ICELANDERS IN ALGIERS – PART 1 – Corsairs & Captives

Last week here in this blog, we finished a series of posts—taken from Stolen Lives, the book my Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I published last year—that described the Barbary corsair attack on the island of Heimaey.

This week we’ll begin a new series of excerpts from Stolen Lives, this one dealing with the captive Icelanders’ arrival in Algiers.

Seen from the sea, seventeenth century Algiers presented a quite spectacular sight. The city was located on the northwestern horn of a large bay— 9 miles (15 kilometers) across—ringed by verdant mountains. The buildings of the city ascended a mountain slope, tier after tier, up from the harbourfront to the mountain’s crest, 390 feet (120 meters) above sea level. Every structure was whitewashed frequently (by slaves), so that they all gleamed brightly in the sun.

More than one writer described this mass of whitened buildings, framed by luxuriant green mountains, as resembling a glittering diamond in an emerald setting.

As the Icelandic captives approached Algiers, they were likely not in any state of mind to appreciate such a sight. Most of them probably never got a chance to witness it in any case, for they would have been kept chained up belowdecks in the holds of the corsair ships carrying them as they approached the city.

Any Icelanders who might have been on deck, however, would have seen the white, gleaming lozenge of the city in its green frame emerge in the distance when the bay came into view. As the ship drew closer, the tiers of brilliantly white buildings would seem to rise up out of the sea, higher and higher, until they completely dominated the shoreline, a human-made alabaster mountain more than a kilometre high.

The Icelanders would never have seen—never even imagined—anything even remotely like it.

When the corsair ships carrying the captives entered the bay, they passed by an island fortress bristling with cannon. The Mole—a long, rocky causeway about 750 feet (230 meters) long—connected this fortress with the city and served as a breakwater to create a sheltered harbour. As the corsair ships rounded the fortified island and entered the protected waters of the port to tie up at the Mole, they would have fired off a celebratory cannonade. This was the standard way of announcing to the city that a returning corsair expedition had been successful. The more successful the expedition, the more exuberant the cannonade would be.

The little flotilla of corsair ships arriving from Iceland that day in August—no doubt a brutally hot, blindingly sunny day—were carrying a total nearly four hundred captives, over 100 from the East Fjords and around 250 from Heimaey. It was a feat rarely equalled by such a modest expedition. The corsair ships must have fired off nearly every cannon aboard in noisy celebration of their success.

The inhabitants of Algiers would have responded immediately—and enthusiastically.

A young English merchant who was enslaved in Algiers in the 1630s related how, when the ship he was on (as a galley slave) drew into the Algiers harbour, it was greeted with “acclamations of joy by the inhabitants, all the house tops being covered with women crying, “Allaluah! Allaluah!” with salutations of cannons and a general rejoicing of the people.”

The corsair ships carrying the captive Icelanders would have prompted the same sort of reaction, with crowds of women dancing and shouting in a frenzy of excitement from their rooftops, cannon fire thundering out enthusiastically from the shore batteries in response to the shipboard salvos, and a great crowd of eager people mobbing the harbourfront and spilling out onto the mole in noisy anticipation.

This general excitement was a standard reaction to the arrival of any successful corsair expedition. It was motivated by a number of factors. Prominent among them was profit, for the economic driver of Algiers during this period, remember, was piracy: the violent capture by Algerine corsairs of goods and people and their subsequent resale—on a grand scale.

Father Pierre Dan, a Trinitarian friar who was in Algiers in the summer of 1634, described the city’s reaction to the arrival of a successful corsair expedition as follows:

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All those of the city run in a crowd to greet the arriving corsairs, to whom they give great praise… They have a keen interest in the new arrivals, since rich and poor alike are all well aware of the gain to be had, for from whom is it that the successful pirates will buy more stuffs to dress themselves with, and whom will they pay when they frequent the cabarets and other places of debauchery?

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So when the corsair ships returning from the raid on Iceland appeared and fired off a triumphant cannonade to announce their success, some among the mass of excited people that came streaming onto the harbourfront were no doubt drawn by simple curiosity, but many—most—where there because, one way or another, they expected to benefit from the outflowing of wealth that was to come.

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For rural Icelanders, the crowds of people—not only the gawkers in the harbor but the seething mass of people crammed into the city—would have been a stunning shock. Iceland had a total population at this time of perhaps 50,000. Algiers had more than twice that packed into a space less than two kilometres across. The variegated nature of the crowds must have been equally shocking.

The population of Algiers was a swirling mixture of peoples: indigenous North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, Ottoman Turks, and Europeans, both slaves and renegades. Not only would the Icelanders have seen a wall of strange faces staring at them—dark, light, round, narrow, bearded, bald, turbaned, black-eyed, blue-eyed, scarred, tattooed… They would also have been buffeted by a myriad of strange and incomprehensible languages.

Beyond the crowds, there was the city itself.

For the Icelanders, who came from a remote island where there were no cities at all, Algiers must have seemed crushingly huge. The harborfront was over half a mile (more than a kilometer) across. A protective wall—30 feet (9 meters) high and nearly 10 feet (3 meters) thick—encased the city, in places coming right down to the seashore, so that the waves broke against it. Some accounts claim that the sea wall was higher than the rest of the city wall and stood 40 feet (12 meters) above the waves. From the Mole, an observed could peer over the top of the wall and see the protruding tops of the minarets of the mosques. Behind them, the long, white, slope of the city rose up and up into the sky.

Once the captives had been unloaded from the ships, dragged along the mole, and pushed through the gate in the wall that led into the city, they would have found themselves surrounded on all sides by the overwhelming bulk of everything—the high walls, the mosques with their towering minarets, the crowded multitude of two- and three-story buildings.

However, it was likely the claustrophobic maze of narrow, twisty alleyways that formed so much of the city that most disturbed the Icelanders. The dim, crowded warren of laneways and passages was a daunting place for those unfamiliar with it. One captive in Algiers, described it like this:

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I always felt a secret horror in walking through the narrow, dark, and filthy streets of this shocking city. The heart is oppressed, and the very soul shut up, as it were, in its tortuous windings: breathing itself was attended with difficulty and pain.

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The Icelanders would have been herded up from the harbour, through the maze of these narrow little streets in a victory parade, with Murate Flamenco, as commander of the expedition, marching proudly in the lead, flaunting his success before rowdy, appreciative crowds that clogged the route. The captive Icelanders in his wake, prodded onwards by guards, must have trudged along apprehensively, huddling together as best they could for safety.

They would all surely have felt a horror similar to that of the writer quoted above, finding themselves driven through such a claustrophobic and disorienting warren of close-set buildings, struggling to get a solid breath in the close, hot air (stunningly hot by Icelandic standards), surrounded by the ogling crowd—with no clear understanding of what was to become of them in this terrible place.

It must have felt like they were being driven into the outskirts of Hell itself.

For those who may be interested…

The young English merchant’s description of arriving in Algiers can be found in Francis Knight, A Relation of Seven Years Slavery Under the Turks of Algier, Suffered by an English Captive Merchant, 1640, p. 10.

Father Pierre Dan’s description of the city’s reaction to the arrival of a successful corsair expedition can be found in Pierre Dan, Histoire de Barbarie, 1649, p. 88.

The reference to the “narrow, dark, and filthy streets” of Algiers can be found in Filippo Pananti, Narrative of a Residence in Algiers, pp. 68-69.