Vestmannaeyjabær

It was a rainy morning, and we were in no hurry, so we woke up late and let the weather do what it wanted before heading into town. Even through the rain, you could see what a place this is. The island is tiny, only about five square miles, and yet packed into it are a coastline of cliffs and bays, high steep mountains, and two volcanoes. We caught glimpses of all of it between the low cloud, the sea one moment, a green mountainside the next, a dark volcanic cone the moment after. We could only wonder how fine this would look on a clear day, and we envied a little the people who get that day. But you take the weather you are given, and we set out to make the best of a rainy one.

The Beluga Sanctuary

Our first stop was the beluga whale sanctuary. We should say plainly that we do not like zoos or aviaries, animals kept in cages for people to look at. But this is a different thing. This is a place that takes in animals that cannot be returned to the wild and gives them a better life than the one they were rescued from, and that we can get behind.

The sanctuary is built around a natural sea bay, netted off from the open ocean, which is a far larger and more natural home than the concrete tanks these animals came from. Its two belugas, called Little White and Little Grey, were brought here in 2019 from a water park in Shanghai, a journey of some six thousand miles by air, land, and sea, to live out their lives in real seawater instead of a show tank.

The bay itself has a famous history. This is Klettsvík, and in 1998 it was the home of Keiko, the orca who starred in the film Free Willy. Keiko had been captured young and kept in captivity for years, and after the film made him famous there was a long effort to give him his freedom. He was brought to this bay to be taught how to be a wild whale again, and was released in 2002. He did not fully return to wild life, and died later that year, but the attempt was real, and it is why this bay became a place for whales in need. The belugas are the ones living here now.

Sagnheimar

From there we walked through the town and went to Sagnheimar, the local museum. We love these small town museums. They are about how ordinary people actually lived in a place.

This one holds three stories. The first is fishing, which is the whole reason the town exists. The Westman Islands sit in rich fishing grounds, and for centuries the people here lived and died by the sea and the boats. The museum lays out that hard working life, the gear, the danger, the rhythm of it.

The second is stranger, and it surprised us. In the nineteenth century a number of people from these islands became Mormons and left Iceland to join the church’s followers in Utah, in America. The islands were one of the first places in Iceland where the Mormon faith took hold, and the museum tells the story of those who packed up and crossed an ocean and a continent for it.

The third is the darkest. In 1627 the islands were raided by pirates from Algiers, in an event Icelanders still call the Turkish Raid. On the sixteenth of July that year, three ships arrived on the eastern shore of the island. Around three hundred raiders came ashore. They killed thirty-six people and captured two hundred and forty-two, nearly half the population, and carried them off across the sea to be sold into slavery in North Africa. Some were ransomed home years later. Most never came back. It is a hard thing to stand in a quiet island museum and take in that this small place lost half its people in a single day, four hundred years ago.

Eldheimar

Our next stop was Eldheimar, the museum of the eruption, and this is the one that explains the island as it is now.

In the early hours of the twenty-third of January, 1973, without warning, the ground on the east side of the island tore open and a new volcano began to erupt, right at the edge of the town. They named it Eldfell. It came up almost at the shore, and it was close enough that the whole town was in danger at once. The entire population, around five thousand three hundred people, had to be evacuated. They were lucky in one thing: a storm the day before had kept the fishing fleet in the harbour, so the boats were all there, and nearly everyone was carried to the mainland by sea within hours, in the dark, as the volcano lit up behind them.

The eruption went on for months. Lava and ash poured out, buried part of the town house by house, and the island itself grew larger as the new rock piled up. At one point the lava was moving toward the harbour mouth, and if it had closed the harbour the town would have been finished, because the harbour is the fishing and the fishing is the town. So they fought it. They pumped seawater onto the advancing lava, millions of tons of it, to cool it and slow it and turn it, and it worked. The harbour was saved, and in the end it was left even better sheltered than before.

The museum is built directly over the ruins of a house that was buried in the ash, dug back out decades later. You walk around the crushed and buried home, left as it was found, with the story of the eruption around it. They call it the Pompeii of the North, and standing over that house, it earns the name.

The volcanoes and the puffins

We tried to walk up to both volcanoes, Helgafell, the older one, and Eldfell, the young one from 1973 that we had just been reading about in the museum. But the fog was too thick to see anything from either, so we gave them up.

Instead we went to the puffin colony. It was still foggy, but the puffins do not mind fog, and they were close, right there in front of us. They are comical birds, all business on the water and then hopeless in the air, flapping like mad and coming in to land as if they had never done it before. We watched them for a good while. They are hard not to like.