Capitalism and the restructuring of fishing and fisheries across the world

When anthropologist Jane Nadel-Klein described how "capitalism can create and then dismisses a way of life", she was talking about the fishing villages of east Scotland. But the same could be said of any of the tens of thousands of fishing communities that developed fishing and fish processing industries over the last century from Iceland to New Zealand. The "dismissal" of these fishing villages has been part of the restructuring of global capitalism known as neoliberalism in response to the falling rate of profit since the end of the long post Second World War boom.

The restructuring of fisheries was intended to increase the profitability of commercial fishing, which it most certainly has for corporations and large boat owners, as the page from Statistics Iceland  below shows. The total catch from Icelandic fisheries in 2016 was almost half a million tonnes less than in 2005, yet it was worth twice as much as the 2005 catch had been.

The increase in value of Iceland's total fish catch 2005-2016

The resulting destruction of many fishing communities has been a by-product of consolidation of capital, privatisation of fisheries, over-fishing, the imposition of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) in the name of sustainability and the financialisation of quotas into commodities in their own right. All of which has led inexorably to the closure of factories and fewer small boats being able to make a living for their crews and owners.

Nadel-Klein's book Fishing for Heritage was published in 2003 and since then anthropologists have been looking in depth at the results of this process in different areas of the world. Penny McCall Howard's superb book Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea focuses on the people "working the ground" in the prawn fisheries of the west coast of Scotland, to investigate how capitalism and its drive for profit is systematically wrecking the fisheries and the livelihoods of the fishers. I have reviewed Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea in the latest edition of International Socialism Journal.

Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea
by Penny McCall Howard

Fiona McCormack's Private Oceans: The Enclosure and Marketisation of the Seas examines how Individual Transferable Quotas work in New Zealand and Iceland and considers Hawaii where ITQs have not yet dislodged a fisheries management system based on maximum annual catches. The book ends in Ireland with examples of the effects of the Common Fisheries Policies from Donegal and the island of Árainn Mhór. I recently reviewed Private Oceans for Climate and Capitalism and while it contains a lot I disagree with, the book is full of fascinating detail and the voices of the fishers at the sharp end of neoliberal restructuring.

Private Oceans: the Enclosure and Marketisation of the Seas
by Fiona McCormack

Eight week fisheries strike bites hard as Iceland's establishment gets rattled

Icelandic fishers have been striking for two months and a report published yesterday by Iceland's Fisheries minister, Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir shows just how much fishing is really worth to the government and employers.

Fisheries minister Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir

The report notes that since the start of the strike on 14 December 2016:

• The production and export of fresh whitefish has dropped by 40-55 percent and export revenue is down by 3500-5000 million Icelandic króna (ISK)
• Some 312 million ISK in unemployment benefit has had to be paid out and contributions to the unemployment fund paid by workers are down by 126 million
• The treasury is losing tax and fishing fees
• Central and local government income has been hit by 3,565 million ISK, of which 2,998 million would have come from fishers and 567 million from fish processing workers 
• If the strike were to continue over the capelin fishing season it would cost the economy a further billion ISK

The report also notes how much fishing workers are sacrificing to fight for their terms and conditions, as their disposable income has dropped 3,573 million ISK and the fish processing workers' income is down 818 million. If the fishing unions had united and stayed out indefinitely as planned from 10 November last year, the workers' could have won weeks ago. But it looks as though Iceland's ruling class is trying to find a way to end the strike and save face.

Páll Magnússon, head of the parliament, the Alþingi, Industrial Affairs Committee was interviewed by state broadcaster RUV last week. It was remarkable enough that he said that the government could intervene without banning the strike. Iceland governments have made fishing strikes illegal before but it appears to recognise now that the well of bitterness beneath this strike is too deep to risk banning it. Instead he suggested that fishers' food allowance could partly be treated as a travel allowance and not fully taxed.

Former Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson, also raised the idea of reinstating fishers' tax breaks. These tax breaks, before they were abolished, went some way to recognise that fishing is hard and dangerous and makes huge amounts of profit for exporters and processing plant owners.

Remember president of seafood producers Samherji, Þorsteinn Már Baldvinsson? He wrote an article saying Icelandic fishers earn £100,000s a year and are better off than their Norwegian counterparts. He was also Chair of Glitnir investment bank when it went belly-up in 2008 and an article published in Iceland last year said that Þorsteinn Már and his ex-wife Helga S. Guðmundsdóttir had been paid some 3.5 billion ISK over the last six years from the company Steinn Ehf. which holds their shares in Samherji. These enormous profits, journalist Ingi Freyr Vilhjálmsson said amounted to nearly 6.5 percent of 2015's budget for the National Hospital in Reykjavik and almost 65 percent of the revenue of Iceland's National Radio or the wages of 13,500 people on the minimum wage in 2016.

The CEO of Grimsby fish market Martyn Boyers knew this strike would hit profits quickly, back in November 2016 he said,

It is not permanent, but it is a bad thing. Because of the way the system works we have fish on its way. It won't affect this week but it will the week after. The biggest issue is we don't know how long it will be. Will it be a day and they'll be back fishing tomorrow? Could it be a week?, A month? It will not be permanent, but the way business works now there won't be a really good period to cover the bad.

Boyers also pointed out that Norway, Ireland and Scotland would not be able to fill the gap left by the strike and said that the Grimsby Fish Merchants Association would be trying to put pressure on the Icelandic government to get the employers and unions to end the strike. 

Whatever pressure they have tried has not worked. Boyars was quoted in an article in British newspaper The Guardian yesterday.

Since January we have had virtually no Icelandic fish. We are currently down 75% on Icelandic fish in weight terms over the last five weeks. It’s putting pressure on jobs in the supply chain and availability in shops.

The Guardian is a middle class newspaper, which explains why the article is mostly most worried about the price of fish and the shortage of courgettes in Britain due to cold weather in Spain. Leaving aside this editorial idiocy, Fisheries minister, Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir's report may have be intended to load pressure on the strikers but it also clearly shows that this strike can be won.

Previous articles on Herring and Class Struggle about the strike can be found here -

Iceland's fishing workers vote and strike again

Iceland's fishing strike casts a wide net

Áfram Sjómenn - The indefinite trawler fisheries Strike in Iceland is on

If workers were to punch their weight, Iceland's fishing strike

If workers were to punch their weight - Iceland's fishing strike

Just four days after Iceland's fisheries strike began on 10 November, articles reported that deals had been agreed and the strike was off. Iceland's National Broadcasting Service, RÚV reported that a contract had been signed between the Icelandic Fishermen’s Association, Sjómannasambands Íslands and the employers association, Samtaka.

Immediately, a furious row broke out as two of the largest fisheries unions - vélstjórafélag Grindavíkur and Sjó­manna­fé­lags Íslands (SFÍ) refused to sign the deal. Jón­as Garðars­son, head of
S­FÍ accused Valmundur Valmundsson of Sjómannasamband Íslands of breaking unity by meeting secretly with the employers.

The members of Vélstjórafélag Grindavíkur and Sjó­manna­fé­lags Íslands made up some 40-50 percent of the striking seamen and they stayed out. But because trawlers are often run by workers in different unions, some boats went back to sea leaving the strikers behind.

The proposed deal involves better money for protective clothing, holidays and guaranteed wages but Jón­as said that his union's lawyers were sure that the deal cut sick leave in half. Sjómannasambands Íslands denied this saying that sick leave is regulated by law. This matters so much because fishing is dangerous and it is easy to get injured. 

The fish dealers were enormously relieved.

Martyn Boyers, chief executive of Grimsby Fish Dock Enterprises, which operates Grimsby Fish Market, said,

"I'm reassured about the coming week's supply now... It was never going to be a long strike, they need to work."

Yet only a few days before in the Grimsby Telegraph, he had been explaining how contingency plans had been made and the strike posed no threat to the market's supply. So employers and markets insisted that the strike would have no effect, but they were ready to send representatives to Reykjavik to get the government to lean on trade union negotiators.

Negotiations continued between the employers and the two large unions that hadn't signed up. There was also the problem of too few crew on herring and other pelagic trawlers. This appears to have been kicked into the long grass with a proposal for an independent study that will be carried out over a year into the numbers, safety and the length of hours worked by crews on these boats.

By 16 November, Sjó­manna­fé­lag Íslands and vélstjórafélag Grindavíkur had also signed a deal that would be binding for two years and suspended the strike. Sjó­manna­fé­lag Íslands said it was able to sign as the sick leave for its members would remain unchanged.

The seamen - fishers and engineers are now being balloted on the deal, with the results due on 14 December.

This strike had been building for a long time, with no negotiated deal since 2011 and 90 percent of those who voted, voted to strike indefinitely. This suggests a level of dissatisfaction among the fishers and trawler engineers that is unlikely to be solved by these deals. But even if the deals are accepted by the majority, much more could have been won by these workers who have barely flexed their muscle and yet whose fishing make billions of krona in profit for the employers and dealers.

Moonstone - the boy that never was

Mánasteinn, drengurinn sem aldrei var til, the novel by Icelandic author Sjón, was published recently in English, in Britain as Moonstone, the boy who never was. My review of it has just appeared in September's Socialist Review.

This short, beautiful novel tells the story of Máni Steinn Karlsson, a movie-obsessed teenager living with his one ancient relative in an attic in the centre of Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1918. Máni Steinn, roams the small town looking for the odd jobs available to a boy who struggles to read and planning which film he will see next. It is a story of young people struggling to be free in a small society under pressure from the shortages of the First World War, the eruption of volcano Katla and soon, from the lethal Spanish flu.

Read the review here. The book is currently available in hardback or ebook from Bookmarks the socialist bookshop and will be out in paperback in February 2017.

The Northern Garrisons - The British Army writes from Iceland, 1941

Iceland occupied Part One

During the Second World War the British Ministry of Information published a series of pamphlets called, The Army at War. These were propaganda to inform and cheer the readers in an accessible, often witty way that was meant to show that the war effort was planned and coherent. The pamphlets were designed to keep people at home in touch in an official way, with what their loved ones were involved in abroad but could not discuss in letters home.

The Ministry of Information employed talented writers and these pamphlets can be moving and poignant. The Northern Garrisons by Eric Linklater is all this about the troops based in the Orkney and Shetland Isles and gives an honest sense of the terror of sailing in the Atlantic convoys being hunted by enemy U-boats. Linklater also, I think, tried to charm angry Icelanders who were deeply unimpressed at the British occupation from 1940.

The Northern Garrisons pamphlet, published 1941

The British government had tried to recruit Iceland, "as a belligerent and an ally", from 9 April 1940 when Germany's forces under the Nazi's invaded Norway and Denmark. It said that Britain could help Iceland maintain its independence by providing an occupying force but Iceland was neutral and had just effectively declared its independence from Denmark after the Nazi's had over run Denmark, so its government refused to co-operate. That didn't stop the British Navy landing Marines in Reykjavik in the early hours on 10 May 1940.

Linklater was not in the landing force and says about his journey to Iceland, 

To travel speedily and well, one should attach oneself, if possible, to a General. There was a General, whose duty was taking him to Iceland when mine also pointed there, and being ordered to join him I crossed the Atlantic in the rapid luxury of a Sutherland flying-boat.

This journey with a three course lunch including steak and kidney pie, took six hours and 55 minutes. He notes that when Iceland Force, as the Allies named it, arrived in Iceland, "they were not received - as ingenuously they had expected - with open arms."

The Icelanders were displeased by the occupation of their country and, being unable to prevent it, they decided to ignore it. To ignore it as far as possible, that is. They assumed towards our troops an attitude of frosty indifference, and our troops, being friendly people, and so sure of the virtue of their cause that they could not see how anyone should doubt it, were sorely puzzled by this reception.

Linklater describes Reykjavik which then had a population of about 40,000 people and politely flatters the locals.

A generation ago the houses were nearly all of wood - farm buildings of turf -  but concrete has now taken the place of timber, and now there are rows of new houses all built according to modern notions of simplicity and functionalism, a rank of windowed cubes with a shelf on each to catch the sun.. There are little hat shops.. with an elegant sample or two of the latest fashions from New York; and there are book shops, half a dozen of them, that put to shame the illiteracy of many an English town of greater size; and there are flower shops where, you may discern a sheaf of roses, a pot of hydrangeas, that have been grown in greenhouses warmed by the hot springs of this icy and volcanic island.

An interesting town, with a brand new university of its own, a National Theatre - not wholly finished yet - and a statue to Leif Ericsson, the Icelander who discovered America.

The pamphlet describes Icelanders as having been flattered for some years by the attentions of German universities who studied Icelandic culture and the Sagas, For this reason, it says a previous generation of Icelandic students who studied in Germany had a nostalgic fondness for Germany with little idea of the realities of the Nazi state. The younger generation, it says, had been courted with cheaper university courses and there was a widespread admiration for German "efficiency". It is true that the relatively few Icelanders then able to go to university, considered Germany to be the European capital of culture, but most Icelanders knew precisely what the Nazi's regime was. Widely circulated leftwing Icelandic newspapers had reported the behaviour of the Nazis all through the 1930s when political polarisation meant some Icelanders admired Nazism and hoped to use it to contain Iceland's own trade unionists, socialists and Communists.

The thaw in relations between the troops and Icelanders, Linklater says, was due to the good sense of Icelanders, the good behaviour of the troops and the good market the British forces provided for Icelandic produce. Iceland had obviously lost it's European markets for fish and sheep produce and Linklater points out how much money the British Army poured into the country in one way or another, including the payment of overtime, for which Icelanders were presumably meant to be grateful.

All the local produce is bought - mutton and milk and fish - and local labour is paid high wages. In March of this year (1941) about £30,000 was paid out in wages; and like his British confrere, the Icelandic labourer is properly compensated for his wounded conscience when he agrees to work on the Sabbath day: 4.50 kronur an hour to be precise; three shillings and fourpence in English money.

This work on the army bases was known as Bretavinna - British work - although everyone agreed the money was good, it was also considered to be boring, menial and degrading to work for the occupiers. But the camp to the south east of Reykjavik was in an area where work was hard to find and people often had to take whatever work was available, even Bretavinna.

Linklater didn't see it that way as an apparent note of irritation crept in at Icelanders' lack of appreciation of the situation,

Camp after camp has been sited far less conveniently than it could have been had we shown less care and regard for the small and scanty fields of the Icelandic farmer.

Clearly, Linklater had no idea what those insignificant fields represented in years of labour, self independence and self respect to the farmers.

To combat boredom and loneliness and provided a bit of news from home, the Iceland Force bought an hour a day of its time from the Icelandic radio broadcasting service and made their own programmes. They also got the local brewery to make stronger beer for the troops. Linklater says, "Icelandic beer is the depressing sort known as near-beer", by which he meant that it was almost alcohol-free, as ordinary alcoholic beer had been illegal in Iceland since 1915. And the brewery couldn't keep up with the troops' demand.

Many members of Iceland Force would have agreed with Linklater when he described, "a fjord, bleak and barren.. and a narrow little village sitting nakedly on a hillside. The houses were white and the hill was white with snow. It all looked very cold and comfortless." An officer who had been in Iceland for nearly a year said appreciatively of the same village:

That's rather a nice little place, isn't it? It must be quite a sun-trap in summer.

 The British troops and Air Force, who were joined in July 1940 by Canadian troops, stayed until Americans troops arrived in 1941. The United States was still technically neutral until it joined the war in December 1941 but the Americans' presence in Iceland by agreement with the Icelandic government, meant that British troops were freed up to fight elsewhere. The continuing occupation divided Icelandic society politically and would, in 1948, cause an explosion of protest against Iceland joining NATO, The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

When Britain's Ministry of Information published The Northern Garrisons in 1941 it was fighting for "hearts and minds" when the Second World War was still in the balance. The German Nazi forces had stormed through Europe to the North Sea coast facing Britain and occupied the Channel Islands. The Russians had not yet beaten General Paulus and the Sixth Army at Stalingrad and it was not at all clear that the Allies would win.

The British government were trying with this pamphlet to reach a mass of ordinary people who on reading it, they hoped, would pass it on to friends and family and feel more involved. It was designed to be a morale booster for the troops in the Northern Garrisons and the British government may have hoped that English-reading Icelanders would also read it and feel part of the wider war. But Icelanders had been fighting for self-determination from Denmark and its servants for too long to be so easily reconciled to this occupation.

Inside cover of The Northern Garrisons: The Army at War

More than fishy - The new frontiers of capitalism's commodification of oceanic ecosystems

The December issue of Monthly Review magazine has a very useful article on Capitalism and the commodification of salmon by Stefano B Longo, Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark, about the invention and production of a genetically modified (GM) Atlantic Salmon, called AquAdvantage salmon. The authors expect it to be approved soon by the US Food and Drug Administrator (FDA) despite the level of protest against its potential dangers to humans and ecosystems from ecologists and scientists. If it is approved, it will be the first genetically modified meat sold for human consumption and will set a precedent for thousands of other GM animals to be developed.

The advantage to AquaBounty Technologies who developed the GM fish, is that it takes only 18 months to mature enough to be sold instead of the usual three years. This will obviously be a massive advantage to AquaBounty over its competitors and will probably make the company billions of dollars.

A good-looking fish: AquAdvantage Salmon from AquaBounty

Other advantages, the company says, are that AquAdvantage salmon will be raised in closed containers reducing waste problems and the risk of contaminating its surroundings. Presumably, AquaBounty's lack of the right water use and discharge permits in Panama, and unacceptably high levels of  coliform bacteria were just teething problems for which the Panamanian government recently fined the company the maximum allowable, $9,500. AquaBounty also argue that because AquAdvantage salmon grow so much more quickly than existing salmon it will take much less food to produce it.

This last argument seems to make sense and it matters because farmed fish eat vast quantities of other fish in their manufactured food. It is often claimed that the fish meal that they are fed is mostly waste fish, "bycatch" fish that cannot be legally landed as part of fishing quotas, as well as all the rubbish of bones, skin and unwanted parts cut off in fish factories leaving the neat fillets for bread crumbing. In reality, there isn't enough waste fish for the farmed-fish market, so vast quantities of small, ugly or currently unmarketable species are hoovered up, boiled and fed to farmed fish.

However, in 1865 an economist William Stanley Jevons noticed that the technological improvements increasing the efficiency of coal as an energy source for industry did not mean less coal was used. On the contrary, as coal became cheaper for industrialists to use, they used more of it—the Jevons paradox. There is no reason why a similar process will not apply equally to GM farmed salmon and the amount of fish meal it is fed, whatever the producers may assert. As the fish becomes cheaper to produce more of it will be produced and more fish meal will be required to feed it.

It is true that salmon was a luxury food that has become much more accessible to ordinary people by farming and it is often argued that GM foods are necessary to feed the world's expanding population. But as Marxist economist Utsa Patnaik demonstrated in Agriculture and Food in Crisis,¹ globalisation and capitalism in crisis have immiserated hundreds of millions of people who can no longer afford chicken, pork or farmed salmon anyway. And, because it is farmed for profit and not human need, it destroys local environments in the short term and is part of a system undermining global ecosystems of which humans are a part. As Marxist Geographer David Harvey argues;

"Money prices attach to particular things and presuppose exchangeable entities with respect to which private property rights can be established or inferred. This means that we conceive of entities as if they can be taken out of any ecosystem of which they are part. We presume to value the fish, for example, independently of the water in which they swim. The money value of a whole ecosystem can be arrived at, according to this logic, only by adding up the sum of its parts, which are constructed in an atomistic relation to the whole....Indeed, pursuit of monetary valuations commits us to a thoroughly Cartesian-Newtonian-Lockeian and in some respects “anti-ecological” ontology² of how the natural world is constituted".³

So what has this to do with Iceland where salmon is wild and grows in some of the cleanest water on earth? Indeed, Matís—the Icelandic government owned food and biotechnology research and development company accentuates that its farming of Icelandic Char, another salmonid species, is in clean water and is GM-free. Firstly, of course no country exists in a vacuum so Iceland is affected by rising levels of pollution in the sea around it and salmon are born in fresh water, migrate to the sea and return to fresh water to breed. But every country is affected by the way capital operates as a global system so that when cheap fish from say Canada appears, Icelandic companies will be forced to compete by adopting the same methods of genetic modification and factory farming, resort to the import controls hated by the currant Icelandic government, rely on a very small super-luxury market or face bankruptcy. So as long as capitalism exists the drive for profit will not just warp our view of the world it will destroy ecosystems and our very means of survival.


1 Agriculture and Food in Crisis, Fred Magdoff & Brian Tokar eds, Monthly Review Press 2010
^{2 Study of the nature of being} 
3 Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, David Harvey, Wiley 1996

Beware the fire and ice: Surviving Iceland’s volcanoes and the hardship of the fog

Volcanoes erupting beneath Iceland's largest glacier Vatnajökull are back in the news. This time it’s Bárðarbunga, under the northwest corner of the great Vatnajökull glacier which covers eight percent of the country. Dyngjujökull is a tributary glacier of Vatnajökull north of Bárðarbunga. Magma is flowing northeast from the Bárðarbunga crater towards the Dyngjujökull glacier 400 meters under the ice. Somewhat confusingly on this map showing the position of Bárðarbunga, the Vatnajökull national park is green while the rest of the country is white. Askja is a mountain further to the north east where the magma is heading. This is its crater--because unless Bárðarbunga blows there isn't much to see there.

Geothermal lake in the Askja crater  created by the 1875 eruption 

Although over 3,000 earthquakes have been recorded in the area recently, this does not necessarily mean that Bárðarbunga will blow this week or next month. But it is steadily pushing out magma under the ice which is melting tonnes of the ice. As the meltwater builds up and finds a way out it will, probably, somewhere form a jökulhlaup—a glacial flood.

Iceland was created by a massive extrusion of magma built up from the faults between what are now the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates so eruptions and earthquakes are inevitable in the area. But if we’re lucky they are short lived—inconvenient and expensive—but do little long-term harm to living things and the atmosphere. If we’re not lucky an eruption can be a catastrophic outpouring of poisonous sulphur dioxide and fluorine and ash to wreck the climate.

So while we’re waiting for Bárðarbunga to settle down or create chaos, I recommend a new book, Island on Fire: “the extraordinary story of Laki, the forgotten volcano that turned 18th century Europe dark" by science journalist Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe editor of Astronomy magazine. 

The book is a fascinating survey of eruptions from the prehistoric to the most modern beginning in detail with the 1973 eruption on Heimaey in the Westman Isles off Iceland’s south coast. Where, due to luck and unexpected good weather, everyone not fighting the lava was evacuated. It was also when brilliant scientific research, speed and resources, including US equipment, saved the island's fishing industry by halting the lava before it reached and blocked the harbour. Even so 400 homes were destroyed and one person died.

One of the 400 houses destroyed by the eruption on Heimey, Westman Isles 1973

The authors have written an extremely clear explanation of the geology of volcanoes, their associated phenomena and how they affect people and our environment. And it shows, whether the authors meant to or not, that the human damage suffered by eruptions in the last 250 years depends very much on the class of the victims and what the authorities choose to do—or not do—about the catastrophe.

The 1783 eruption of Laki

Witze and Kanipe argue that the 1783 eruption of Laki in one of the least developed corners of Europe was one of the worst pollution events in modern times and across the world probably killed a million people. Jón Steingrímsson, local priest of Kirkjubær Parish in South east Iceland first noticed a huge black cloud from the “new volcanic fissure system” 45 kilometres to the northwest on the morning of Sunday 8 June 1783 when he set out to ride to church. He probably wasn’t surprised because there had been such strong earthquakes recently that some people in the district had taken to sleeping out in tents, unsure whether their turf and stone houses would survive.

Jón had had nightmares that he interpreted as impending disaster but he had also studied previous eruptions and noticed how ash layers varied in different parts of the country. He reasoned that this was a historical record of the severity of earlier eruptions and the destruction wrought. Witze and Kanipe point out, “Today this is standard volcanological wisdom, but in the backwoods of Iceland in 1783 it was cutting edge”.

Yet, despite reasoning that volcanoes were a natural occurrence and writing his material observations about these phenomena, Jón also blamed the immorality of people’s behaviour. Their love of eating, smoking and drinking had brought god’s wrath down on them all. Over the next eight months the eruption created the chain of Lakagígar--Laki's craters, that now stretches over 27 kilometers as it spewed out enough lava to "bury Manhattan 250 meters deep".

One of the craters in Lakagígar 
Pic: Juhász Péter

In his Fire Journal, Eldrit, Jón recorded the daily details of the volcanic phenomena—the ever increasing earthquakes, that water in the fast flowing river Skaftà suddenly dropped and then dried up altogether. The scorching acid rain and weird floating volcanic glass that Jón described as “blue-black and shiny, as long and thick around as a seal’s hair”.

Skaftà’s riverbed gorge filled with lava and by 17 July it was only three kilometres from the church at Klauster—the last refuge for those unable to get away. 

On Sunday 20 July, with the lava creeping through Skaftà’s gorge heading for the little church crowded with survivors and the dark sky raining ash, Jón said the mass that is remembered as Eldmessan—the Fire Mass. He talked on and on to god and his parishioners, who seemed to be calmly resigned to death and took some comfort in being together. But eventually he stopped talking and they all went outside to find that the lava had stopped. 

Jón explained the miracle in his diary when he wrote that there had been so much rain that two rivers poured over the lava dams and “with great torrents and splashing smothered the fire, which was churning and rumbling in the channel”. “During the time that had passed,” Jón wrote, “it had collected and piled up in the same place, layer upon layer, in a down-ward sloping channel some 70 fathoms wide and 20 deep, and will rest there in plain sight until the end of the world, unless transformed once again”.

Jón Steingrímsson 

The water was enough to cool the lava but there were another seven months of eruption to bear before it was all over. In that time, Jón had to bury dozens of his friends and neighbours, collecting their bodies from miles around with one young volunteer strong enough to haul the bodies back to the churchyard.

As the weeks went by, the eruption "belched out an estimated 122 million tons of sulphur dioxide, 15 million tons of fluorine and 7 million tons of chlorine”. It created Móðuharðindin, the hardship of the fog that killed around 10,000 Icelanders—a fifth of the population, mostly from starvation as half the livestock died. The sheep, cattle and horses—and people—were killed by fluoride poisoned grass as the fine ash cooled the atmosphere. Fish died, birds disappeared, sheep, farms were engulfed by flaming lava.

Witze and Kanipe only rate the eruption of Laki from June 1783 to February 1784 as a four on the eight point scale of the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI). They compare it other eruptions such as Krakatau west of Java in 1883—a VEI six and Mount Tambora, Indonesia in 1813, a VEI seven that killed around 71,000 people. Thousands more people died across Europe and America from the “dry fog”, the sulphuric haze that blocked out the sun’s warmth for months and attacked vulnerable hearts and respiratory systems. It also contributed to the worst winter for possibly hundreds of years.

The 1783 catastrophe is remembered at Kirkjubæjarklaustur with screenings of the short film drama in English, Eldmessan—the Fire Mass, about the eruption and its aftermath by Hringur Hafsteinsson , starring Hafstein Hafsteinsson and the people of Kirkjubæjarklaustur, which can also be watched online for 2 Euros. It gives a sense of the all encompassing catastrophe of the eruptions of Lakagígar. It also says that the Danish King tried to send help but it arrived it was too late.

Botanist Sir William Hooker went to Iceland in 1809 and wrote in his “Journal of a Tour in Iceland in the Summer of 1809” that Chief Justice Magnus Stephensen told him that he was at the court of the Danish king, just starting his career as a lawyer in 1783, when news of the eruption arrived. The king immediately ordered Magnus back to Iceland to make a report which was published in Denmark. Hooker added, “Funds were raised for the relief of Icelanders after the dreadful volcanic eruption of 1783. This money ought to have been immediately sent to the country for the use of its distressed inhabitants, but to this day it is retained in Copenhagen.”

I hope to be able to find out more about the truth of this soon.

Moss covered lava