Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Page 42

Ragnar Edvardsson, Sophia Perdikaris, Thomas H. McGovern, Noah Zagor & Matthew Waxman
by small crews rowing 4 or 6 oared open
boats. Exposure and fatigue (especially
in winter fisheries) would take a steady
toll on the crews, who were regularly
described by 18th - 19th century foreign
visitors as exceptionally hardy but gen-
erally poorly clothed and equipped by
contemporary British or Continental
standards. Transit time to deep water
fishing was important not only for least
effort considerations but also for hazard
reduction - prolonged survivability of
these small open boats (on retum voyage
usually heavily overloaded and in winter
subject to icing) attempting to ride out a
gale on the open sea would be minimal
and the only viable option open to a crew
caught offshore by bad weather would be
to mn for a verstöð landing. Heavy surf
and directly onshore wind would make
any landing a dangerous "one chance"
affair, and would greatly limit the ability
of users of the verstöð to launch boats at
all. Peninsula locations often provide
more options for landing and recovery
under different weather conditions than
spots deep in a bay or fjord (like the
heimræði of Finnbogastaðir). The ideal
location for a verstöð thus would involve
proximity to deep water, and an ability to
successfully launch and recover boats
from a variety of bearings in a variety of
wind and surf conditions. These marine
locational factors may regularly out-
weigh the considerations of terrestrial
cultural landscape, and a good verstöð
location need not be at a good farming
location. The verstöðvar (pl.) in the
Ámes district in fact all clustered in a rel-
atively small area at the end of the
Reykjanes peninsula (Figure 8). The area
west of the Reykjanes peninsula was a
very rich area for both shark and large
cod físhing in the early 18th century.
Marine catchment circles around these
fishing stations, with 20 km as the aver-
age distance for a boat with six oars on a
single físhing trip, provide some scale.
Sizes of boats in the Northwest varied
from small boats with two oars to large
boats with eight oars. The most common
boat in the Northwest was the boat with
six oars (Kristjánsson, 1980). The deter-
mining factor in locating a verstöð in
Ames district thus does appear to follow
the broader model. About 80% of the
farms in the Ámes district, including the
Finnbogastaðir farm, would therefore be
too far away from the best deep water
fishing grounds, and their local farm fish-
ing stations would have been hazardous
bases for extensive offshore fishing.
During the fishing seasons many
accounts describe farmers and farmhands
moving to the verstöð to get access to the
deep water fishing.
In the 18th century the poorer farmer
Brandur at Finnbogastaðir had a small
boat which he used for inshore fishing
"when he could". The richer occupant of
the farm Sr. Bjami owned several boats.
One boat was used for fishing from the
farm itself for domestic use, another spe-
cialized in shark fishing at the Gjögur
verstöð and Sr. Bjami also owned part in
a third boat which was also used for
shark fishing. This suggests that one of
the Finnbogastaðir farmers was mainly
subsistence fishing while the other was
fishing on a larger scale, both for com-
mercial and domestic consumption. The
farmer at Reykjanes and primary tenant
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