and most people have scraped the bottom ever since. This icy and black January night in 1903, the ship stranded on Svínafell shore and the twelve-member crew made it onto the land with great difficulty, and they loitered there, stuck on the beach until light began to appear late in the morning and the stranded men were at last able to see around them: when the Germans saw Öræfajökull they were terrified by the threat of this colossus appearing before them on the shore, Öræfi, they could not imagine any settlement existed here, only desolation and death, and they decided to stay in the west on the shore furthest from Öræfajökull and try to build a shelter; that seemed to them the easier and smoother plan, but it was a big mistake, Sigurður said, they did not know the beach lay on a great estuary and the whole of Skeiðarársandur lay before them; if they had kept on in the direction of the glacier they would have reached a settlement within a day, that’s what the heroic Kári Sölmundarson did when he broke his ship to pieces on the promontory at Ingólfshöfdi and walked to Svínafell in a snowstorm, as Burnt-Njal’s Saga tells us, reconciling there with Flosi and marrying his first cousin; Kári settled in Öræfi, and from him extends a large, beautiful family tree with many stately men. This was the first registered shipwreck in Skaftafell district since the division of the country into administrative hundreds, but the shipwrecked Germans on the Friedrich Albert were not familiar with Öræfi the way Kári was: they continued west along the coast, an entirely impassable route along which the quicksand sucked the men’s strength so that they grew exhausted after just a short distance, hungry, cold, and despairing, walking on quicksand is miserable, mortally dangerous, and there are many quagmires here—so they returned to the ship, from which they managed to rescue an inconsequential amount of food; they made a fresh attempt the next day to head west; day after day they made attempts to go west across the sand away from their wreck, but each time they had to return to the ship because the route was blocked. The First Mate went crazy, tearing himself away from the group, taking three crew members with him, rushing out into the sands. One day as the shipwrecked men were trying their hand at the estuary they saw two crew members wandering about, confused and perplexed; a third sailor was stuck in the mud, delirious, and he died shortly afterward, the same day as the chief engineer succumbed to cold and weakness; the First Mate was never seen again. After a week at the spot where they’d wrecked, a week of unsuccessful attempts to get past the sand, the shipwrecked men hauled material off the trawler with great difficulty and built a raft; they dragged the raft across the shore and went past the glacial estuary and the sea marshes. On 30th January, after three days straining on the sand with the raft, ten days after the stranding, the men reached a small farm, Orrustustað; by then, they had surmounted over forty kilometers. At Orrustustað lived a solitary farmer with only one leg; he was very happy to welcome them, as they’d hoped, and afforded them all the kindness and food available, because Skaftfellings are hospitable people. The district doctor, who was an excellent surgeon and courteous to all men, came the same day at full speed; some of the shipwrecked men had frostbite and gangrene and the district doctor was kept busy through the day sawing off their limbs to save their lives: he put the men to sleep with chloroform, cut, flayed, sawed and sewed the stubs with patches of flesh, as many feet as fingers lay about the living space, which was becoming more of an abattoir; from the five men who had frostbite he took eight feet plus all the toes from two other feet; thanks to his methods, the shipwrecked men returned to full health and happiness in a short time. They were grateful and fortunate and hospitable themselves, humble and polite like Skaftfellings, because such behavior is highly contagious. At the same time, a corpse was found, driven in from the sea near the coast; people believed it was the First Mate but the skin on his face was so damaged by frostbite that he was unrecognizable. Another body washed up on the shore at Tvísker. When the strandees returned to Germany, the most talented Continental doctors hurried to examine how the amputations had been carried out by the primitive northern people, suspecting they might need to fix things, and the event was written up in the newspapers, becoming exceedingly famous throughout the continent, because the German doctors were amazed to see how neatly everything had been done, and how well the wounds had healed; it was said in the press that the amputations had been performed as if by the most skilled European physicians, and so the district doctor from Skaftafell was honored with the Prussian Medal of the Red Eagle Order.
Yes, 1903 was an eventful year in Öræfi, said Sigurður, Dr. Lassi said, and I had to write it all down, the wreck in January, the Skeiðará flooding in May, the greatest jökulhlaup the oldest residents had ever seen, known since then as the Stórahlaup, the Great Flood, the subject of numerous reports. The Skeiðará had been dry for several months’ time so the Öræfings knew a flood was coming, but no one had any idea how big the flood would be: the water gushed out from cracks which had opened in the glacier and jets poured down in high pillars as everything moved in angry tremors, the region quivering, the houses shaking, window panes shattering as icebergs rolled about the sand; heavy thuds were heard all about Suðurland, heard many hundreds of kilometers away, and the flooding caused a tidal wave along the whole coastline so that ships enjoying a smooth sea suddenly found themselves in the greatest danger. Next, fire burst out from the glacier and the flames shot high into the air; a dark, gray-black, thick cloud formed, dominating the sky, an alarming mushroom rapidly growing, and lightning flashed and lit up the night, a cold, metallic light striking the ground and water, while the ash plume clung to the slopes, causing ash to fall onto the settlements. After the flood, giant blocks of ice littered the sand, taking many years to melt, and creating in their wake dangerous kettle deperessions in the sand. The fire burnt in the glacier until the following year and killed much of the livestock due to the dust steaming off the fire—especially horses, far and wide across the country.
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