(This post is a continuation of The Barbary Corsair Raid on Heimaey in 1627 – Part 1. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read that post before continuing on here.)
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This week, we continue with the story of the Barbary corsair attack on Heimaey, taken from Stolen Lives, the book my Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I published last year.
The Heimaey islanders waited tensely at the harbor all that long day, but the approaching ships never came near. The lookouts watched them tacking against a strong headwind, veering back and forth, trying without any real success to make headway. They were still far enough off that discerning clear details about them proved difficult.
Were they pirates, or the Danish patrol ships everybody yearned for? Nobody could agree. As the hours dragged on, people became restless—and hungry. There were chores to do. Life could not just stop, some argued, because of the vague possibility of a threat on the horizon. A few of the islanders began to drift away back to their homes, to fix a proper meal and put cranky children to bed. Others followed.
The island’s organized defense dissolved.
The three ships bearing down on Heimaey were not Danish. They were corsair ships from Algiers.
These corsairs had entered Icelandic waters on July 5—almost two weeks before they approached the Westman Islands—and made landfall near the East Fjords, along Iceland’s southeast coast. They spent ten days pillaging the area. After that, they started to see diminishing returns, for word of their arrival spread and the local people fled inland to get away from the danger area near the coast.
Packing their captives into the holds of their ships, the corsairs then weighed anchor and sailed westwards along Iceland’s south shore. By that time, they had taken a total of over a hundred captives—men, women, and children.
A day or so later, they neared the Westman Islands, where, as we have seen, the wind turned against them, and they had to spend long hours tacking back and forth, making little headway.
Mounting an assault Heimaey was a tactical challenge: the island had only the one good harbor at the north end—which the islanders were prepared to vigorously defend. So a straight-on frontal attack would have been dangerously risky.
The solution to this problem presented itself in the form of an English fishing boat that the Algiers corsairs seized in the waters off Eyjafjallajökull, a smallish glacier on Iceland’s south coast. The details of the story are not completely clear, but the corsairs apparently presented the English captain and his crew with an offer they found hard to refuse: if they could show the corsairs a way to go ashore on Heimaey that let them sidestep the defenses at the harbor, the corsairs would allow everyone aboard the English boat to go free.
Somebody aboard that English fishing boat apparently knew the local area well (more on this later) and guided the corsairs to a landing site at Heimaey’s south end, a place where nobody was expecting them—and where, according to the Icelandic accounts, nobody had come ashore in living memory (for locations on the island and for the corsairs’ movements, see the Map of Heimaey showing the land and sea routes of the Algiers corsairs).
Early on Tuesday morning, July 17, the Algiers corsairs cruised along Heimaey’s eastern coast, guided by one of the crewmen from the English fishing boat. They first thought to come ashore at a spot named Kópavík, but the shoreline there looked intimidatingly steep, and they spotted some islanders roving about along the crest of the slope leading up from the sea—which would have made ascending the slope hazardous. Their next choice was Brimurð, a shallow cove near the island’s southern tip, with rough surf but a gently sloping rocky beach where boats could land.
The corsairs lowered their ships’ boats into the water, packed them with somewhere between 200 and 300 men (accounts differ), and rowed ashore in a quick, well-organized mass landing.
The islanders had been following the movement of the corsair ships, and when Lauritz Bagge, the island’s Danish Factor, heard the news that they had slipped southwards along the coast instead of trying to enter the harbor, he saddled a horse and rode out with a force of armed men to see for himself what the state of things might be.
When he and his men arrived, the Factor was dismayed to see the corsair boats already plunging through the surf and nearing the rocky strand. He fired his pistol at the lead boat, but the only effect was to goad the corsairs into angry shouting. Then the keels of their boats grated against the gravel of the beach, and they leaped ashore in a boiling mass, brandishing weapons—matchlock muskets, wheellock pistols, cutlasses, long knives, spears—and howling like wolves, as one witness put it.
If the islanders had all still been congregated at the harbor settlement, they might have stood some chance of protecting themselves by employing organized cannon and musket fire to drive the corsairs off. But after scattering to their homes the evening before, they were still spread out.
Any chance of an effective collective defense of the island was gone.
Realizing this, and seeing the awful crowd of corsairs sweeping up the beach like a tide, the men who had accompanied Lauritz Bagge panicked and scattered to find their wives and children and get them to safety. Lauritz Bagge leaped onto his horse and fled back to the harbor.
The raid on Heimaey had begun.
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…
Here are links to both Northern Captives and Stolen Lives :
Corsairs and Captives
Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates
View Amazon listing
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
The story of the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in 1627
View Amazon listing