ENSLAVED: THE STORY OF THE BARBARY CORSAIR RAID ON EAST ICELAND IN 1627 – PART 1.

A quick reminder:

In the summer of 1627, two groups of Barbary corsairs raided Iceland, one group from Salé, one from Algiers. My Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I have published five books on these raids—known in Iceland as the Tyrkjáranið (the “Turkish raid”).

The first of these books was The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627, published by the Catholic University of America Press in 2016.

After The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, Karl and I wrote four more books on the Tyrkjáranið.

Northern Captives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Grindavík in 1627
Stolen Lives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Heimaey in 1627
Enslaved: The Story of the Barbary Corsair raid on East Iceland in 1627
Turbulent Times: Skálholt and the Barbary Corsair Raids on Iceland in 1627

These books are narrative histories. That is, they describe the raids and their aftermath—in Iceland and North Africa—in novelistic fashion, focusing on the people involved as much as possible.

Until recently, these four narrative histories were only available in Iceland.

Now they are available on Amazon.

During the past three weeks, I posted excerpts from Stolen Lives.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be posting excerpts from Enslaved.

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 excerpt below from Enslaved deals with the original source document that provides much of what we know about the East Fjords raid: the skólapiltar (schoolboys’) report (the illustration at the top of this post shows part of a manuscript page from the skólapiltar report).

The skólapiltar report is a somewhat mysterious document. It is based on the testimonies of a number of young men (likely in their mid, possibly late teens) who came from the East Fjords area and who attended Skálholtsskóli the year after the raid.[1] We do not, however, know who these students might have been nor how many of them there were. We also do not know who took their testimonies, how those testimonies were taken—orally or in writing—or who wrote up the final report.

At the end of the report, there is a brief addendum stating that the content was “based on information and drawings that students from East Iceland gathered together.” So perhaps the students submitted written statements—perhaps even including maps. Unless new documents emerge, however, there is no way to know.

There is also no easy way to know if the students actually witnessed first-hand the events they described or if they were merely retelling accounts they had heard from others. Given the high risk of being an actual eyewitness to events—few people getting that close to a marauding corsair band evaded capture, especially youngsters—they probably passed on accounts that were being told throughout the East Fjords area at the time.

In general, such oral accounts are notoriously unreliable. The skólapiltar report, however, contains a lot of specific details regarding the chronological sequence of the raid, the names of the individual farmsteads pillaged, and the names of individual people captured. It also seems that somebody—one or more of the professors at Skálholtsskóli presumably—tried to collate and edit the report to make it as clear and as coherent a document as possible. All of this gives the skólapiltar report a credibility that it might otherwise lack.

The report is still a compilation, though—a splicing together of different individuals’ narratives—and despite the editing that it obviously underwent, the various accounts it contains do not always fit smoothly together. As a result, the story it tells is not entirely consistent. It is also based on a small, random selection of testimonies, and so it is not an exhaustive account of the corsair raid. Thus, while the report probably records most of the events of the raid with a fair degree of accuracy, it should not be thought of as either a fully accurate or a fully complete account.

From the reader’s point of view, though, any lack the report may have in terms of overall accuracy or completeness is more than compensated for by the vividness of the details it provides.

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The skólapiltar report, remember, was derived from the eyewitness accounts of school-aged boys. Much of it deals with the larger events of the raid. Occasionally, though, we catch a glimpse of what happed to those individual boys.

Below is an excerpt from Enslaved containing a short account of one of the skólapiltar who survived and lived to tell his tale—though in the report it is rendered in the third person.

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On Sunday [July 8], the murderers [i.e., the corsairs from Algiers] went again into Breiðdalur [a settled dale, i.e., a valley, near the coast], to see if any people had returned to their farms. They lay in secret in different places, watching…

Some of the evil pirates [i.e., the corsairs from Algiers] travelled all the way to Flaga, at the far end of Breiðdalur, nearly one and a half þingmannaleið [from where the corsair ships lay at anchor].[2] On their return to their ships, they encountered an old man almost eighty years old. They murdered him. They also captured a young man on the way back. So they took three men from Breiðdalur, and they killed a fourth [the old man].

When the pirates came to Núpur, on Berufjarðarströnd [the strand, i.e., the seashore], with their three captives, they left two men at the farm there, guarding the captives, and the rest began searching the surrounding area to see if any valuables might have been be hidden thereabouts.

While the two pirates guarding the captives were in the farmhouse, the young man whom they had captured [in Breiðdalur] ran off, even though his hands were still tied behind his back.

The pirates who were searching along the strand saw this and immediately chased after him. This young man raced up the mountain into a fogbank. As he ran, his trousers slid down and got tangled around his feet, and he could do nothing else but throw himself to the ground and trust in God’s mercy.

The pirates walked everywhere around the depression where he lay, howling like wolves, for they knew the boy must be close by, but they could not find him.

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And so one of the Skólapiltar escaped and lived to tell the tale. His name has not survived, so we have no idea who he might have been. His descendants, though, likely still live somewhere in East Iceland, completely unaware of how close their many-times-great grandfather came, four hundred years ago, to being captured by Barbary corsairs and enslaved in North Africa.

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

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[1] Seventeenth century Iceland had only two schools (both cathedral schools; that is, both were attached to a church). One was located in the north of the island: Hólaskóli (Hólar’s school: i.e., the school at Hólar). The other was located in the south: Skálholtsskóli (Skálholt’s school: i.e., the school at Skálholt). Students in the East Fjords attended Skálholtsskóli, for their area was within the jurisdiction of the school.

[2] A þingmannaleið equalled about 37 kilometers (23 miles), so the corsairs marched nearly 55 kilometers (34 miles) inland to the far end of Breiðdalur.