ALGIERS – THE CAPTIVES’ EXPERIENCE 18

This week we conclude the story of Helgi Jónsson, the young Icelander who, along with the rest of his family, was captured in the summer of 1627 by corsairs from Salé, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Helgi, remember, was originally taken to Salé but ended up in Algiers, along with his brother, Jón.

Helgi left no first-hand account of his experiences, but his brother wrote several letters home that have survived. Everything we know about Helgi’s time in Algiers comes from these letters. One of them, sent to Jón’s and Helgi’s parents back in Iceland and dated January 24, 1630 (two and a half years after their capture), contains the following:

We [Jón and Helgi] are together here in one city [Algiers], not far off from each other, and see each other almost daily.

Helgi has had many masters. His master here in this town is a Greek renegade who has abandoned his religion and is now a chief over many soldiers [i.e., Helgi’s master was a janissary captain]. From the beginning, Helgi’s master tried every way, through beatings and threats, to turn Helgi from the true faith [i. e., make him convert to Islam]. But in the end Helgi said to his master, “If you do not stop beating and bullying me, you will be searching for silver payment for me in the sea. For I shall throw myself from the castle and die there, rather than deny my true God!” His master’s attitude softened when he heard these words, and he has not pressured Helgi or beaten him since.

Jón also wrote another letter home, dated 1633, that survives only in a paraphrased version in an Icelandic work titled Tyrkjaráns-Saga (The Saga of the Turkish Raid), compiled by Björn Jónsson in 1643, sixteen years after the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in which Jón and Helgi were first captured. This second letter confirms the details in the first. Here is Björn’s paraphrase:

He [Jón ] says that he and his brother, Helgi, are, by the grace of God, unharmed and in good health, still with the same masters, who have owned them for a long time, and are both in the same place, the city of Algiers.

Jón says that he and his brother Helgi stay at each other’s houses when Helgi is not at sea, which Helgi sees as his best chance at preferment. Helgi serves aboard the ship of the Admiral who has the greatest luck at sea. The Admiral’s name is Jairi Mustafa. This man rarely attacks ships directly but, instead, captures them using cunning. In the fighting that has occurred, he has never been hurt. He keeps the Christians aboard his ship shackled during any battle. He is a hard man but brave, and he is well liked by northlanders, of whom there are many aboard his ship.

The details provided in these two letters of Jón’s form the basis of Helgi’s story as it has been recounted in this series of posts about him.

Here’s a recap.

After being taken from Salé to Algiers along with his brother, Helgi was bought and sold several times (he must have become uncomfortably familiar with the auctioning process at the Badestan, the slave market in Algiers).

Sometime before 1630 (the date of Jón’s first letter), Helgi was bought by a janissary captain. Initially, the janissary captain tried to coerce Helgi into converting to Islam, but Helgi resisted, and, eventually, the two men reached an arrangement that let Helgi remain a Christian. By 1633 (the date of Jón’s second letter, the one paraphrased by Björn Jónsson in Tyrkjaráns-Saga), Helgi was still with that same janissary captain, serving alongside his master aboard a corsair ship commanded by Jairi Mustafa.

Thanks to the details provided in the official ransom list submitted to the Danish authorities of the time, we known that Helgi was ransomed in May of 1636, and that his owner then was a janissary captain named Mamet Bölükbaşı (“Captain Muhammad”). So it looks like Helgi stayed with Mamet Bölükbaşı for something like six or seven years—from sometime before 1630 to 1636. He spent that time aboard corsair ships alongside Mamet Bölükbaşı, just as René du Chastelet des Boys served alongside Ouda Bachi Topeclaure, and the two men’s experience must have been very similar—which is why I include des Boys’ narrative in this series of posts about Helgi.

As a slave, Helgi faired pretty well. Or, at least, he fared better than many others enslaved in Algiers at the time. He may have been forced to serve aboard corsair ships and take part, one way or another, in attacks upon Europeans, but he wasn’t chained to an oar and forced to row day and night on a corsair galley. He wasn’t forced to do hard, dangerous work (like quarrying and transporting blocks of stone to repair the Mole, the long breakwater that protected the Algiers harbor. He wasn’t beaten regularly (at least not after he Mamet Bölükbaşı reached their agreement). He wasn’t sold off to an owner in Istanbul or Cairo or Beirut—far-distant places from which it was virtually impossible to be ransomed.

Most importantly, perhaps, his master was willing to part with him for a reasonable ransom amount.

So in June of 1636, Helgi boarded a ship along with thirty or so other ransomed Icelanders. As the ship sailed away, did he stand at the stern railing gazing at Algiers as it dwindled in the distance. Did he feel any sort of pang at leaving what had become his home—or at least a kind of default home?

Helgi’s brother Jón wasn’t ransomed. Did Jón come to see Helgi off as he boarded the ship that was to take him to freedom? Did the two brothers embrace? Did they shed tears?

We can never know any of this, of course, but some version of it must have happened.

Helgi was about fifteen or so when he was captured. Jón was a few years older. By the time Helgi was ransomed, they were in their mid-twenties. Nearly half their young lives had been spent in servitude.

That must have had a profound effect on them.

Helgi returned to Iceland, where he settled into some version of his old life as a farmer. He married and raised children. His descendants walk around Iceland today.

There is no record of what sort of person Helgi was after his return. After nearly ten years as a slave, though, and after spending most of it aboard corsair ships in the violent business of capturing human beings to sell into slavery, it is hard not to think that he suffered from what today would be referred to as PTSD—post traumatic stress disorder.

Did he dream of Algiers during the long, cold, dark Icelandic winter nights? Were they dreams of terror? Of violence? Or did he remember the better times with his brother, or perhaps even with Mamet Bölükbaşı, with whom he lived for so many years. Had he and Mamet Bölükbaşı, become friends of a sort, despite everything? Such things did happen between master and slave in Algiers.

As far as we know, Helgi lived out the rest of his life quietly as a farmer and never left Iceland again.

Maybe he told tales to his children and, later, grandchildren, about sun-drenched Algiers, where it never snowed, and where people owned other people and how life was hard—harder even than in Iceland—if you were a slave there.

Maybe the children shivered, hearing such stories.

Or maybe they were just stories. “Tell us another one, grandpa!” they might have called out. “Tell us the one about uncle Jón and the flock of sheep and how it never snows!”

As far as we have been able to discover, Helgi lived to a decent old age and died peacefully in his bed—a better ending to his life than he had probably at one time hoped, given the events of his youth.

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For those who may be interested…

Jón’s 1630 letter can be found in Karl Smári Hreinsson & Adam Nichols, The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, pp. 121-147.

The paraphrase of Jón’s 1633 letter can be found in Björn Jónsson, Tyrkjaráns-Saga (The Saga of the Turkish Raid), Part Six, Chapters XXXVII and XXXVIII. This reference is to the original Icelandic version of the book. Tyrkjaráns-Saga has never before been properly translated into English, so the translation here is mine and Karl Smari’s. We have a complete translation of Tyrkjaráns-Saga planned for publication in the coming year. Look for an announcement of it here in this blog.

As far as we have been able to determine, Jón Jónsson, Helgi’s brother, was never ransomed and died in Algiers, a slave.