NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT
I have a new book out. It’s titled Corsairs & Captives: Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates.
Corsairs & Captives is available on Amazon in the US, the UK, and Canada, as well as all the other Amazon locations.
As readers of this blog know, Barbary corsairs swarmed the Mediterranean and the Atlantic for the better part of three hundred years (from the mid sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries), seizing enormous amounts of booty and tens of thousands of captives and hauling them back to North African slave markets and auctioning them off to the highest bidder.
The conflict between these Barbary corsairs and Europe was military, but not just that; religious, but not just that; social and economic, but not just that either. Above all, it was a human conflict, with all the confusion, blurred lines, and inherent messiness of such things, and the narratives it generated were more complicated than simple swashbuckling pirate tales.
Corsairs & Captives presents a collection of these narratives, all based directly on primary-source documents, several of which are translated into English for the first time. They include biographies of four renegade corsair captains (Europeans who converted to Islam and became corsairs), descriptions of sea battles by those who were there, accounts of ransomed captives, the report of a French Trinitarian friar who led a ransoming expedition to Algiers, even the transcript of a trial held by the Canary Islands chapter of the (in)famous Spanish Inquisition.
These narratives bring to life a world much rougher than our own but no less complicated, in which people with the ordinary human fears and aspirations we are familiar with today struggled to endure. It is not the world most people expect when they think of Barbary corsairs. It is more interesting than that.
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.
Over the past few years, Karl and I completed four more books devoted to the Barbary corsair raids on Iceland in 1627.
One, titled Northern Captives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Grindavík in 1627, 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: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Heimaey in 1627, tells the story of the raid by corsairs from Algiers on Heimaey, one of the Westman Islands, located off Iceland’s south coast. It details the events of the attack on Heimaey and then follows the Icelandic captives to Algiers, where they too were sold into slavery.
The third book, titled Enslaved: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on East Iceland in 1627, tells the story of the raid by the same corsairs from Algiers on the East Fjords, in southeast Iceland. It details the events of the attack on the East Fjords and then follows the Icelandic captives to Algiers, where they were sold into slavery along with the Heimaey islanders.
The fourth book, titled Turbulent Times: Skálholt and the Barbary Corsair Raids on Iceland in 1627, explores for the first time the role played by Skálholt, the seat of the Bishops of South Iceland, and Skálholtsskóli (Skálholt’s school) in the creation of the Icelandic accounts of the corsair raids of 1627. It presents a description of Skálholt and the times in which it existed as well as the accounts themselves, translated from the original seventeenth century Icelandic.
You can find excerpts from these four books posted in this blog (Northern Captives: October – December, 2021; Stolen Lives: January – April, 2022; Enslaved: July – September, 2022, Turbulent Times: September – October, 2023).
These books were published in Iceland (Northern Captives in 2020, Stolen Lives in 2021, Enslaved in 2022, Turbulent Times in 2023) and are for sale throughout the island. So anybody who might be contemplating a visit to Iceland will be able to buy copies at any decent Icelandic bookshop (including the airport bookshop).
For those who may not be contemplating a trip to Iceland, these books are also available online from an Icelandic vendor (it may be an Icelandic vendor, but they work the same as Amazon: you can order the books and have them shipped to you).
Below are images of all the books’ covers plus links to the online listings.
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: the Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson is also available as an audio book from Amazon:
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson – Audio Book
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson is mostly made up of translations of seventeenth century Icelandic documents.
Northern Captives, Stolen Lives, and Enslaved are narrative histories. That is, they tell the story—present a narrative—of what occurred in novelistic fashion, emphasizing the people involved and what happened to them. We focus on the characters of the story as much as possible, and we try to evoke for the reader what the early seventeenth century world was like, how it felt to be the victim of a corsair attack and to be sold in a North African slave market, and what it was like to live in a place like Salé or Algiers in the late 1620s.
Turbulent Times provides more Icelandic background than the other books and looks at how the men who wrote narratives and letters related to the corsair raids were able to do that.
All these books are good reads.
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Karl and I have also recently had a couple of our books translated.
The first was in Greek:
Τα ταξίδια του αιδεσιμότατου Όλαφουρ Έγκιλσον (The Travels of Ólafur Egilsson), translated by Thalnis N. Karagiannopoulos, published in 2023 by Lavyrinthos Books, Athens, Greece. This book is a translation of the revised edition of The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson and contains all the Icelandic texts of that edition.
Τα ταξίδια του αιδεσιμότατου Όλαφουρ Έγκιλσον
The second was in Italian:
Schiavi dal Nord: L’incursione dei pirati barbareschi in terra d’Islanda – Grindavík 1627 (Slaves of the North: The Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland – Grindavík 1627), translated by Attilio Sodi Russotto, published in 2023 by Passaggio al Bosco Edizioni, Florence, Italy. This book is a translation of the complete text of Northern Captives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Grindavík in 1627.
There is also a Dutch translation from some year ago:
De reizen van Ólafur Egilsson: een 17e-eeuwse Ijslander ontvoerd door moslimpiraten (The Travels of Ólafur Egilsson: a 17th-century Icelander Captured by Muslim Pirates), translated by Joris van Os, published in 2019 by Uitgeverij de Brouwerij / Brainbooks, Maassluis, Netherlands. This book is a translation of the Revised Edition of The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, containing all the Icelandic texts of that edition.
