Ólafur Egilsson - The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson

THE TRAVELS OF REVEREND LAFUR EGILSSON (known in Iceland as Reisubk Sra lafs Egilssonar) is a well-known classic of seventeenth century Icelandic literature, but it has never before been translated into English. It tells an altogether remarkable story.

In the summer of 1627, Barbary corsairs from Algiers and Sal (on the Atlantic coast of what is now Morocco) descended upon Iceland.southwest corner of the island, while three ships came from Algiers and attacked the southeast coast and the Westman Islands, off the south coast. As many as forty or more people were killed in the raid and close to four hundred in total were taken away to North Africa to be sold into slavery. Reverend lafur and his family were among those captured on the Westman Islands.

The islanders ended up in Algiers. Reverend lafur did not stay there very long, though, for his captors chose to send him off to arrange ransoms for his family and the other Icelanders. They provided him with a letter of safe-conduct (to prevent other corsairs from interfering with his task in case a ship he was on should be attacked) and sent him on his way. He then traveled alonewithout money or supportacross the Mediterranean, through Italy and France, to Holland, and, finally, to Denmark (Iceland was a Danish possession in those days) to petition the Danish king for ransom funds. Denmark was faring badly in the Thirty Years War at the time, however, and the royal coffers were empty. Reverend lafur had to return to Iceland alone, making landfall on the Westman Islands on July 6, 1628, slightly under a year after his original capture.

It may come as a surprise to some that Barbary corsairs, operating out of ports along the Maghreb, should have been raiding Iceland, of all places. Who exactly were these corsairs, and what prompted them to launch a raid on a place so very far away? Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to begin by saying what they were not.

They were not pirates, at least not the sort of buccaneeringfreebooterslike Captain Kidd or Blackbeardthat the word pirate typically brings to mind. Barbary corsairs certainly behaved like pirates, in that they boarded ships and took by force everything they could (often including the ships themselves), but they were not lone wolfs out purely for illicit personal profit. And though there was an element of jihad in the corsair enterprise, the situation was not a simple antithetical clash of civilizationsMaghrebi Muslims versus European Christiansacted out on the high seas. Things were more complicated than that on both counts.

It is important to remember that the seventeenth century world was very different from our own. We casually refer to sixteenth/seventeenth century European countries using familiar namesIceland, England, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Spainand the very familiarity of these names makes it all too easy to forget that these were not what we would today recognize as nation-states. Among other things, they typically did not have standing armies and navies of the size and permanence we now take for granted. As a result, during the sustained conflicts that marked much of the sixteenth century, governments resorted to merchant corporations, mercenary armies, and privateers to achieve their goals.

Privateers were private individuals/ships that had received a commission of warcustomarily referred to as a letter of marque and reprisalfrom a government or monarch to attack and seize foreign vessels. The proceeds would then typically be split between the private backer(s) of the privateering expedition and the government or monarch. Among otherthings, this stratagem enabled the ruling powers to muster an increased number of armed ships against an enemy without having to incur the extra expense of permanently enlarging their existing navies. During the varied conflicts in the sixteenth century, privateering was a standard practice. Scores of English sea dogs, French filibustiers, and Dutch watergeuzen hunted both sides of the Atlantic, enriching both themselves and their governmentsa system that continued, in varying forms, into the nineteenth century.

The Barbary corsairs were also, in their way, a species of privateer. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Empire expanded on both shores of the Mediterranean basininto the Balkans and across North Africa. In Reverend lafurs day, cities like Algiers were under the rule of the Ottoman Porte. As various European powers negotiated treaties with the Porte, the Maghrebi corsairs, as Ottoman subjects, were supposed to abide by these treaties and attack only those ships belonging to powers with which the Porte had not entered into treaties. As well, some European powers arranged individual treaties with corsair cities, paying an annual tribute to keep their ships safe, so Barbary corsairs did not simply attack all and sundry. They were as constrained as any privateerat least in theory. How scrupulously they abided by these constraints is, of course, another question.