BENEDIKT PÁLSSON – A CAPTIVE’S TALE

Being captured by Barbary corsairs was bad news.

The capture itself was awful enough. At the very least, it was terrifying—heavily armed corsairs leaping aboard your ship shrieking like banshees and rampaging about brandishing their weapons. At worst—if the captain and crew of the ship you were on chose to resist—it was a matter of life and death, for once a corsair attack became violent, it became deadly.

But the attack itself wasn’t the worst part. What came after was arguable harder to bear: slavery.

Captives were brought to the slave market and auctioned off to the highest bidder—like cattle. After this they were property, and their owners could pretty much do whatever they wanted to them. The Quran and the Hadiths laid down rules for how slaves were supposed to be treated, but ownership granted the owner total power over the slave, and total power (as the old cliché goes) corrupts totally. So the rules often operated more in theory than in fact.

Slaves with good owners might lead reasonable comfortable lives. Slaves with bad owners endured a living hell.

Good owner or bad, though, every slave yearned for freedom.

The quickest way to get such freedom was to be ransomed, but that only worked if you were lucky (and Catholic) enough to be ransomed by one of the redemptive orders (the Mercedarians or the Trinitarians—or if you were rich.

This week’s post tells the tale of one such rich captive.

He was an Icelander named Pálsson.

Benedikt was born in 1608 to a prominent family in North Iceland. In fact, Benedikt’s family was arguably the prominent family in North Iceland.

Benedikt’s grandfather, Guðbrandur Þorláksson, was a clergyman who had studied abroad at the University of Copenhagen and served as the Bishop of Hólar, in North Iceland, for over fifty years, until his death in 1627 at the age of 86. Benedikt’s father, Páll Guðbrandsson, was a sheriff at Þingeyrar, a wealthy farmstead in north Iceland.

So Benedikt came from a family both wealthy and influential. Big things were expected of him. Accordingly, when he came of age, he was packed off to university. Unlike his grandfather, though, he attended university of Germany rather than Denmark. At the University of Hamburg, he studied to become a barber-surgeon.

In the summer of 1633, at the age of 25, having finishing his medical studies, Benedikt set sail aboard a Hamburg ship. It’s not clear what his destination night have been. It doesn’t matter, really—for the ship never reached its destination.

Barbary corsairs from Algiers attacked it and captured all those aboard.

Along with the other captives, Benedikt was taken to Algiers and stood up on the auction block in the Badestan (the Algerine slave market) and put up for sale to the highest bidder.

At this point, though, Benedikt took a different path from that of the other captives.

As with so many aspects of life, wealth buys privilege.

In European cities of the time, wealthy men speculated on merchandise, on trade, on stocks. In North African corsair cities, wealthy men speculated on slaves. Slave owners could make good money buying and selling slaves and from benefiting from their enforced labor. The really big money, however, came from ransoms.

The cost of an ordinary male slave on the auction block in Algiers in the early seventeenth century was anywhere between 40 and 300 Spanish pieces of eight. The average annual wage for a skilled laborer in most European countries of the time was between 40 and 80 pieces of eight a year. So such ransoms were the equivalent of anywhere between one and five years’ worth of wages for the ordinary working man. Raising such an amount of money was incredibly difficult.

Ransoms were even higher—much higher.

This is where the speculation came in. Rich captives fetched higher prices on the auction block than poor ones because they could afford to pay high ransoms—anywhere from 1,000 pieces of eight upwards.

This is what happened to Benedikt.

We don’t know whom he was sold to, nor for how much. But we do know that in 1634, he wrote a letter to his family in Iceland asking them to send him 1,000 pieces of eight to pay his ransom, plus an extra 400 pieces of eight as an allowance to live on in Algiers until he could be freed.

Such arrangements had a standard form. The captive/slave agreed to pay his owner the required ransom, plus the expenses of keeping him until the funds arrived. It could take upwards of a year for that to happen, however (it was a slower age than ours), and so the cost for room and board could mount up.

In Benedikt’s case, the money arrived about a year later. It wasn’t enough, though. The ransom demanded for him by this point was 1,500 pieces of eight.

Benedikt was lucky, though. In the summer of 1635, a Danish ransom expedition arrived in Algiers. This expedition spent more than 16,000 pieces of eight and ransomed a total of 50 people, 28 Icelandic women and 22 Nordic men—Danes, Norwegians, and Icelanders. Benedikt was among the Islanders, the Danes having chipped in the needed 500 pieces of eight to pay off Benedikt’ ransom.

By the summer of 1636, Benedict Palsson was back in Iceland—after nearly three years in slavery in Algiers.

We don’t know what those three years were like. There’s an old Icelandic poem that tells Benedikt’s story, describing how he served three years as a galley slave and nearly died of misery and privation. This seems unlikely, however. Rich captives were not sent to the galleys. They were far too valuable as potential sources of profit for that.

Benedikt’s time in Algiers was likely quite bearable. He may have suffered from anxiety about whether or not the needed money would indeed arrive. But as a rich captive awaiting ransom, he would have been spared the torments of ordinary slaves—no hard labor, no beatings, no violent mistreatment of any kind. There is even some indication that he might have had a mistress while in Algiers and that he left behind at least one child.

Whatever his time in Algiers may have been like, he survived it.

Once back in Iceland, he resumed his interrupted life.

He took up a position as Ráðsmaður (Estate Manager) in Hólar, where his grandfather had been Bishop. After that, he was appointed as Klausturhaldari (Overseer) in Möðruvellir í Hörgárdalur, a Danish royal property near Hólar (that had once been a Catholic monastery). He held this position at Möðruvellir until his death in 1664, at the age of 56.

Benedikt married three times and left behind a number of children—whose descendants live in Iceland today.

The fact that Benedikt was able to successfully arranged the financing for his ransom with a single letter indicates just how wealthy and influential his family was.

For ordinary people, being captured and enslaved by Barbary corsairs was an event that marked an irrevocable end to their lives as they had known them.

For the wealthy, like Benedikt, it was merely an unpleasant inconvenience—thanks to the insulating power of money.

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For those who may be interested…

The details of Benedikt Pálsson’s life come from Jón Espólín, Íslands árbækur í söguformi, vol. VI, pp. 16, 67, 70, 78, 98 (Kaupmannahöfn : Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, 1827).

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