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| Subtitle | The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627 |
| Translator | Karl Smari Hreinsson |
| First Written | 1627 |
| Genre | Travel |
| Origin | Iceland |
| Publisher | The Catholic University of America Press |
| ISBN-10 | 0813228697 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0813228693 |
| My Copy | library paperback |
| First Read | March 30, 2025 |
| Collections |
The Travels of Reverend Olafur Egilsson
Also, he was kidnapped from Grindavik, a town that I’ve actually been to (and just drove past last year!) and is recently in and on-and-off evacuation state because of a volcano.
Noted on April 30, 2025
Some books are so full of surprising events or facts that you just stop reading, look around the room, and exclaim to who ever is around. My poor wife is the recipient of most of these exclamations, and she suffers my outbursts with mild good humor. This book has a lot of these. The poor guy was kidnapped in Iceland! His wife had a baby ON the ship while they sailed down to Algiers!
Noted on April 30, 2025
OK, so this fall I was reading about the Barbary Corsairs, and this is a first-person narrative of someone who experienced this firsthand. The scope and geography of this corsairs stuff still kind of blows my mind. I think of the 1300s as a time when people traveled slowly, and not far. Yeah, sure there were the Mongols and stuff. But listen: our writer Olafur lived in Iceland, and then pirates from Northern Africa showed up, captured him and his family, took him to Algiers, where they kept his family as slaves and sent him back to Europe to go find some ransom money. And this was common!
Noted on April 30, 2025