THE BARBARY CORSAIR RAID ON EAST ICELAND

Earlier this summer, my Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I published a new book on the Tyrkjaránið (the Turkish raid)—as the Icelanders refer to Barbary corsair raids on Iceland in 1627. This book, titled Enslaved: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on East Iceland in 1627, tells the story of the corsair attack on the East Fjords, in Iceland’s southeast corner.

As I did with our two previous books — Northern Captives and Stolen Lives — I shall be posting excepts from Enslaved here in this blog over the next few weeks.

Here is the first excerpt.

In the early seventeenth century, Iceland was an extremely isolated place. Its nearest Scandinavian neighbor, Norway, was a 750-mile (1,200-kilometer) sail away, a journey that could take anything up to a month if the weather was bad—which it frequently was. Each summer, Danish merchant ships brought supplies to the island, and the English fishing fleet came for the cod. Otherwise, apart from the occasional Basque whaler, there was little other traffic.

The inhabitants of the East Fjords in those days were subsistence farmers and fishermen—sheep and cod, mainly. Life had a seasonal rhythm. Winters were long, dark, and cold, with the northern lights shimmering across the sky on clear nights. Snowstorms howled in off the ocean, and people huddled in their houses, repairing gear and reading aloud to each other to pass the time. Summers were brilliant, with no true darkness for months on end—a time to be outdoors. Folk took their sheep flocks up into the hills to graze, or they ventured out in small, open boats to fish, rowing to the fishing grounds and casting out lines with baited hooks.

Most people never travelled more than a few tens of kilometers from their birthplace. Few ever left the island. They knew about the wider world beyond their northern home, of course, but it had little direct connection with their lives.

The very last thing they expected was to be attacked by Barbary corsairs from North Africa.

But attacked they were.

Without warning, corsairs from Algiers suddenly appeared in the waters of East Iceland. They spent eight days plundering the East Fjords, killing a handful of people and capturing over a hundred—men, women, children, and infants still in the cradle—packing them all into their ships and transporting them to North Africa to be auctioned off in the slave markets there.

The different parts of the story of the Barbary corsair raid on East Iceland have never before been strung together to form a single, coherent narrative. Enslaved does that, telling the story not only of the attack on the East Fjords but also of what happened afterwards, in Algiers.

The details of the attack itself come from a report compiled from the testimony of students from East Iceland who attended Skálholtsskóli (Skálholt’s School), the Icelandic equivalent at the time of Oxford University in England.

In the academic year following the corsair raids, the students from East Iceland were interviewed and the report on the raid compiled, so it was created while the events were clear in their minds (those events had no doubt been burned painfully into their memories). This skólapiltar (schoolboys) report provides a detailed “blow by blow” description of the raid as it progressed over a period of several days. It is one of the most detailed accounts that exists of a Barbary corsair land raid and a uniquely important historical document. Our translation represents the first time it has ever been rendered into English.

Here, from the skólapiltar report, is the description of the corsairs first arriving in Icelandic waters. (Because this is a translation of a four-hundred-year-old document, a bit of background explanation is sometimes required; we have done this with footnotes. We have also added clarifications in the text in square brackets where needed.)

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Two [Algerine corsair] ships first made landfall near Hvalnes, in Lón.

They came ashore in four boats.

There was nobody home at the farm there, for all the farm folk had gone to their sel,^[1] which was in a small valley not far away from the sea. The pirates stole everything of value [from the farm], both outside and inside—a total value of six hundruð.^[2] They cleaved open the doors and the storage chests and captured as many of the farmer’s lambs as they could.^[3]

Some of them walked west along the strand looking for people. But those who went that way did not spot the sel, even though they walked close by, because there was a small hill in between.

Then they returned to their boats.

As the pirates were rowing back out to their ships, the farmer came riding up to see what was going on. He did not know what ships these might be. As he came closer to the farmstead, he saw the four oared boats already out on the sea, as well as a fifth one, which he owned [and which they corsairs had stolen].

He thought these pirates were Englishmen, and he called out to them, demanding to know why they were stealing from Icelandic people who had done them no harm.

When they heard this, the pirates became angry and wanted to return to land, but they could not because [when they tried to] the surf partially swamped their boats, washing overboard a bale of colored cloth and a lamb—both of which the farmer recovered.^[4]

The pirates then headed eastwards.

For the next excerpt from Enslaved, see the next post here in this blog.

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For those who may be interested, the photo below is of the strand where the corsairs came ashore at Hvalness (Whale Headland). As you can, see, the surf looks treacherous—and this photo was taken on a calm day.

[1] A sel (“seli” in the Icelandic text) was a sort of shepherd’s hut, but on a larger scale. In the early summer, Icelandic farmers took their livestock—mostly sheep but also some cattle—away from the farm and out to grazing pastures. During the summer season, the farm folk lived in the sel, milking the animals and tending them.

[2] A hundrað (the term derives from the Icelandic word for “hundred”) was a traditional Icelandic measure of wealth. It is difficult to equate its value to a precise modern equivalent, but for a rural farmer, the loss of six hundruð worth of goods and stock would have been a serious blow.

[3] The corsairs had just endured a month-long sea voyage. The Icelandic sources differ, but there were somewhere between 200 and 300 of them in total—all hungering for fresh food. The lambs would have represented a much-needed source of fresh meat.

[4] The villages and ports along Iceland’s southeast coast had suffered pirate attacks before this. The culprits were mainly English—opportunistic brigands who stole what they could and then slipped away. In 1614, for instance, two English adventurers, William Clarke and James (John) Gentleman, led an expedition that pillaged the island of Heimaey, terrorizing the islanders in the process, and then went on to loot several paces in East Iceland. These English pirates were interested in portable goods they could quickly load aboard their ship, not human captives. The Barbary corsairs were a different sort of pirate entirely: they stole goods, but they also stole people as well. The farmer at Hvalnes had no idea who—or what—he was dealing with, and he was fortunate the corsairs were not able to row back through the surf to get at him.