Stationed on an island 40 miles south of the Faroe Islands’ main landmass, Streymoy, the tiny, shore-clinging hamlet of Sandvik is home to two monuments to seafaring peril.
Standing over the slate-rock western bay is a broad stone cross in honour of 10th-century Christian Viking chief Sigmundur Brestisson, who swam from a distant shipwreck to shore, only to be immediately beheaded by a local for his gold armband. Five hundred yards down the road, overlooked by a daunting, grey-green wall of mountain jutting out into a wind-whipped aquamarine fjord, is a fenced-off gravestone, erected in honour of 14 sailors who lost their lives on their return from a whaling expedition in 1915.
On the black sands where the villagers witnessed their loved ones being overtaken by the waves, Hamferð keyboardist Esmar Joensen is recounting the horrors of the latter disaster and the reverberations that persist more than a century later. It’s the subject of his band’s latest album, Men Guðs Hond Er Sterk (‘But God’s Hand Is Strong’).
“Of the two ships that went down,” he explains, “only one sailor survived. He was pulled out of the sea on a rope, and they found the body of his son ensnared at the end of it. Entire bloodlines were
