Further Information

I am a historian of Iceland and the North Atlantic, environmental history, and the global 18th and 19th centuries. I have visited Iceland many times in the last 30 years--also Greenland and the Faroe Islands--and this translation is my fourth book. (If you want to read more about me and my other books, look here: https://shepherd.com/best-books/why-anyone-would-want-to-freeze-in-the-arctic (recently updated)
and here, https://seeingthewoods.org/2014/02/04/making-tracks-karen-oslund/ (a little less recent).

I learned about the travels of Eiríkur and Árni when I was traveling in Scandinavia. Home from travelling during the pandemic, I used the time to translate both stories. During this period of isolation, I read their accounts of adventures: witnessing the African slave trade, learning about women’s lives in Qing China, about Hindu and Muslim religious practices, and battles fought against the Ottoman Empire. Both men survived war, hunger, and disease, and nearly died several times. Yet these stories of survival have never been known outside of Iceland, and this book, the first English translation of Eiríkur and Árni, will tell the world of their fight to endure and bring their experience and knowledge of the world back home.

Later, as travel restrictions lifted, I visited Iceland and Denmark to see the manuscripts and the farms where both men grew up and decided to go to see the world. The translations are accompanied by numerous pictures of their homes and the places they visited.

The book is now complete and Nord Academic, a division of Gad, the oldest Danish press still publishing, has offered to publish it. However, some financial supplement is necessary before this can be done. The book has been accepted with all the pictures I wanted (which never happened in publishing three previous books) and with the quality that respects the stories--yet these things do not come for free. I am grateful, on behalf of the "forgotten people" of the eighteenth century, for your good wishes and support.

If all goes well, the book and all of the celebrations (see the pledge rewards!) will come to fruition in 2026--the 300th anniversary of Árni's birth!

Update 06.11.2024

Tales for a Tuesday: Female Ingenuity and Resistance against Autocrats

In the 18th century, the Qianlong Emperor of China declared rules for trade in Canton:

“the barbarian merchants of Europe have had a definite locality assigned to them for residence and trade, and have been forbidden to encroach an inch beyond the limits assigned to that locality. Sage Emperors and wise rulers have bestowed on China a moral system and inculcated a code, and there has been no hankering after heterodox doctrines. Even the European missionary officials in my capital are forbidden to hold intercourse with Chinese subjects.”

Yet, he was wrong. Sometime in the 1760s, a Chinese woman whose name we do not know had a great desire to see the European sailors in the city. She snuck into the shop of a merchant and hid herself behind a curtain until a sailor from the other side of the world came in to buy porcelain. She watched him from behind the curtain, and, then, taking a deep breath, came out and stood before him. She did not know how to talk to him, so she smiled and showed him her hands…

If you want to know what happened next in the story, you can find out in my new book! Her courage is remembered in it by a poem composed in Icelandic!

Update 09.11.2024

A Story for Saturday: Unlawful Imprisonment of Immigrants and Aid for War Victims

In 18th-century Copenhagen, an Icelandic sailor was tricked into signing a false document he did not understand and thrown into prison. There, he was chained, beaten, and humiliated by guards because he had often spoken his mind too freely. He would have been executed for insulting a captain, but his brother, who worked for a prominent official, intervened, and the sailor was released if he agreed to enlist in the navy. At that time, Catherine the Great of Russia had the right to enroll up to 400 Danish soldiers in her army, so he was taken to the Mediterranean together with the Russian troops to fight against the Ottoman Empire. Somewhere near the Bay of Sidon (now in Lebanon), he was with a band of comrades when they saw two women being attacked by soldiers on the beach. Quickly, he asked several of his friends to find the commanding officer so the attackers could be brought to justice, and the rest of the band ran to the beach as fast as they could…. If you want to know what happened next in the story, you can find out in this book!

Update 16.11.2024

Wednesday Wishes: How to Flee your Country and Thrive in a New Land

Most of the sailors who went from European ports to China and India returned home after the voyage. But, of course, some did not: they died, were shipwrecked, or absconded from their crews to another land. In South Africa, one of the Icelandic sailors stayed in the home of a Danish man who had been shipwrecked there twenty years earlier. Instead of finding his way home on another boat, this Dane married a Dutch woman, had several children, and bought a house there. How did he manage to live and work in southern Africa? the Icelander wondered. The next morning, he came out of this house to discover several wagons in the front garden, all of them filled to the brim with produce taken from the forest. These wagons were being driven to the market by men who worked for the master, as he had established a thriving business in his new home. If you want to find out the source of this wealth, and the possibilities for resettling in a new country, you can learn this in my new book.

Update 18.11.2024

And on a Monday: When the People Anoint a Mad King

An Icelandic sailor returned to Copenhagen from China to enormous celebrations of the ascension of a new monarch, Christian VII. New coins were minted, wine flowed from a fountain by the palace, a whole ox was slaughtered and roasted for the soldiers, and there were fireworks and music all night long. But the people’s joy was short lived: the new king was mentally ill. Christian spoke incomprehensively, hallucinated, and was violently short-tempered. He had no interest in the state but visited brothels in Copenhagen and engaged in self-mutilation. The rule of the land came in the hands of his ministers, particularly a foreign-born physician who rose to power through his affair with the queen. How did Denmark survive the rot into which the king had led them? You can learn the answer in my new book!