NORTHERN CAPTIVES: THE BARBARY CORSAIR RAID ON GRINDAVÍK – PART 1

On June 20, 1627, in the pale light of an early northern summer morning, a lone ship approached the Grindavík area, on the southern shore of the Reykjanes Peninsula in southwest Iceland.

Unbeknownst to those ashore, the newly arrived ship had crossed the North Atlantic from Salé, the notorious Barbary corsair port on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. During the summer shipping season, a variety of vessels from different countries regularly plied Icelandic waters—Danish and Dutch merchant ships, English fishing boats, the occasional whaler from France or the Basque Country. So the sudden appearance of a strange ship would not have caused any immediate alarm to people on shore.

Barbary corsairs had a reputation for being brutally violent, but in fact they often employed subterfuge. Murad Reis, the commander of these Salé corsairs, was a particularly wily and successful corsair captain. By the summer of 1627, he had been leading corsair raids in the Mediterranean, along the Atlantic coast of Europe, and in the English Channel for a decade. He had never led such a long-distance raid before, though, and Icelandic waters would have been strange and unfamiliar to him and his crew.

It was the height of the sub-Arctic summer. Northern Europe had long summer days, but nothing like Iceland’s. As the Salé corsairs sailed further and further northward, they would have seen the sun almost constantly in the sky, low on the horizon, dipping out of sight for only about three hours of twilight, and then rising to circle the horizon once more—resulting in almost perpetual daylight, no true night, and no stars to navigate by.

In the summer of 1871, William Morris, the celebrated English poet, textile designer, and reformer, visited Iceland. Here is his description of what seeing the place for the first time from the sea was like:

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The mountains look as if they rose straight out of the sea: they are all dark grey, turning indigo in the distance under the half-cloudy sky; but here and there the top of a conical peak will be burned red with fire, or a snow-covered peak will rise up: at last we see the first of the great glaciers that looks as if it were running into the sea, and soon there is nothing but black peaks sticking up out of the glacier sea.[1]

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The Salé corsairs’ first view of Iceland would have been much the same, coming in by sail from the east as they did (as everybody did): rugged, dark rocky coast mottled with the white ice of the glaciers gleaming in the perpetual light of the northern summer.

After first making landfall on the Icelandic coast, the Salé corsairs cruised westwards along the shoreline until they came to Grindavík. Why Grindavík? It turns out that there are very few decent harbors along Iceland’s south coast, which mostly consists of either naked rocks or long beaches of black, volcanic sand. The cove at Grindavík—known as Járngerðarstaðasund—offered a sheltered area with reasonably deep water and was one of the better anchorages available. Both the fishermen and farmers of the Grindavík area made use of it. More importantly, perhaps, a Danish trading post was situated on its shoreline. Moreover, the Danish merchant ship that supplied that trading post lay at anchor there.

For the Salé corsairs, such a ship represented potential prey—likely the first they had seen since entering Icelandic waters. It would have caught their interest the same way a gazelle at a watering hole would have caught the interest of a hungry lion.

So the Salé corsairs sailed into the sheltered bay of Járngerðarstaðasund.

This was a strange and unknown shore for them, though, and Murad Reis was cautious. Opting for subterfuge over blind brute force, he decided to converse with the locals and reconnoitre first, keeping his true intentions hidden until he learned more about local conditions.

The Salé corsairs lowered their sails and quietly dropped anchor near the Danish merchant ship. They put a ship’s boat into the water, and some of them rowed over to the Danish vessel to see how well it might be armed and to speak with the captain, who was on deck peering at them curiously. In polite German, they explained that they were Danish whalers who had been off course for some weeks and asked if he might possibly have any provisions he could sell them.[2] The captain said he had none. The corsairs then bid him goodbye and, without fuss, rowed back to their ship—having ascertained to their satisfaction that the Danish merchant ship had only the captain aboard and so would be easy to seize.

The Captain of the Danish merchant ship might have been a little suspicious of these strangers, but it would never have occurred to him that such German-speaking ‘whalers’ were predatory Barbary corsairs from far-distant North Africa.

Seventeenth century Iceland was an extremely isolated place. Its nearest Scandinavian neighbour, Norway, was a 1,200-kilometre (750-mile) sail away, a journey that could take anything up to a month if the weather or the winds were bad—which they frequently were. This isolation meant there was no practical way to call for help in time of trouble, but it also offered a certain safety: from North Africa, the journey was fully 3,500-4,500 kilometres (2,100-2,800 miles), depending on which port the corsairs sailed from and which route they took. Few were willing—or able—to make such a voyage.

Danish merchant ships arrived every summer, as did the English fishing fleet (who came for the cod), and whalers from France and the Basque Country passed through, along with some Dutch ships, but these all hailed from northern European ports, and all were commercial vessels operating in ordinary, predictable ways. There was virtually no other sort of traffic. Iceland had no navy of its own, no military of any sort, and ordinary Icelanders did not possess weapons. Under ordinary circumstances, they had no need of them. The island’s isolation offered protection enough.

So the unsuspecting Icelanders in the Grindavík area—and the Danish merchants and seamen among them—would have been totally unprepared for a hoard of Barbary corsairs from North Africa to suddenly show up. It would have been as shocking, as terrifying—and as incomprehensible—as a sudden and unprovoked attack by aliens from the stars would be for us today.

More so. For we at least are familiar with the notion of an alien attack from seeing it played out in innumerable science fiction movies. The Icelanders had nothing to prepare them.

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For a continuation of this excerpt from Northern Captives, see the next post here in this blog: Northern Captives: The Corsair Raid on Grindavík – Part 2.

[1] William Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris, vol. 8: Journals of Travel in Iceland, 1871-1873, p. 20.

[2] The crew aboard Murad Reis’s ship—like the crews aboard most Barbary corsair ships—would have been a variegated lot speaking a number of different languages. Apparently no one aboard spoke Icelandic or Danish, though there must have been at least one German speaker. During this period, Denmark possessed part of what is now northern Germany. The inhabitants of this territory were subjects of the Danish king but spoke German. Many of them were seafarers. So the captain of the Danish merchant ship, who himself evidently spoke (or at least understood) German, would not have been all that surprised to encounter German-speaking men who claimed to be Danish whalers.