STOLEN LIVES: THE BARBARY CORSAIR RAID ON HEIMAEY – PART 1

A quick reminder:

In the summer of 1627, two groups of Barbary corsairs raided Iceland, one group from Salé, one from Algiers. My Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I have published five books on these raids—known in Iceland as the Tyrkjáranið (the “Turkish raid”).

The first of these books was The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627, published by the Catholic University of America Press in 2016.

After The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, Karl and I wrote four more books on the Tyrkjáranið.

Northern Captives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Grindavík in 1627
Stolen Lives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Heimaey in 1627
Enslaved: The Story of the Barbary Corsair raid on East Iceland in 1627
Turbulent Times: Skálholt and the Barbary Corsair Raids on Iceland in 1627

These books are narrative histories. That is, they describe the raids and their aftermath—in Iceland and North Africa—in novelistic fashion, focusing on the people involved as much as possible.

Until recently, these four narrative histories were only available in Iceland.

Now they are available on Amazon.

During the past three weeks, I posted excerpts from Northern Captives.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be posting excerpts from Stolen Lives.

Here’s the link to the Amazon listing:

Stolen Lives – Amazon listing

Stolen Lives focuses on the raid, by corsairs from Algiers, on the island of Heimaey, one of the Westman Islands off Iceland’s south coast, and on what happened to the Icelandic captives when they arrived in Algiers.

The excerpt below looks at what happened in Algiers.

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The Icelandic documents contain few details about the experience of the Heimaey islanders in Algiers.

The Icelanders, however, were not the only Europeans to be captured by Barbary corsairs operating out of Algiers. During the first half of the seventeenth century, Algerine corsairs were taking on average something close to 5,000 captives a year.

In general, these captives lived or died in complete anonymity. Even those who were lucky enough—or tough enough—to survive and return home mostly left no trace.

Some of those who returned, though, wrote about their experiences. There were also various European officials—Consuls, Special Envoys, friars from redemptionist religious orders—who spent time in Algiers and left behind written records. Here we rely on an assortment of such first-hand accounts, using descriptions from them to paint a picture of what entering Algiers must have been like for the Icelanders.

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Seen from the sea, seventeenth century Algiers presented a quite spectacular sight. The city was located on the northwestern horn of a large bay—15 kilometers across—ringed by verdant mountains. The buildings of the city ascended a mountain slope, tier after tier, up from the harborfront to the mountain’s crest, about 120 meters (400 feet) 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 captive Icelanders 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 hold of the corsair ships 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 kilometer high.

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

When the corsair ships carrying the captive Icelanders entered the bay, they passed by an island fortress bristling with cannon. The Mole—the long, rocky causeway extending for about 225 meters (740 feet)—connected this fortress with the city itself and served as a breakwater to create a sheltered harbor.

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.

A Portuguese captive wrote that the fleet of corsair ships carrying him and his companions announced its triumphal arrival in the Algiers harbor with “banners flying, trumpets blaring, and salvos of artillery.”[1] The more successful the expedition, the more exuberant the cannonade would be.

The small flotilla of corsair ships arriving from Iceland that day in August—no doubt a brutally hot, blindingly sunny day—were carrying nearly four hundred captives. 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.

A young Englishman—a galley slave chained to an oar in the 1630s—described how, when the ship he was on drew into the Algiers harbor, 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.”[2]

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 harborfront 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 was piracy: the violent capture by Algerine corsairs of goods and people and their subsequent resale—on a grand scale.

In 1619, Jean-Baptiste Gramaye, a Flemish scholar, was held captive in Algiers for six months (May through October). He kept a careful record of the successful corsair expeditions that came in during that season: 25 ships and a total of 578 captives. And that was not even a particularly good year. In 1607, Algerine corsairs raided several towns in Calabria (the toe of the Italian ‘boot’) and took no fewer than 1,400 captives. In 1612, they took over 3,800 captives from Spain (a stunningly successful year). In 1617, they took 26 ships and a total of over 1,700 captives. In 1618, they took nineteen ships and a total of nearly 1,500 captives, most abducted in the raid on Lanzarote and La Gomera, in the Canary Islands.[3]

The varied merchandise and the human captives taken in these raids were brought back to Algiers and sold. The merchandise—such items as sugar, salt, oil, fish, timber, leather goods, woollen cloth, silk, wine, spirits, tobacco, and much, much more—was offered at cut-rate prices (it was all stolen goods, after all) in the Badestan, the market in Algiers that handled such goods. Many of the buyers were European merchants who specialized in purchasing the stolen European goods cheaply and then shipping them back to European ports like Livorno, in Italy, to be sold for a hefty profit—capitalism at its most cutthroat.

The human captives were auctioned off in the Badestan to the highest bidder, like livestock.

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Next week’s excerpt from Stolen Lives will focus on the process of being sold into slavery in Algiers.

[1] Paul Teyssier, (trad.), Esclave à Alger: récit de captivité de João Mascarenhas (Enslaved in Algiers: the story of the captivity of João Mascarenhas), original Portuguese text, 1627, p. 54.

[2] Francis Knight, A Relation of Seven Years Slavery Under the Turks of Algier, Suffered by an English Captive Merchant, 1640, p. 10.

[3] Abd el-Hadi Ben Mansour, trans. & ed., Alger XVIe – XVIIe siècle: Journal de Jean-Baptist Gramaye, « évèque d’Afrique », (Algiers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: the Journal of Jean-Baptist Gramaye, the “Bishop of Africa”), a translation of Jean-Baptiste Gramaye’s Diarium rerum Argelae gestarum ab anno MDCXIX (A Diary of events in Algiers from the year 1619), originally published in 1623, pp. 141-42 and p. 178.