Rescuing Árni

By Stephany Evans-Steggall

Two young men, an Icelander and an Irishman, meet as strangers in a dire situation on a Sydney cliff. The Irishman, James, is the sole survivor of the Dunbar shipwreck, 1857. The Icelander, Árni, rescues him - and himself. Res

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephany Evans-Steggall
• Release date: Apr 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9780646895314

Book preview

The Icelander and the Irishman: An Introduction

Iceland is close to the Earth’s cusp. Those who lived there in the time of Árni Olafsson Thorlacius knew of the forbidding frozen wastelands to the north and the grasping lands beyond the Norwegian Sea to the south-east, the direction from whence the Vikings once came. Icelanders were either seafarers or land lovers at whose door the sea was always present anyway. On littoral reaches those with salt water running fast in their veins were ever looking outward while those with earthbound feet looked inland to their crofts and turf homes. At a young age Árni Olafsson Thorlacius was neither. The words from a favourite saga, The slopes are beautiful. I will not go, may well have held true for him but the decision was not his to make.

This saga of an Icelander is closely linked to that of an Irishman. The minds of both moved with the sea, although not always in total harmony, for the sea has a mind of its own. The islands of their birth could not compete with the oceans nor their homes with the sailing ships. Those who are island dwellers will understand how impossible it is for some to be land bound when sails are set for the far side of the sea. The two islanders resisted fishing or wharf or any shore work for motion on the deep waters. At least, that is true of the first twenty years of their lives.

Árni, for that was the Icelander’s name before he changed it, and James, whose English name belied his Irish upbringing, were in geographic and historic proximity years before they met in the southern land of Australia. The waves that lapped the shores of Iceland and Ireland were borne by northern waters in the farthest reaches of the world. Árni and James were approximately the same age; when they had barely reached double figures, old enough to remember, their lives were shaken by mighty eruptions: the Great Famine in Ireland and Mt Hekla in Iceland.

Salt cod or potatoes were plain staple fare, but the crofts of childhood were enriched by stories told of their ancestors and cultures and foreigners who subjugated their lands. The family sagas were all about the Vikings who settled in Iceland in the Middle Ages; real people to whom Icelanders traced their forebears. Seanchaí were the custodians of history for centuries in Ireland; the keepers of valuable folklore. Various homespun comparisons between their countries may be made: Icelandic elves and Irish leprechauns, puffin meat and potatoes, hot springs and bogs, Vikings and pirates.

Árni and James (such dissimilar names!) had their favourite heroes whose exploits they liked to hear again and again: light heroes and dark heroes. This Telling, or saga, may end with either, or both, extolled for heroic deeds. It is time to make sail.

Chapter 1

The Icelander

By the Stykkishólmur harbour on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula in western Iceland stands a basalt island called Súgandisey. From here Árni could look out over Breiðafjörður to the many islands, especially Elliðaey, where he once lived. He could see his uncle’s boats departing and returning. One day soon his older brother would be on one of those boats coming home from Denmark. In March, Árni was on puffin watch. The birds, lundi, usually arrived in early April, after winter months bobbing about on the waves of the North Atlantic Ocean, diving for fish.

They will be early, predicted the uncle whose name he shared, Árni Ólafsson Thorlacius. The weather has been exceptionally mild.

Somehow it was never quite the same as watching on the island of Elliðaey, where the puffins arrived like a large party of tiresome guests, demanding attention, calling out in their peculiar grunting, grumbling way, flapping about, squabbling over their places on the cliffs.

The March weather was the same though, on island and mainland. Winter was often reluctant to leave, snow lingered on the mountains and the bare land was bereft of life. So far this year grey skies were generously patched with blue, sunbeams smote the ice and snow, and bright northern lights faded as long daylight hours took over. His shadow was back! Árni wondered, as a small boy, at the absence of his shadow when outside in the dark days of winter. A little imaginative boy on an island then, he checked that his shadow went with him everywhere in summer, a protective presence.

Uncle kept a weather book in which he recorded temperature and atmospheric pressure several times a day. On this day, the 20th of March, 1847, the weather was fine, as it had been for the previous three weeks. A perfect spring day, decided Árni’s foster mother and her young husband, for a picnic outing. They organised a party to join them in a large rowing boat which left for Krossnes, just outside Grundarfjörður, to the south from Stykkishólmur. They were going to visit Árni Thorsteinsen, a sheriff they all knew.

Árni watched as the group walked down the wooden pier, clambered into the boat, the men removed their hats and all of them bowed their heads in prayer: Sjóferðabæn, the age-old seafarers’ prayer. He returned his foster mother’s wave and made his own plans for the day. Stocky and strong, he was a sleek swimmer and a good oarsman for his age. He had the use of a small boat to row the short distance to Súgandisey and no one to question a young Icelander on the water by himself.

Will you come with me? he asked his cousin, Josefina Antonía, called Antonía by everyone, and Árni’s favourite. She was just thirteen, three years older than Árni. The family acknowledged her birthday on the 12th of March with a dinner, to which Árni and his family were invited. The big meal was cooked by Antonía’s mother, Anna Magdalena, an undisputedly clever housewife and hostess of Norwegian parentage. Unable to bake her special Norwegian cake, Bløtkake, over the open fireplace, she used waffle irons to make waffles covered in cream and jam. Her jams were made from crowberries, blueberries or brambleberries, picked fresh the previous autumn. Aunt Anna never failed to describe the cake she would have preferred to make.

Antonía could not go that day with Árni to Súgandisey.

Mother plans a day of sewing, she said. Anna, Olina and I will be helping her make a start on our summer dresses. I expect Sigurborg will be telling us what to do!

Anna and Olina were Antonía’s older sisters; Sigurborg was Árni’s half-sister, a young woman of twenty-four years.

So Árni went alone to Súgandisey. He was a quiet, solitary boy, content with his own company, apart from Antonía. He wandered around the headland, listening to the voices of the lively ocean and the brisk wind in every direction; seeing the mountains hunched defensively over Breiðafjörður Bay, stoically waiting to shed their thinning white cloaks come the warmth of high summer. Water everywhere below him, waving, ready to welcome back boats and birds for the summer. Summer! Long sunshine hours, visits to Norwegian House, fresh fish and lamb on the dinner plates, running to the wharf to see the fishermen return with their catch of salmon and cod and other fish, gathering dung and driftwood for the fire, watching the puffins, setting out in boats to other places, riding on the back of Antonía’s horse, his arms around her waist.

Soon it would be the First Day of Summer, on the Thursday between the 18th and 25th of April. Guðný said that would be the 22nd and there would be a gift from her with her cheerful smiling greeting, Happy Summer, Árni!

It’s a good omen, Árni’s foster father told him, if summer and winter ‘freeze together’, frost on the night before the First Day of Summer.

He always left a dish of water out in a sheltered place, to show whether the temperature dropped below freezing.

Árni thought it unlikely that summer and winter would freeze together that year. The air was still colder over there on Súgandisey, though, biting through his thick homespun jacket and nipping his ankles through the woollen stockings, now well-worn and much mended at the end of winter. He took deep breaths, eyes closed, of clean arctic air after so many months confined indoors. He opened his eyes and there was his shadow, large and still, waiting to move with him all over and around Súgandisey.

On the highest point the wind usually threatened to blow him sideways; a less solidly built child might have trouble standing there. Like all Icelandic children, Árni learned early in life to lean into the wind. Today, though, the wind was less fierce. He scanned the skies for the elusive puffins. He imagined them here, busily building their shallow nests in the grasslands on the top of the cliffs, laying their eggs and squatting there contentedly till their chicks hatched. The ground was thickly matted with brown grass, good green grazing soon for the sheep when farmers brought them over in the summer.

Tough, stubborn creatures! accused Guðný Palsdottir, his foster mother, who knew all there was to know about sheep. Like the Vikings they arrived with.

He looked back towards the village, dominated by the Norska Húsið, Norwegian House, his uncle’s home. The home, built in 1832 of dark bevelled wood from Norway, was the first two-storey residence in Iceland. Uncle Árni Ólafsson Thorlacius went to Norway to bring the wood back in his own ship, as well as a builder from Copenhagen to supervise the construction.

The house seemed very grand to Árni, whose home with his foster mother, Guðný Palsdottir, and her second husband, Einar Pétursson, was cramped and charmless by comparison. Theirs was a torfbæir, an A-frame turf house, built of basic timber frames, with blocks cut out of turf arranged over a base layer of rock and packed in to form the walls and roof.

They should be coming back soon from Krossnes, he thought, trotting down the steep incline, kicking at stubborn lumps of ice, and back to the rowboat. The fire will need more peat by now. There’ll be trouble if I let it go out.

A raven swooped overhead cawing crossly. Only a few eider, beloved by all good housewives, shared the water as he rowed home.

The light was dimming by seven and there was no sign of the picknickers’ boat.

Einar is a good foreman to have on board, Guðný Palsdottir had assured Árni as she packed a basket with food that morning. But you know that, don’t you? You’ve been out on a boat with him. There was a mackerel sky earlier today, a good sign for our outing.

Árni nodded. He was wary of Einar Pétursson, whom Guðný had married a couple of years ago, a man half her age. The foreman was the captain of the vessel, responsible for assessing conditions.

Guðný took her apron off, tightened her shawl and straightened her cap. Outside her shadow was large and quaint as she smoothed her skirts and shifted the weight of the basket. She was plump now, at fifty-six, but her pink cheeks and ready smile were youthful. Árni watched as she and her shadow walked away.

‘Don’t worry, Árni. I have an aggarsteinar in my pocket!"

This was a small hollow stone which floated. If carried on a sea journey it was supposed to protect the person from drowning. Árni did not put much faith in aggarsteinar. Breiðafjörður was filled with cod and salmon, but the open seas beyond the protective arms of the bays, and the natural harbour of Stykkisholmur, contested the right of fishermen to take its bounty without paying. The cost was many lives and very few bodies recovered from the deep.

Árni built up the fire and ate a piece of salted fish with a hunk of rye bread. Soon he would have to light a lamp. The boat was very late. Someone called out to him.

Are you there, Árni?

Margret Magnusdottir, a maid who worked in Jacobsen’s apothechary, was at the door. She had been invited to go with the picnic party, but her plans changed and she stayed home. Late in the day, when the boat had not returned, she thought of Guðný’s boy waiting alone.

The boat has not come into the harbour yet, Árni. I think you should go to your uncle’s home. Come now. I shall walk with you. Perhaps they have had to stay overnight for some reason. Guðný would not like to think of you all alone here.

The boy went with her and joined his cousin, Ólafur Kristjan, in the children’s bedroom, upstairs in the Norwegian House. They examined Ólafur’s collection of bones and shells in a small chest before his aunt, Anna Magdalena, bustled in with another eiderdown and bade the boys good night.

Árni slept soundly, unlike the maid Margret Magnusdottir in her room above the apothechary. She dreamt that she was downstairs and all the people who had left on the boat were there too. They were wet and seawater dripped onto the floor. All of them were standing, except Guðný, who was sitting on a chest. One of them was waving his hands and legs about, but why she could not imagine. She recognized them all and woke suddenly, chilled and disturbed.

She heard people talking downstairs in the apothechary and thought that they must be in immediate need to come in the middle of the night for some medicine and were talking to the apothechary’s assistant. She dressed and hurried down the stairs. It seemed in her confused state of mind that the people down there were the picnic party she had dreamt about, who had returned, soaked and miserable, in urgent need of medication. She opened the door into the apothechary, only to find it empty and silent. She checked with the night watchman.

Has anyone come here tonight?

No one at all, he assured her.

Margret returned to bed, shivering with cold and dread. She couldn‘t get warm. What did the dream mean?

Árni also woke to the sound of voices downstairs. These were hushed, unhappy voices, he could tell. Was that Guðný’s voice he could hear? She would come up soon to see him and explain why she was home so late. He heard footsteps on the staircase and burrowed under the eiderdown, pretending sleep. The steps were too heavy for Guðný.

Árni! His uncle’s voice, unusually gentle.

Yes, Uncle?

Come with me, dear boy.

Uncle led the way to his office and sat down, putting one arm around his nephew and drawing him close.

We have received bad news, Árni, and I am sorry that I am the one to tell you.

Árni was staring at all the knobs and keyholes on the desk, wondering distractedly what each drawer and cavity contained. He traced a pattern along the polished surface, watching the shadow move beneath his finger.

The rowing boat capsized and everyone on board was drowned. Guðný too, I‘m sad to say.

Blue eyes met blue eyes, and Árni wondered, as he had many times before, if his father, Uncle’s brother, had a similar appearance. If he thought about this long enough, he could put off thinking about the drowning of seven people. Guðný! How could that be? Kind, cheerful Guðný, his substitute mother for ten years.

Come now, Uncle said at last. We shall go downstairs where your Aunt is making hot drinks. That and the fire will comfort you.

The kitchen in Norwegian House was a place where hungry family and friends could almost taste the food from the aromas that lingered all day. The big pot simmering over an open fireplace held promise of the next substantial meal to be served.

Árni perched on the edge of a chair and stared at the flames. Antonia knelt beside him, tears in her eyes and rubbed his cold hands. Margret Magnusdottir was there, repeating her dream to anyone who entered the kitchen. Another woman visited too, talking of how she was near the water when the rowing boat went by. She could hear a fiddler and singing, and laughter, but no, she had not seen the accident happen. Others came by to share what they knew of the misadventure and eager to know more.

A doctor by the name of Thorleifur lived in Bjarnarhöfn, close to where the drowning occurred. He was renowned for his far sightedness. On the same day that the boat sank, Thorleifur was out walking after visiting a patient, agitated about a vision he had seen clearly. Could it be true? The boat was in Bollaleidir, a deeper strait in which boats could move safely.

He met a boy looking for sheep for his master.

Thorleifur greeted the boy and said: A boat has been lost today, here in this area.

No, the boy replied. I don’t know anything about that and no one else is aware of it.

The doctor questioned others, but they had not heard about the boat. Just the same, at the doctor’s insistence, a search was made along the shore. Guðný’s body, a chest and various items were found.

Árni heard the doctor’s premonition and the maid’s bad dream as if in the grip of a nightmare himself. Guðný had often said, when he told her about his dreams, that Icelanders were a fey people, steeped in fantasies and forebodings. Uncle Árni believed that their barren land fed fertile imaginations.

Perhaps, one man suggested, Einar Pétursson had a feeling before they set out that they shouldn’t go, but didn’t want to spoil the party. Foremen have that knowledge. A storm blew up, I’m thinking. Einar Pétursson should have trusted his instincts.

Aunt Anna shook her head at him and bent down to her nephew.

Here, child. This will warm you up. Such a terrible shock to us all.

She placed a cup of hot sweet coffee in front of Árni.

His cousin Ólafur Kristjan sat at the other end of the table, eating porridge spoonful by spoonful. He kept his eyes on his plate. Antonía lifted the cup of coffee to Árni’s lips, encouraging him to drink. He took a sip and wiped his face with the back of his hand. He gazed at her.

What will happen to me, Antonía?

—§—

Árni had a family of siblings, similar to Antonía, but he did not grow up with them in a home like Norwegian House. He was the youngest of five sons, born on Monday, the 28th of November 1836 and christened the following Sunday, the 4th of December. His Uncle Árni, who kept weather records, and liked to connect family events with the conditions of the day, told him when he was older about the weather at the time of his birth.

Frosty! A cold and dry autumn, icy winds with snow falling. A hard winter followed.

A bare month after their youngest son’s birth, Ólafur Ólafsson Thorlacius and Helga Sigmundsdóttir were involved in a rescue. Two neighbouring farmers decided, a couple of days before Christmas, to walk across the hard ice to a long island called Fagurey, Beautiful Island. They set out with their dogs, but a westerly wind started to blow, the current changed direction and the ice began breaking around them. They managed to make a desperate leap to the island; one of the dogs didn’t make it.

The farmers shouted and waved their arms, but they could not attract attention. They kept moving, building a snow house to stay warm. The remaining dog offered warmth to his owner but not to the other farmer. They thought they would freeze to death or die of starvation, whichever happened first.

Helga happened to see movement out there and picked up her binocular telescope to take a closer look. Were there sheep stranded on the island? She saw two people out there and she called out to her husband. Men on the island! We must launch our boat and rescue them!

Meanwhile, at the church nearby the minister could hear strange loud cries. Some said they were the cries of the lost children coming from the sea, the ones left out to die in the cold, but he wasn’t convinced. He cut the service short and rode his horse towards the sound. Ólafur and Helga had already gone to rescue the men whose cries he had heard. They had been there for three days and suffered nothing worse than frostbite, even the dog’s paws.

Perhaps Ólafur Ólafsson Thorlacius was already unwell when that rescue took place, or perhaps the expedition in freezing conditions caused him to sicken. He died just a few weeks later, on the 8th of February, 1837 when he was thirty-three years old. His coffin was lowered in the frozen earth of a burial ground not far from the family farm, close to Búðardalur. Búðardalur was a settlement in the fjord Hvammsfjordur, innermost off Breiðafjordur. Árni’s maternal grandfather, Sigmundur Magnússon, was buried there, just days later than his son-in-law. It had been a very hard winter, claiming many lives.

Icelanders believed in destiny. Their word for it was feigur: someone who was about to die and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. In a harsh and unforgiving land of farmers and fishermen, feigur was well known and philosophically accepted. Yet the grown up Árni, far from his birthplace and its manners, grieving in a foreign land, wondered how his mother faced feigur when her husband and father died at almost the same time.

At the time of his death, Ólafur Ólafsson Thorlacius, his wife Helga Sigmundsdóttir, their five sons and Sigurborg, Ólafur’s daughter from a previous relationship, were living on the farm, Innri-Fagridalur, on Skarðsströnd, once owned by Helga’s father. This was no poor man’s turf house, but a handsome two-level house on good grazing land which descended from the fells to the sea and the boats they took out fishing. Helga and her stepdaughter Sigurborg attended to the eider nests along the shore, making sæng, eiderdowns or duvets, and pillows for the family and for neighbours. Even baby Árni was covered with a soft eider blanket.

Helga knew what was about to happen after her husband died. By law she was not permitted to continue farming on her own, even though she had the means, the hired hands and growing sons to help her. An edict of the land allowed district authorities to dissolve a household when its head man had died. If the land were bountiful, or bordering on the sea, as theirs did, the authorities or perhaps the church could claim it and sell off the family’s possessions. Helga had to leave, but she was spared other indignities.

At the request of Ólafur’s brother, Árni Olafsson Thorlacius in Stykkisholmur, an estate auction was held on the 29th of May 1837 at Innri- Fagridalur and the widow was allowed to keep some of her personal property, including the precious sæng. Cows, horses, sheep, hay, saddles, furniture, tools, most of the crockery and cutlery – sold. Helga’s brother, Rognvaldur Sigmundsson, at the age twenty-seven, bought the farm, Innri-Fagridalur, Beautiful Valley.

Like her stepbrother Árni, years later, Sigurborg asked plaintively, What will happen to me? Her father was dead and Helga might discard her now,