THE SKÓLAPILTAR REPORT

We know about the details of the Barbary corsair raid on East Iceland in 1627 because of an Icelandic document sometimes known as the skólapiltar report—“skólapiltar” means “school boys (“skóla” = “school” – “piltar” = “boys”).

The skólapiltar report is a somewhat mysterious document. It is based on the testimonies of a number of young men (likely in their mid, possibly late teens) who came from the East Fjords area in Iceland and who attended Skálholtsskóli the year after the corsair raid.

In those days in Iceland, there were two centers of higher learning, both cathedral schools—that is, both were attached to a church, and the program of study was largely religious. One school (Skálholtsskóli) was located at Skálholt, in the southwest (the image at the top of this post depicts Skálholt as it was a little after the time of the corsair raid), and the other (Hólaskóli) at Hólar, in the north. These were small, elite institutions that served the same function in Iceland that Oxford and Cambridge universities did in England: educating the sons of well-to-do families to prepare them to take up important positions in the church, the government, and the wider society.

In the academic year following the corsair raids, the students from East Iceland who attended Skálholtsskóli were interviewed, and a report on the raid was compiled from their testimony.

We do not know who these students might have been nor how many of them there were. We also do not know who took their testimonies, how those testimonies were taken—orally or in writing—or who wrote up the final report.

At the end of the report, there is a brief addendum stating that the content was “based on information and drawings that students from East Iceland gathered together.” So perhaps the students submitted written statements—perhaps even including maps. Unless new documents emerge, however, there is no way to know.

There is also no easy way to know if the students actually witnessed first-hand the events they described or if they were merely retelling accounts they had heard from others. Given the high risk of being an actual eyewitness to events—few people getting that close to a marauding corsair band evaded capture—they probably passed on accounts that were being told throughout the East Fjords area at the time.

In general, such oral accounts are notoriously unreliable. The skólapiltar report, however, contains a lot of very specific details regarding the chronological sequence of the raid, the names of the individual farmsteads pillaged, and the names of individual people captured. It also seems that somebody—one or more of the professors at Skálholtsskóli presumably—tried to collate and edit the report to make it as clear and as coherent a document as possible. All of this gives the skólapiltar report a credibility that it might otherwise lack.

The report is still a compilation, though—a splicing together of different individuals’ narratives—and despite the editing that it obviously underwent, the various accounts it contains do not always fit smoothly together. As a result, the story it tells is not entirely consistent. It is also based on a small, random selection of testimonies, and so it is not an exhaustive account of the corsair raid. Thus, while the report probably records most of the events of the raid with a fair degree of accuracy, it is neither a fully accurate nor a fully complete account.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the reader’s point of view, though, any lack the skólapiltar report may have in terms of overall accuracy or completeness is more than compensated for by the vividness of the details it provides.

Look at the following, for example:

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Very early the next morning, thirty-five of the evildoers marched further inland than they had before, to the area around Hálskirkja parish, southwards on the road to Hamar farm, which is situated half a þingmannaleið from the town of Djúpivogur. The man who lived there [i.e., the master of the 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.

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There is another story related in the skólapiltar report equally as vivid but with a special twist to it. Here’s the story:

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That same day, the evil pirates travelled all the way to Flaga, at the far end of Breiðdalur. On their return to their ships, they encountered an old man almost eighty years old. They murdered him. They also captured a young man. When the pirates came to Núpur, on Berufjarðarströnd, with their three captives, they left two men at the farm there, guarding the captives, and the rest began searching the surrounding area to see if any valuables might have been be hidden thereabouts.

While the two pirates guarding the captives were in the farmhouse, the young man whom they had captured ran off, even though his hands were still tied behind his back. The pirates who were searching along the strand saw this and immediately chased after him. This young man raced up the mountain into a fogbank. As he ran, his trousers slid down and got tangled around his feet, and he could do nothing else but throw himself to the ground and trust in God’s mercy. The pirates walked everywhere around the depression where he lay, howling like wolves, for they knew the boy must be close by, but they could not find him.

After that, the Turks returned to the farm and their bound captives. They beat both men and then brought them to their ships. They stole whatever they could on their way back.

The young man who escaped got away to safety.

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There is no way of knowing for sure, but it is likely that the young man in the story was one of the skólapiltar, and that we know the details of what happened to him because he contributed his first-hand account to the report when he returned to school in the autumn after the raid.

If he had not been lucky (if he hadn’t made it into the fogbank, if his trousers hadn’t slipped down and forced him to lie still, if the corsairs had stumbled across him in the fog), he would have been abducted along with the other hundred or so other inhabitants of the East Fjords and been sold into slavery in North Africa like they were—and we would never have known anything about him at all.

We still know very little. No name is provided for him. But thanks to his good fortune, somewhere in Iceland today (likely in East Iceland) his descendants still live—completely unconscious of the crucial role that a pair of baggy trousers once played in their existence.