Back in 2016, my Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I published The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair raid on Iceland in 1627 with the Catholic University of America Press. There’s a link to that book here in this blog.
Over the past couple of years, Karl and I completed two more books devoted to the Barbary corsair raids on Iceland in 1627.
One, titled Northern Captives, tells the story of the raid by corsairs from Salé on southwest Iceland. It details the events of the attack itself and then follows the Icelandic captives to Salé, where they were sold into slavery.
The second book, titled Stolen Lives, tells the story of the raid by corsairs from Algiers on southeastern Iceland and the Westman Islands. It details the events of the two attacks and then follows the Icelandic captives to Algiers, where they too were sold into slavery.
In the last few months of 2021, I posted some excerpts from Northern Captives. Over the next few weeks, I will post some excerpts from Stolen Lives.
We begin with the Heimaey islanders’ first glimpse of the corsair ships in the distance.
Early on Monday morning, July 16, 1627, people on the island of Heimaey spotted three unidentified sailing ships approaching. The ships were still far off, and, in the uncertain light of early day, it was hard to make them out.
“Pirates!” some of the islanders cried and hurried to the defensive ramparts at the island’s harbour to man the cannons mounted there.
Others were not so sure and stood on the rocky shoreline, squinting into the distance, trying to make out what sort of ships they might be. Iceland was a Danish possession at this time, and the Danish Crown sent out protective warships to patrol Icelandic waters every summer. This summer, they were late. The approaching ships were coming from the east, as the patrol ships always did.
“It’s the Danish ships,” several among those on the shore insisted. “Come at last.”
When he heard news of these unidentified ships, Lauritz Bagge, the island’s Danish Factor, sent out messengers to tell everybody to congregate in the settlement at the harbour on the island’s north end and to man the defenses there, for Heimaey was a rugged, rocky place, and the only sure way the pirates could come ashore—if indeed they were pirates—was at the harbor.
People began straggling in, singly or in groups, some detouring on the way to gaze uneasily at the approaching ships, which were sailing into a stiff headwind and making little headway. A crowd of women and children and old folk gathered in and around the Danish merchant houses at the harbor. Lauritz Bagge called the men together and handed out muskets, shot, and powder and then organized others into teams to operate the brace of small cannons mounted on the harbor front.
Meanwhile, lookouts continued to keep track of the incoming ships’ progress, which was still slow. Young boys scrambled agilely across the island’s hummocky lava fields, carrying messages back and forth. The islanders kept coming in until several hundred people—the majority of Heimaey’s population—were gathered at the harbour settlement, milling about, glancing apprehensively at each other, trying to calm fretful children.
The men who had been assigned the muskets looked to their priming and murmured fervent prayers.
The Heimaey islanders had good reason to be uneasy.
Three and a half weeks earlier, on June 20, a lone Barbary corsair ship from Salé had appeared out of nowhere. The corsairs sacked the Grindavík district, on the southern shore of the Reykjanes Peninsula, on Iceland’s southwest coast, and then assailed Bessastaðir, on the peninsula’s northern shore, where the Danish Governor of Iceland had his official residence—and where he amassed the taxes he collected for the Danish crown.
The Governor had been informed of the corsairs’ presence by some escapees from Grindavík, and he ordered a makeshift protective rampart to be erected, complete with cannon emplacements. This defense prevented the corsairs from taking Bessastaðir. Thwarted, they sailed north-westwards past Snæfellsjökull into the waters off the West Fjords, where they captured the crews of several English fishing boats.
The English fleet, which arrived every summer to fish for cod in Icelandic waters, and which in the summer of 1627 consisted of no fewer than 150 vessels, was escorted by two English warships. Rather than risk a confrontation with such large, heavily armed ships, the corsairs slipped away and disappeared, headed back to Salé with something like 50 or 60 captives, possibly more (an exact number is hard to come by).
News of these shocking events spread quickly, and the Heimaey islanders heard all the details. The general opinion was that the pirates were gone for good, too wary of the English warships to hang around, and that they no longer posed a threat. Besides, the Danish patrol ships were due any day. Once they arrived, the waters would be safe.
Nobody knew anything for certain, though. The pirates might be anywhere, biding their time, waiting to strike again. And these pirates were especially dangerous.
The villages and ports along Iceland’s southern coast had suffered pirate attacks before. But those had been opportunistic brigands—amateurs—who stole what they could and then fled. Some English adventurers, for example, pillaged Heimaey in 1614. They terrorized the islanders, but their real interest was the portable goods they could load aboard their ship (including the iron bell from out of the Landakirkja church). The Barbary corsairs were a different sort of pirate entirely: they stole goods, but they stole people as well. The inhabitants of Grindavík had not fled to safety when the corsairs first came ashore because it never occurred to them that they themselves might be the booty the corsairs sought.
Seventeenth century Icelanders were used to relying on the safety provided by their island’s isolation, and they had no organized defense force. The captains of the two warships that accompanied the English fishing fleet were willing to help, at least in principle, but by the time official messages had been passed back and forth between the Danish authorities and the English, the corsairs who had attacked Grindavík and Bessastaðir had vanished. In any case, the warships’ mission was to guard the English fishing fleet, not to protect Icelanders.
Without the season’s contingent of Danish warships to patrol their waters, the Icelanders were left with no real means of protecting themselves except for whatever ad hoc barricades could be thrown up on shore—as had been done at Bessastaðir—under the auspices of the local Danish Factors, who exercised control over whatever armaments were available.
So the Heimaey islanders ended up huddling together in and around the Danish merchant houses at the harbor at the island’s north end, trying to make the best use of what defensive resources they had: a couple of small-bore cannons—no threat to the approaching ships themselves, but adequate for discouraging shore parties—a few muskets, and limited supplies of powder and shot.
They were used to making do, though. They were a tough lot. And they had every reason to expect to survive this latest challenge. They were forewarned; they were armed; they were prepared. Heimaey’s coastline was mostly steep and rocky. The only place ships could make an assured landfall was the harbor, and the islanders had their cannons aimed at the entrance, ready. Men with muskets patrolled the strand. At Bessastaðir, the pirates had been driven off. The Heimaey islanders intended to do the same—if they were pirates.
Everybody still hoped—and earnestly prayed—that they were not.
For more on the Barbary corsair raid on the island of Heimaey, see next week’s post here in this blog.
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For those who may perhaps be interested…
Northern Captives (2020) and Stolen Lives (2021) are for sale in Iceland. So anybody visiting Iceland will be able to buy copies at any decent Icelandic bookshop.
For those who may not be contemplating a trip to Iceland, these books are also available for purchase online from an Icelandic vendor called Sigvaldi.
Below are individual links to Northern Captives and Stolen Lives at the Sigvaldi website:
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
The story of the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in 1627
Amazon listing