This week, we conclude the series of excerpts from Northern Captives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Grindavík in 1627, written by my me and my Icelandic colleague Karl Smári Hreinsson—and now available on Amazon.
Here’s the link to the Amazon listing:
Northern Captives – Amazon listing
Last week’s excerpt described how the Salé corsairs had gathered information, captured the Danish merchant ship in the harbor, and were preparing to raid the surrounding area. This week’s excerpt describes that shore raid.
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The Salé corsairs’ first move when they came ashore was to ransack the Danish trading post, no doubt on the advice of the captives they had interrogated. They must have expected the building to be filled with a season’s worth of valuable trade goods.
Lauriz Bentson, the Danish Factor, had clearly figured out that something was wrong, however, when the eight men he had sent out to the corsair ship had not returned (he had sent two others after them, and those men had not returned either). He hastily removed as much of the merchandise in the trading post as he could and hid it. Then he and the other Danes with him—sailors from the ship and employees of the trading post—fled into the lava fields in the interior before the raiders came ashore. So the corsairs got little of value out of the trading post or anything nearby, and likely not a single captive.
Grindavík was an important community in its own right, but by modern standards it was not much of a settlement. There was no actual town as such. Instead, the community consisted of three farmsteads .
After their disappointing beginning at the Danish trading post, the corsairs’ next move was to overrun those three farmsteads. Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, the Icelandic pastor who suffered ruthless interrogation at the hands of the Algiers corsairs, wrote that when the raiders descended upon Heimaey they “rushed with violent speed across the island, like hunting hounds, howling like wolves.”
Intimidation was the goal in a corsair attack. Murad Reis and his men would have moved out across the countryside quietly at first, not wishing to cause a general alarm. But the instant they spotted potential captives, they would have charged towards them en masse, brandishing weapons, shrieking and hollering—all in an effort to terrify their victims into immediate, cowering submission.
A certain amount of brute violence might have been inevitable during such attacks—anybody who resisted or opposed them would be ruthlessly dealt with—but in general Barbary corsairs did not want to seriously harm their victims. The point of such raids, after all, was not slaughter; it was to capture as many people as possible alive and uninjured, so that they would fetch the highest prices possible when auctioned off in the slave market.
The Salé corsairs had likely been given a description of the area by the first set of captives they interrogated, and so they knew the basic geography. They would have split their force up. Since there was no means of communication between the local farmsteads other than word of mouth, if the corsairs moved quickly enough, they could swoop down upon the unsuspecting inhabitants of each farm and overwhelm them before they knew what was happening. In their quest for captives, they must have attacked all three farmsteads, but we have details about what happened only at one: Járngerðarstaðir. This is likely because the description of the attack is based on an account written by a member of the family that operated the farm at Járngerðarstaðir, and he focused exclusively on what happened to the members of that family.
The corsairs descended upon the Járngerðarstaðir farmstead in a violent wave and caught Guðrún unawares. She had no doubt been out doing farm chores—supervising others rather than doing them herself—when she heard a commotion, looked around… and, to her horror, saw a mob of shrieking corsairs, bristling with weapons, charging down upon her.
Along with Guðrún, the corsairs also captured a young girl, and probably a number of farm hands.
Women—and especially young girls—fetched high prices in North African slave markets, so the corsairs would have handled Guðrún and the girl very carefully.
As the corsairs were carrying them away from the farm, Guðrún’s brother, Filippus, tried to come to the rescue. He did not have any sort of weapon, though, and so stood little chance against the well-armed corsairs. They left him lying in the dirt, half dead, wounded and bleeding.
As they turned from him, another of Guðrún’s brothers, Hjálmar, came galloping towards them on a horse. He had been out riding and heard the commotion. But he too was unarmed, and though he struck at the corsairs with his riding crop, they dragged him to the ground, where one of the corsairs stabbed him, and then a second and third also assaulted him. Leaving Hjálmar lying mortally wounded beside his brother, the corsairs slung Guðrún and the girl—no doubt shocked into paralysis by the brutality they had just witnessed—upon his horse and drove them down to the sea.
The corsairs looted the Járngerðarstaðir farmstead, taking everything of value they could carry and every person they could gather up—man, woman, or child.
They also captured another of Guðrún’s brothers: Halldór. He and some farmhands with him made no attempt to flee when they saw the corsairs coming, for they did not imagine they would be kidnapped. The southwest coast of Iceland had suffered pirate attacks before this, most notably by English pirates. In those attacks, only property had been taken. Barbary corsairs were a different kind of pirate entirely, though, and Halldór and his companions were unprepared for them. The corsairs swarmed Halldór and those with him, trussed them up, and herded them all down to the sea.
The corsairs ferried their new captives across to their ship where it lay at anchor in Járngerðarstaðasund. Once on board, the new arrivals were pushed down into the ship’s cargo hold and chained up beside the men already there. Shackles were fastened around everybody’s neck, linked to chains so heavy it took a strong man to lift them.
The corsairs then have stomped back up on deck, leaving the captives huddled together in the dark, dank, cramped confines of the hold, the children wailing, everybody shaking with terror and shock.
Taken by surprise as they were, and unarmed, there was little the Icelanders could have done against such an unexpected and overwhelming attack.
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This concludes the series of excerpts from Northern Captives.
Next week, we’ll start a series of excerpts from Stolen Lives: The story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Heimaey in 1627.
Corsairs and Captives
Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
The story of the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in 1627