THE BARBARY CORSAIR RAID ON EAST ICELAND – PART 4

This week, we continue with a series of excerpts from Enslaved: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on East Iceland in 1627, the book my Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I recently published.

Here is this week’s excerpt.

(Because this is a translation of a four-hundred-year-old document, remember, background explanation is sometimes required; we have done this with footnotes. We have also added clarifications in the text in square brackets where needed.)

Very early the next morning [July 7], thirty-five of the evildoers marched further inland than they had before, to the area around Hálskirkja parish [the area around Háls farm], southwards on the road to Hamar farm, which is situated half a þingmannaleið from the town of Djúpivogur.^[1] [For the locations of Djúpivogur and the farms at Háls and Hamar, see the Map of the East Fjords.]

The man who lived there [i.e., the master of Hamar farm] had concealed everything of value that he owned inside his house, and he had driven his stock far away. But he did not allow his people to flee that night. Instead, he ordered two men to stay awake and stand guard and to alert him immediately if they heard the pirates. The rest of the people then went to bed for the night.

Close to sunrise, those ungodly blood hounds [the corsairs] came and broke into the house where the people were sleeping. They hammered on the beds with their swords, screaming and yelling, commanding the farm people to get to their feet, hardly giving them time to dress. They then drove everybody to the [farm’s] chapel.

They lit torches and searched the houses of the farmstead. They found the two faithless guards in the kitchen and dragged them over to the others. The pirates then tied everybody up—as they always did.

There were thirteen people captured in all, including the wife of the farmer, who was very sick and weak, and so she could not keep up with the others. One of the pirates struck her on the cheek with the butt of his gun, and she collapsed. The pirates kicked her and thought she was dead, and so they abandoned her.

The pirates then drove the captives towards their ships. On the way, they stopped at Hálskirkja [the chapel at Háls farm] and took the vestments and the chalice, as they had at the other two chapels at Berunes and Berufjörður farms [see the Map of the East Fjords for the locations of the farms at Berunes and Berufjörður]. They ruined the books in Hálskirkja and then hacked the altar apart and threw it onto the floor. This was on Saturday [the morning of July 7].

After the people from Hamar had been brought to the Turks’ ships, some of the evil pirates crossed the fjord to Berunes. They marched north over the mountains until they came to Breiðdalur. There were eight of these villains. The first farm they came upon was called Ós. They captured three men there—Gísli Þórarinsson and his son, and Ásmundur Hermannsson—and bound their hands and feet. Two Turks stayed to guard them. [For the locations of Breiðdalur (a wide valley) and the farms at Berunes and Ós, see the Map of the East Fjords.]

The others crossed a river to chase after some men they saw on the other side. These were Reverend Höskuldur Einarsson’s men, from Heydalir. They were supposed to be hiding some chests full of valuables, for word had reached them of the arrival of these Turks. The men fled, abandoning Reverend Höskuldur’s chests. The pirates broke the chests open and got nearly 30 hundruð worth of silver and garments.

Around this time, a man named Jón, from Streiti farm [For the location of Streiti farm, see the Map of the East Fjords.], and his people came walking from his settlement to Ós. He did not know that Turkish pirates had arrived in Breiðdalur.

When the two evildoers [at Ós ] guarding the bound captives saw Jón and his men, they chased after them. The Icelanders fled away towards the mountains. However, Jón crept back and managed to liberate the three captives [Gísli Þórarinsson and his son, and Ásmundur Hermannsson], and they fled with Jón across Breiðdalur and into the small valleys of the hinterland.

The Turkish pirates did not find the church at Heydalir because they mistook it for a rock formation [the illustration at the top of this post depicts the corsairs marching blindly past the chapel at Heydalir; if you look closely, you can make out the chapel in the right background, looking like a rock formation]. They continued searching throughout Breiðdalur but could not find any more people. Instead, they ransacked the farms they came across and then returned to their ships.^[2]

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

[1] The corsairs hiked overland past Háls farm, which was located about four kilometers (2.5 miles) west of Djúpivogur, to Hamarsdalur, the valley to the northwest of Hamarsfjörður (the fjord adjoining Djúpivogur to the southwest) and on to Hamar farmstead, located near the end of the fjord (see the Map of the East Fjords). The þingmannaleið was a traditional Icelandic unit of measurement equal to about 37 kilometres (23 miles). So the corsairs trekked something like eighteen kilometers (11 miles) to reach Hamar farmstead.

[2] According to the Icelandic account, the corsairs’ total catch for July 7 consisted of the twelve people taken from Hamar farmstead. Perhaps word of the corsairs’ appearance had got out, and the countryside around Berufjörður fjord was entirely deserted by this time. But there were somewhere between 200 and 300 corsairs. It seems likely that, with such a large number of men to draw on, they would have sent out multiple raiding parties to scour the country, not just one, and that they would have been able to scrounge up more captives. So it is possible—perhaps even likely—that the total number of captives taken on this day was more than the number recorded here.