(This post is a continuation of The Barbary Corsair Raid on Heimaey in 1627– Parts 1 through 4. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)
This week, we continue with the story of the Barbary corsair attack on the island Heimaey, taken from Stolen Lives, the book my Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I published last year.
The corsairs, remember, split into three groups after landing on the island. In Part 3 of this series of posts, we followed the group that marched up the middle of the island. Last week, we followed the group that pillaged the island’s western side. This week, we follow the remaining group, which hunted the eastern side.
The corsair group quartering the east side of the island came to Kirkjubær, the residence of Reverend Jón Þorsteinsson, the other pastor on Heimaey. Unlike Reverend Ólafur, Reverend Jón had been warned about the attack beforehand and had time to gathered up his household—his wife Margrét, his daughter, also named Margrét, his son Jón, plus some servants and boarders—and take refuge in a nearby cave. There, to calm everybody, he read to them quietly from scripture.
The cave was a secure enough hiding place, and they should have been safe. However, one of those in Reverend Jón’s little group, an old man described as being stubborn and reluctant to do what others asked of him, refused to stay inside and instead climbed out to survey the country and see what was happening. The corsairs spotted him and, as he turned to flee, shot in the head and killed him. After this, Reverend Jón and the others could only cower in the cave, waiting for the inevitable moment when the corsairs would discover them.
Here is how events unfurled, as described in the Icelandic text:
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Reverend Jón heard footsteps approaching and said to his wife, “They are coming, Margrét. I will face them without fear.” His wife asked him for God’s sake not to desert her. As they spoke, the bloodthirsty pirates entered the cave. When they saw Reverend Jón, one of the pirates said, “Why are you here, Reverend Jón, and not in your church?” Reverend Jón replied, “I was there this morning.” One of the pirates then replied, “You will not be there tomorrow.” He then struck Reverend Jón across the head. Reverend Jón extended his arms and cried, “I commend myself to my God! Do to me what you will.” After the next blow, Reverend Jón said, “I commit myself to my lord Jesus Christ!” His wife crawled to the feet of the vicious pirate and grabbed his legs, thinking that she could stop him from continuing his violence. But he had no mercy. The pirate struck Reverend Jón a third time. Reverend Jón said, “That is enough! Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” Before he was fully dead, the pirates began to drive Reverend Jón’s wife, daughter, son, and the other people there away from the body. His wife took her scarf from her head and tied it around her deceased husband’s jaw. After that, the pirates drove everybody to the Danish houses at the harbour.
There was a small hole in the rock above the cave where all this happened. Two women were hiding there, and they heard and saw everything that occurred.
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This story provokes some obvious questions. How did corsairs from Algiers know who Reverend Jón was? Why did they murder him rather than simply take him captive as they had Reverend Ólafur? And how could they hold up their end of a conversation with him in Icelandic?
The answer to these questions seems to be that the “pirate” who murdered Reverend Jón was not in fact an Algerine corsair at all. He was an Icelander.
To follow this account of events, we must go back to events before the corsairs landed on Heimaey. As they were first approaching the island, they captured an English fishing boat. They made a deal with the captain of the boat: if he or one of his crew could guide the corsairs to a safe landing in Heimaey, they would set all the Englishmen free and return their boat.
According to this story, there was an Icelander named Þorsteinn among the crew—though exactly why he should be there is unexplained. Þorsteinn had once been Reverend Jón’s servant, but Reverend Jón had dismissed him for immorality. Þorsteinn vowed revenge. When the corsairs took the English fishing boat he was on, he saw a means of achieving it: by guiding the Algerine corsairs to Brimuð, at the island’s southern tip, going ashore with them, and hunting down Reverend Jón and murdering him in a violent act of vengeance. After succeeding in this, Þorsteinn was said to have left Iceland with the Algerine corsairs and taken up a new life in North Africa—and was never heard from again.
Such is the story, anyway.
Reverend Jón Þorsteinsson was a renowned poet in his day. He was also, it seems, a “fire and brimstone” preacher. He took up residence at Kirkjubær in early 1608, having replaced the previous pastor there who had apparently been removed for spending too much energy resisting the Danish overlordship of Heimaey. Unlike his predecessor, Reverend Jón did not rail against the Danes. He railed against sin—both in the pulpit and in his verse. After English pirates pillaged Heimaey in 1614, Reverend Jón commemorated the event in a poem in which he portrayed the attack as God’s justice wreaked upon the sinners of Heimaey and warned that if those sinners did not mend their ways, further divine punishment would be meted out to them. Here is the poem:
Oh God, you sent both sword and pain,
To chastise us your children,
So we must bear the cross again
Until you lift the burden.
Hear me now as I proclaim,
A greater grief is seeded,
And men shall die in blood and pain.
Repentance now is needed.
We must forsake our shameful ways,
And forsake bitter silence,
For we fled the peace your word conveys,
And goaded you to violence.
Repentance now must be our path,
And punishment of vices,
Lest we suffer from your wrath,
Prey to our own devices.
With this sort of unbending “sinner be damned” perspective on life, it is perfectly plausible that Reverend Jón could have dismissed one of his servants for immorality. And it is equally possible that the servant could have been angry and resentful over the dismissal—and been goaded into vengeance.
The actual details are perhaps less plausible. The murder scene itself, with the three blows struck and Reverend Jón’s pious, ritual evocations of Jesus Christ, seems a little too pat—a little too much like hagiography—to be historically accurate in a literal way. We will likely never know for sure exactly what happened, though, for the details of this story are also buried too deeply in the past to be easily resolvable.
What we do know is that Reverend Jón was killed during the first day of the raid, and that his wife, Margrét, his daughter, Margrét, and his son, Jón, were all captured and taken to Algiers, where they were sold into slavery.
For nearly three hundred years, the location of Reverend Jón’s remains was unknown. Then, in 1924, a farmer planting a vegetable garden in the area near Kirkjubær unearthed a buried headstone that turned out to be that of Reverend Jón. This headstone is now kept in the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavík. Reverend Jón was in his late fifties when he was murdered.
In Icelandic history, he was long known as Reverend Jón the Martyr.
For more on the Barbary corsair attack on the island of Heimaey, see the next post in this series here in this blog.
Corsairs and Captives
Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates
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The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
The story of the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in 1627
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