arrived in Algiers.

The details of the corsair raid on the East Fjords come from a remarkable document known as the Skólapiltar Report (the Schoolboys’ Report).

This report (based on interviews with students from the East Fjord area) contain a surprisingly detailed account of the corsair raid, chronicled sequentially, day by day.

Below is part of the chronicle for July 6, 1627, the first day of the raid. There’s quite a lot of background material that needs explaining in order to make the events of the chronicle clear. We have done this through footnotes.

JULY 6

On July 6, very early in the day, the two Turkish ships[1] were seen from the island of Papey. They had a following wind, and they sailed into the fjord known as Berufjörður. On their way, they encountered four Danish men from the market town of Djúpivogur, in a boat, with their lines out, fishing. The pirates took that boat. They then followed the usual sailing route of the English into the fjord.[2] When they came abreast of Berunes [on the fjord’s northeast shoreline], they dropped their anchors. By this time, it was close to sunrise.

They next rowed over in three boats to the town of Djúpivogur, which is across from Berunes at the southwest end of the fjord. One of the pirates’ boats went quickly towards the Danish merchant ship [that was moored in the harbor at Djúpivogur]. The others went to the two ends of the harbor and surrounded the [Danish] trading post.[3] The Danish men were all asleep in their beds, both those onboard the ship and on land. The pirates surprised them and took a total of fifteen men, including an Icelander who was with the Danes.[4] Nobody escaped. The Turks bound them all and transported them in two boats to their ships.

After this, thirty-five pirates armed themselves and went to Búlandsnes farmstead, next to Djúpivogur, screaming and roaring like lions. They captured Guttormur Hallsson, the farmer,[5] and five of his people—a young man, three old women, and a girl—as well as six beggars, who had come there from another area in hopes of receiving food, and also a married couple who were tenant farmers in Búlandsnesshjáleiga [a small farm on the Búlandsnes farmstead estate].[6] The Turks tied the hands of the men behind their backs, and a couple of them took the captives to Djúpivogur, from where they were ferried out to the Danish merchant ship.

The remaining thirty-three pirates marched to Háls [a farmstead, with its own chapel, that was located about three kilometers/1.8 miles northwest of Búlandsnes]. The pastor there was named Reverend Jón Þorvarðsson. The pirates captured Reverend Jón and his wife, Katrín Þorláksdóttir, along with six local people and also three men [who were tenant farmers] at Hálshjáleiga [a small farm on the Háls farmstead estate]. They drove all these captives towards Berufjörður farmstead, at the end of the fjord. The priest and his wife were exhausted from the march and from grief and hardship.[7]

The Berufjörður farm folk had been warned about the corsairs’ attack by a boy who escaped from Háls, and they fled to safety with the boy northeast across the mountains into the area called Breiðdalur.[8] The master of Berufjörður farm, Magnús Þórðarson, was some distance away in the countryside. The pirates told Reverend Jón Þorvarðsson, his wife, and the other captives to wait where they were [under guard]. Then the raiders continued on along the eastern shore of Berufjörður towards Berunes.[9]

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Next week, we’ll look at another excerpt from Enslaved.

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[1] Seventeenth century Icelanders—and Europeans in general—referred to all Muslims as ‘Turks,’ whether they actually came from geographical Turkey or not.

[2] The Icelandic cod fishery was a major commercial enterprise for the English during this period, as important to their economy as the fisheries of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. In 1627, no less than 150 English fishing vessels sailed to Iceland for the season. Mostly, they frequented the rich fishing grounds off Iceland’s northwest coast, using harbors in the inlets of the West Fjords in the northwest of Iceland, but they also fished along the south coast and in East Icelandic waters—including the waters around Berufjörður. So the statement that the Algerine corsairs followed “the usual sailing route of the English into the fjord” likely refers to English fishing boats.

[3] Barbary corsairs typically interrogated new captives—often quite brutally—to gain information about an area they were about to attack. The Algerine corsairs undoubtedly subjected the four Danes they caught fishing to such an interrogation and learned from them that there was a Danish trading post at Djúpivogur, with a merchant ship moored in the harbor. The corsairs would have used the knowledge they had acquired via these interrogations to plan their attack on the trading post. For details about Danish trading posts in Iceland during this period, see the chapter titled Iceland in the Seventeenth Century in the Background Material section at the back of this book.

[4] The captured Danes would have been the trading post’s Factor (i.e., the agent of the Danish Crown in charge of the trading post) and the Danish workers/sailors he employed. The skólapiltar report provides no further details regarding the fate of these captured Danes, but another source, a report compiled by Klaus Eyjólfsson, a sheriff on the Westman Islands, does: “When the Turks returned to their ship with their [Danish] captives, they [the corsairs] took the local Danish Factor, stripped him of his clothes, made him put on an old and filthy shirt, and put him in irons. They also manacled the other Danish people, who lay that way for seven days” (Karl Smári Hreinsson & Adam Nichols, The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, p. 97).

[5] Guttormur Hallsson, an educated man from an important family, was the master of the Búlandsnes farmstead. While a slave in Algiers, he wrote a letter home that survived in the form of hand written copies.

[6] Búlandsnes was a large and prosperous farmstead with a number of smaller farms attached to it. It was also a Kristfjárjörð (a “Christ-fee”) property, that is, one dedicated to providing sustenance for the poor—hence the “six beggars who had come there from another area in hopes of receiving food.”

[7] The local mountains come right down to the southwest shoreline of Berufjörður, making the land there unsuitable for farming. So the corsairs had to hike almost the entire length of the fjord (a distance of about 20-25 kilometers/12-15 miles) over rugged terrains, dragging their captives along with them, before they encountered another farm to despoil.

[8] The broad peninsula that formed the northeast shore of Berufjörður had a spine of rugged mountains running down it. Breiðdalur was a valley on the other side—i.e., the northeast side—of those mountains. This mountain range provided a barrier against the corsairs, who did not know the passes through it, and Breiðdalur itself afforded numerous places in which to shelter and hide away.

[9] Berufjörður is quite a large fjord, almost five kilometers (3 miles) wide at the mouth and about 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) long. After assaulting the farmsteads of Búlandsnes and Háls (on the fjord’s southwestern tip), the corsair raiding party hiked along the steep, rocky southwest shoreline of the fjord to Berufjörður farm, at the fjord’s foot, a walking distance of roughly 20-25 kilometers (12-15 miles). The march to Berunes, on the fjord’s other side, where the corsair ships were anchored, was a further 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) or so—a total walking distance of close to fifty kilometers (30 miles). Though likely somewhat arduous, such a circumnavigation of the fjord would have been an obvious first step in the raid, allowing the corsairs not only to garner captives and loot, but also to get a sense of the local countryside.