Husavik

Day 61 to 62. 28th to 29th August. Husavic, Iceland (North).

This is Husavik. I don’t show anything of the town itself. What caught my attention were the boats moored at the dock.

I arrived at Husavik in the late afternoon, coming from Dettifoss, Selfoss, Verterdalur and Ásbyrgi earlier in the day.

Husavik was the first Scandinavian settlement in Iceland. The Swedish Viking Garðar Svavarsson sailed round Iceland and wintered here in 870. He built a house on shore and hence Husavik means Bay of Houses.

The Landnámabók or Book of Settlements relates early settlement events between about 870 and 930 and the first version probably dates back to the 12th century. It is the source of information for Garðar Svavarsson’s adventures. It records that when he sailed away the next spring, a man called Náttfari escaped from the party in a boat with a young servant woman. They settled on the other side of the bay from Husavik and thus became the first permanent settlers in Iceland, apart from a few Irish monks.

For the next thousand years there was not much at Husavik. It only became a town in the late nineteenth century when it became a port for exporting sulphur to Europe to make gunpowder (sulphur being plentiful in volcanic Iceland).

There is a Whale Museum here and I remember visiting it but little more. I presume that Husavik was a centre of whaling at the turn of the nineteenth century though I can find no explicit reference to this on the web.

It was certainly a fishing port and in the early 1960s the viability of the fishing industry began to recede so the town reinvented itself as a centre for whale watching and tourism.