GUTTORMUR HALLSSON: A CAPTIVE’S TALE – PART 3

(This post is a continuation of Guttormur Hallsson: a Captive’s Tale – Parts 1 & 2. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)

Guttormur Hallsson spent seven years as a slave in Algiers. And then…

To understand what happened that changed things for Guttormur, we have to first look at a little background.

As was mentioned in Guttormur Hallsson: a Captive’s Tale – Part 2, slavery in North Africa was not like slavery in the Americas. Africans transported to the Americas were fated to spend the rest of their lives there as slaves. They might indeed run away, and so escape enslavement, but there was no way for them to buy their own freedom. It was a life sentence. Worse than that. Not only were they slaves; their children were slaves; their children’s children were slaves.

The situation in North Africa was very different.

First, there were economic differences.

In the Americas, slave labor was required to work the extensive sugarcane and cotton plantations that had grown up there. These plantations needed a large, permanent labor force. So slavery was a permanent condition, and a slave’s value was basically determined by the one criterion: how useful the slave was to the production of the plantation crop. In North Africa, there were no such plantations. Instead, slave labor was used for a wide variety of work, so slaves had an equally wide variety of economic value. A North African slave could be a field hand… or a carpenter, a sail maker, a gunsmith, a nanny, a tailor, or a physician. Each had a different value, and some were more valuable than others. Slaves could also hold positions of considerable importance. The Ottoman Governors of Algiers, for example, typically kept several European slaves as translators and book keepers.

There was another economic difference in North Africa as well. A slave’s value wasn’t determined solely by what sort of work the slave could do. Slavery as practiced by Barbary corsairs was a ruthless business enterprise: they made profits selling captives into slavery. They made even more profits, however, by demanding exorbitant ransoms for their captives. Newly bought captives with sufficient financial resources were always pressured by their owners to write home and arrange ransom payments. If a slave owner was canny, or lucky, he could see as much as a 500% profit on his investment, sometimes even more, from a ransom. Such slaves—captives, really—were viewed as short-term investments: buy low, sell high, move on to the next transaction. As soon as a captive/slave could produce a ransom, he (or she) was free to go.

There was also another difference—one that had nothing to do with economics.

North African Muslims valued converts. If a European Christian converted to Islam, he or she was accepted fully as a member of the community of the faithful. Female captives were particularly expensive because they were valued for harems. But child captives were expensive, too, because they were potential converts, since a child could be more easily acculturated. There are many stories from this period of Muslim owners refusing to sell their child captives for any price, because they intended to raise them as good Muslims. There are just as many stories of European children being captured when young and growing up to become Muslims, sometimes even corsairs. Some wealthy Algerians had half a dozen or more of such converts, whom they groomed and prepared for successful lives, including arranging marriages for them.

All of this meant that European slaves in North Africa had options African saves in the Americas did not.

In Algiers, if a slave had a trade, especially a trade connected with something like ship building, he could fashion a reasonably comfortable life. It was possible for slaves to run independent businesses and earn money. It was even possible for slaves to buy their own freedom—though in practice it was punishingly difficult to save enough money to do so.

It was also possible for slaves to convert.

In theory, enslaving Muslims was taboo. In practice, though, conversion didn’t automatically mean a slave was freed. It did make the slave’s life better, though. More importantly, it opened doors that otherwise would have been firmly closed.

And this brings us back to Guttomur.

Guttormur had the option of converting to Islam to ease his life, but he refused and clung instead to his Christian faith. This was a laudable stance, but it meant that his circumstances never got any better.

Others were not as resistant as Guttormur, though.

When the Algiers corsairs descended upon Guttormur’s farm, remember, they captured not only him but also six of his farmhands, a young boy, three old women, and two of the farm maids. Among those farmhands was a young man named Jón Ásbjarnarson. Jón managed to make a new life for himself in Algiers by converting to Islam and, eventually, becoming a free man. Algerian society was multi-cultural and multi-ethnic in ways that European societies of the time were not. Algerian society was also meritocratic in ways that European societies were not. An intelligent, energetic, adaptable young man could go far, even if he did start as a slave. Jón had all of those traits and more, and he fashioned a career among the upper class Muslim society in Algiers. More than that… he became a successful and wealthy man.

The Icelanders who had remained true to their faith—like Guttormur—and who toiled under the weight of their servitude, saw Jón as a self-serving traitor. Despite this dismissive judgement by his countrymen, though, Jón went out of his way to help his fellow Icelanders in whatever way he could.

One of the things he did was buy Guttormur’s freedom.

And so, out of the blue one day, everything change for Guttormur, and he suddenly found himself a free man.

Jón must have had good memories from his time as a field hand on Guttormur’s farm, for he not only purchased Guttormur’s liberty, he also provided him with a considerable amount of cash and arranged a berth aboard a ship for him.

One can only imagine the final scene between the two men. Guttormur must have been deeply grateful, but at the same time he must also have seen Jón as a doomed soul for having forsaken his faith. Was there tension between the two men? Did Guttormur try to convince Jón to abandon Islam and return with him to Iceland and to the true faith? Did Jón attempt to convert Guttormur to the true faith of Islam and join him in a new and prosperous life in Algiers?

We can never know. The documents that exist say nothing.

All we know is that Guttormur was freed and took ship from Algiers to England—against all the odds, and against his own expectations, a free man.

And so the saga of Guttormur Hallsson ends happily.

Well… actually, no.

Real life isn’t a story. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends that make sense. Stories have endings that satisfy.

Real life (unfortunately) isn’t like that.

Guttormur made it out of Algiers safely. The ship he was on managed to successfully navigate the corsair-infested Mediterranean, threaded the dangerous needle of the Strait of Gibraltar, and made it all the way to the English Channel without encountering any hazards beyond the weather.

There was no way to sail directly to Iceland from Algiers in those days. The England-bound ship had been the first one available out of Algiers, so Guttormur had taken it. Once he landed in an English port, he intended to use the cash Jón had provided him to pay for a berth aboard an Iceland-bound ship. Having done that, he would be home in a month.

He never made it to land, though. As his ship drew close to the English coast, four of the crew robbed him, killing him in the process, and tossed his body overboard. Two of the murderers were captured and hanged. The other two escaped with the money.

We know of these events because, in 1635, an English fishing vessel brought to Iceland a letter from the captain of the ship on which Guttormur had been murdered. This letter told of Guttormur’s death and explained that his effects were stored in Bristol, in England, and would be confiscated by the local authorities if Guttormur’s relatives did not retrieve them.

There is no record of whether or not they were ever retrieved.

And so ends the saga of Guttormur Hallsson. Not a happy ending. A not untypical one, though. The seventeenth century was a much rougher time than ours, and a much more dangerous one. Injustice was common. Unhappy endings were common.

What makes Guttormur different is that we know the details of his unhappy ending. There must have been (quite literally) thousands of other individual tragedies like his, in which circumstances proved too much, and no amount of struggle could provide salvation.

The details of all those individual tragedies are lost now in the depths of time.

Such was life in the hard days of the seventeenth century.