GUTTORMUR HALLSSON: A CAPTIVE’S TALE – PART 2

(This post is a continuation of Guttormur Hallsson: a Captive’s Tale – Part 1. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read that post before continuing on here.)

Guttormur Hallsson arrived in Algiers on August 12, 1627 (Julian).

According to Tyrkjaráns-Saga (The Turkish Raid Saga), ¹ a description of the 1627 raid written in 1642, the Algerian corsairs killed nine people and captured 110 in the East Fjords. Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, who was captured by these same Algerian corsairs on Heimaey, one of the Westman Islands off Iceland’s south coast (and who wrote a lengthy narrative about his experiences), recorded 34 people killed in the corsair attack on that island and 242 people abducted. This makes for a combined number of 353 people—men, women, and children—abducted by the Algerian corsairs in the course of the raid. Guttormur himself put the number at 400.

Guttormur, you see, wrote a letter home from Algiers.

He was a slave in Algiers for seven years. Being an educated man, he probably wrote a number of letters to family and friends back in Iceland during that period. Mostly, those letters (if he did indeed write them) have disappeared: eaten by time. Against all odds, though, one did actually survive, dated November 20, 1631.

By that time, Guttormur had been a slave for four years.

After their arrival in Algiers, the people from East Iceland had spent a week “in prison,” as Guttormur put it—meaning they were kept locked up while preparations were made for their sale. Once everything was ready, their captors paraded them through the streets of Algiers to the Badestan, the slave market, where they were auctioned off, one by one—children, women, men—to the highest bidders. Here’s how Guttormur described the experience: “We were sold and separated from each other with many a sorrowful cry and scream of pain, so that no one knew what had happen to another until time had passed and people gradually became acquainted with what had gone on and where everybody was.”

Once you were a slave in Algiers, the conditions of your life were determined by one central and all-encompassing factor: your owner/master. Here’s how Guttormur explained the situation:

“There is a great difference here between masters. Some captive slaves get good, gentle, or in-between masters, but some unfortunates find themselves with savage, cruel, hardhearted tyrants, who never stop treating them badly, and who force them to labor and toil with scanty clothing and little food, bound in iron fetters, from morning till night. Many have had to endure unfair beatings.” (See the illustration above for a depiction of European slaves dragging their chains—their “iron fetters”—behind them.)

Guttormur was bought by a well-to-do landowner, who employed him as a field hand on an estate the man owned out in the fertile hinterland that surrounded the city of Algiers. Guttormur’s owner, apparently, was not one of the bad ones. Here’s Guttormur’s description:

“I have a Turkish man as my master, an elderly man, but his wife is very young, and they have four children, all young. They have both been gentle with me, especially the wife, so that I have neither been beaten nor insulted. When my master has shouted rebukes at me—the Turkish are quick to anger—his temper has subsided due to his wife’s kind interventions.”

Guttormur spent his time as a slave plowing fields and doing other farming work and selling water in Algiers in the off-season. “The hardest time in this country,” he wrote, “when the labor is most difficult, is from the winter moon in November until the seventh week has passed of summer. During the rest of the year, when I am not plowing, I must walk the town selling water.”

Plowing was a novelty for Guttormur: “I was set to work plowing fields by hand with a tool called a sappað which is run over the ground to break up the earth — a custom in this country.” The word “sappað” looks Icelandic (with the “ð”, the Icelandic letter eth), but it is not. A “sappað” is a kind of plow (the word might be a corruption of a Turkish word for plow: saban). Guttormur added the explanatory aside “a custom in this country” for his Icelandic readers because in Iceland in the seventeenth century nobody used plows. Instead, when they had to break the ground for crops, they used spades; so little ground was used for growing crops that plows were simply unnecessary.

Guttormur lived some considerable distance from the fields where he worked: “I had to walk to and from home daily, in bad weather and good, a distance about twice that between two farms.” The distance “between two farms” refers to the average distance between farms in Iceland at that time. It’s not an exact measurement, but it was about a mile (1.6 kilometers) or so. This means Guttormur had to walk something like four miles (6 ½ kilometers) a day, rain or shine, just to get to and from his work in the fields.

When he wasn’t working those fields, Guttormur had to sell water in the streets of Algiers. This was a common employment for slaves. Water in the often parched, hot environment of Mediterranean Africa was always an issue. The city of Algiers had a series of aqueducts that piped in fresh water from a spring, and individual houses had cisterns in which to collect rainwater (when there was rain), but it wasn’t enough. So slaves were employed selling water on the streets, sometimes loading the water containers on the backs of skinny donkeys, sometimes carrying such containers on their own backs. It was a stressful occupation. Here’s Guttormur’s description:

“Selling water is a difficult labor and one that many slaves are forced to endure. We must pay our masters a certain amount of money every day. If we can get more than that amount, it is to our profit, and we can use it to feed and clothe ourselves. But if we cannot earn the required amount, then it is taken out of our clothing and our food. Oh, God, how miserable we are in this terrible place.”

Misery was a constant companion for slaves in Algiers. Some slaves did indeed manage to prosper. Some ran lucrative taverns in the bagnios (the slave pens), for instance. Most, however, led unhappy lives—not surprisingly. Guttormur’s experience seems to have been fairly typical: he labored day after day, plowing fields, tending crops, hawking water in the street, and in return he received enough food to keep him from starving and enough clothing to keep him from dying of exposure. Nothing more. At least he didn’t have to endure regular beatings, as some slaves claimed they did.

The years of servitude wore Guttormur down, though.

Unlike saves in the Americas, who were destined to live out their lives in bondage, slaves in Algiers could be released at any time if they could somehow arrange to be ransomed. There didn’t seem to be any realistic chance of that happening, though. “At present,” Guttormur wrote, “there is no visible hope of freedom for any of us here. We are poverty stricken exiles a very long way from our own country, and the wealthy lords of our land are not moved by pity to help redeem us.”

So Guttormur (and the other enslaved Icelanders) were looking at a life of unending servitude. This prospect colored the way Guttormur began to see things. Here is his description of the state of affairs in Algiers and in the world in general as he saw it when he penned his 1631 letter:

“There is nothing here except fear and fright, grumbling and quarrel, murder and manslaughter, haughtiness and arrogance and demoniacal possession, day after day. It may truly be said that we live here in Earthly torments… There is no news from other countries other than disturbance and the tidings of war, each nation against another, each realm against another, and even within each country only fighting and conflict and betrayal. Oh, God! How great a plague it is to be here. May the Lord come soon and make an end to this sinful world. We are in a storm, and the waves break across this world.”

So—to put it mildly—things were not looking good for Guttormur.

And then, unexpectedly, something happened that changed everything for him.

See Guttormur Hallsson: a Captive’s Tale – Part 3 here in this blog for the events that changed Guttormur’s situation.

1. In the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire, centered in what is now Turkey, was the overriding Muslim power that all Europe faced. As a result, Europeans tended to overgeneralize and refer to all Muslims as ‘Turks.” Icelanders were no exception to this. Hence the title of the book on the 1627 raid was Tyrkjaráns-Saga, which translates as The Turkish Raid Saga in English.