Monday, August 18, 2025

August 17 - Heimaey, Westman Islands, Iceland

It’s a misty day here in our first Icelandic port. We’re anchored off the town of Heimaey on the largest of the Westman Islands, an archipelago consisting of about 13 islands.  All of them were formed by submarine eruptions which eventually became large enough to appear above the ocean’s surface.  Heimaey is the largest and only one inhabited.  There is a population of about 4500 people, and around 8 million puffins live here in the summer months. 


I took a three-hour tour with a 26-year-old native of Heimaey named Arnar.  His English was probably better than mine.  As I write it is a very foggy and misty day and the temperature is significantly cooler than it has been.  When we boarded the bus the first thing Arnar showed us was a baby puffin or a  puffling.  The baby was found this morning in the parking lot near the bus. Arnar explained how puffins are reared.  The parents mate for life and the female will lay a single egg in a burrow, which can be as deep as three meters.  They feed the puffling until it has fledged. The parents then take off and the puffling will try to take off usually landing in the water because it can’t yet fly well.  I’m not sure I understood it, but apparently the young ones can survive bobbing around on the sea until their feathers have come out enough that they can take off.  Here in Heimaey each summer the residents find about 15 to 18 thousand pufflings stranded on land or streets.  They are taken to a place on the island where they are weighed, marked in some way and then set free on the water around the Westman Islands.  The birds will return every year to the same place for the mating ritual.  And that’s probably more than any of us who aren’t ornithologists needs to know about puffins.

Here's the little puffling.  He hasn't developed the puffin's distinctive yellow-orange beak or black and white feathers.

And here are some grownups on a steep hillside where they like to roost and burrow.


I'm just adding this in because I forgot.  There's a golf course here.  Who would have thought that?  There were quite a few people on the course despite the misty, moisty weather.


It's a pretty rugged coastline!


A little blurry.  Sorry about that!


To be honest, this place, especially on a foggy day like today, hasn’t got a great deal to see or do. All the earth that we could see was as black as coal because it’s all volcanic.  At first I thought I was seeing mounds of coal and it took a minute for it to click in my head.  While I didn’t see much through the mist, I did hear a few interesting tales so I’ll recount those now.


Iceland was settled by Norse travelers sometime in the 9th century A.D., long before Amerigo Vespucci or Columbus came this way.  Among the Norsemen who came here were two brothers who on their way across the ocean stopped in Ireland and picked up a few slaves.  The brothers settled in different spots in Iceland.  The slaves belonging to one brother rebelled, killed their Norse masters, and stole their boats.  The other brother learned of the killings, went after the Irish rogues and tracked them down to Heimaey and killed them all.  He then called that island and those around it the “Vestmenn” islands, literally Westmen because the Norse called the Celts of Scotland and Ireland westmen.


But that’s not one of the most interesting stories I wanted to tell; I digressed.  In 1627 a band of Barbary Pirates from Algiers (yes, the one in North Africa and which was then part of the Ottoman Empire) arrived at Heimaey.  The pirates were looking for blonde haired, blue-eyed people to sell in their slave markets.  Women of course being the preferred ones.  They captured 234 people and took them home where they were sold off, most spending the rest of their lives in captivity.  One of the captives, a Lutheran minister, managed to get away after three years and he wrote an account of his experience.  In 1636 funds were raised to ransom 34 more of the captives and most of them returned to Iceland.  Somehow I just never imagined Barbary pirates roaming around the North Atlantic. It’s also sobering to think that today in some parts of the world there are people and cultures which traffick women, especially blonde blue-eyed ones.


That’s story number one, now here’s story number two.  At 01:00 on January 23, 1973 the mountain Eldfell on Heimaey began a volcanic eruption. Within hours a mile-long fissure grew and lava begun spewing out. Fortunately, the seas had been rough because of windy conditions so the fishing fleet that would normally be out to sea was in the harbor.  The population was put aboard the boats and taken to the mainland carrying only a few of their possessions.  As the eruption continued the fissures closed and the lava became a concentrated river of fire headed toward the harbor.  The population was worried that the lava would close the mouth of the harbor which would have essentially made Heimaey uninhabitable.  300 men volunteered to stay behind to 1) try to protect as many homes as they could from being incinerated and 2) find a way to stop or divert the lava flow.  Those 300 received assistance from the US Navy which provided them with massive pumps which the men then used to spray cold sea water on the forward edge of the flow in an effort to cool and solidify it.  Something like that had evidently never been tried and no one knew if it would work.  It did!  One of those brave volunteers happened to be our bus driver Griff.  I talked to him for a few minutes and asked him what that was like and whether they had any kind of breathing apparatus or special gear.  He said they only had helmets and he told me that at times they were getting singed because they were close enough to the moving lava that the heat was scorching.   He also said the noise was deafening. The harbor was saved as were some of the houses.  Only one person lost his life.  The volunteers were all given a special medal by the government of Iceland.  I asked if I could take his picture and he didn't want me to do that.  He said he didn't think what he and the others had done was anything more than anyone else would have done.

One of the houses buried in the eruption, excavated later and the museum built around it.

One of the US Navy pumps used to save Heimaey


I thought that was a great story and I felt honored to have met such a brave person.  Talking to Griff made my day in Heimaey a wonderful one despite the fog and mist. A museum about Eldfell and it’s eruption was built around a house that was excavated from the ash.  In places the ash and particulates from the event were 30 or 40 feet deep.  Not far away from Heimaey to the southeast is one of the newest islands on Earth, Surtsey Island which began as an eruption 130 meters below and finally reached the surface in June 1967.  Places like Iceland and Hawaii remind me that we’re on an ever-changing planet and I’m only here for less than a blink of the eye in the grand scheme of things



No comments: