We have more than 35,000 years of human history, but the vast majority is unknown to us. Archaeological evidence has given us much, but there is significantly less known about what was happening in Tasmania a millennium ago than there is in Iceland. Our history is characterised by absence and unknowing. Our history is driven by what is lost.
. . .
“Excuse us for being a race of historians who forget nothing,” says one of the great characters of Icelandic literature, and perhaps it is true. Apart from probable settlements by Irish monks before the arrival of the Vikings in the 800s, almost the entirety of human history on that boreal island is recorded. Various annals and the famous Icelandic saga literature give an account of almost all facets of life there for more than a millennium.
Arriving in Reykjavík at midnight, I was met by historian Jón Torfason. He would help me uncover information about Jørgen Jørgensen, the Danish-born adventurer who staged an attempted revolution in Iceland in 1809. Jørgensen was 24 years old then; he had already been to Australia, and had been on board the Lady Nelson when it helped unload the first convicts in Van Diemen’s Land. He would later be sent as a convict himself.
I had come to Iceland to walk 400 kilometres across the country, following a route taken by Jørgensen on horseback during his Icelandic Revolution.
Born to a successful family in Copenhagen in 1780, Jørgensen’s nautical career began working on British collier ships when he was in his mid-teens. A skilful sailor with a bright mind, his career progressed to the southern hemisphere. Jørgensen’s first Vandemonian visits, on British naval vessels in 1803 and 1804, brought associations with important figures such as mineralogist Adolarius Humphrey, naturalist Robert Brown and the Reverend Robert Knopwood. It is also likely that he was employed under the great navigator Matthew Flinders, before moving to South Sea Company whaling vessels.
But Jørgensen returned to Europe to find England at war with Denmark, which had sided with Napoleon. He was given command of a significant Danish vessel, the Admiral Juul, and then quickly captured after a surprise battle off the coast of Scarborough. Many Danes would allege that he was a traitor. Taken captive, he would never see Denmark, or his family there, again.
Jørgensen’s allegiance during this battle remains unknown. However, for a prisoner-of-war, the young Dane was treated well. Lodging with relative freedom in London, Jørgensen met local businessmen while enjoying the environs of his favourite pub. With them, perhaps over some strong draughts, he hatched a mercantile endeavour. Iceland, Jørgensen proposed, was a place to make good money. Then a colony of Denmark, the island had few of the resources that were common in England. But it had plenty of tallow, of interest to one of Jørgensen’s new mates, a soap maker.
The business trip, made in December 1808, went disastrously, thwarted by Danish opposition, so the following summer, Jørgensen and company went to Iceland again, this time with arms. They seized the governor and Jørgen Jørgensen was declared the Lord Protector of Iceland.
For fifty-eight long summer days, Jørgensen reigned.
Today, the Danish revolutionary is remembered in the tongue-twisting Icelandic language as Jörundur Hundadaginskoningur, Jørgen the Dog-Days King, a reference to the Dog Star, Sirius, which rises in these almost nightless months.
My connection to historian Jón Torfason was almost as capricious as Jørgensen’s business associations. After months of preparation, I joined Jón and his wife Sigga – a well-known women’s rights and labour activist – for soup on my drizzly first day in Reykjavík. He had already mailed detailed maps covering my route, and after lunch, we pored over them, Jón handing me photocopies of information, in both English and Icelandic, about villages I would encounter and horse-tracks I would wander.
Jørgensen’s biography has been well covered by several writers, including British historian Sarah Bakewell (The English Dane) and Tasmania’s Dan Sprod (The Usurper). I was not necessarily interested in uncovering more facts about Jørgensen, but wanted to use the narrative of his life as a vehicle to understand the country of Iceland – especially in comparison with Tasmania. There are few stories in world history that connect such distant locations as this story does.
Almost as far apart as is possible on Earth, they make for interesting comparisons. Of similar size and population, Iceland and Tasmania occupy an equivalent role in the physical and social geography of the world: islands at the extremities, with a mystique enhanced by literature and history, and exaggerated by popular culture. Both places have been belittled in the past; both are now the centre of international tourism interest.
But do we have the same approach to history and memory? Icelanders remain a race of historians. Jón Torfason eagerly shows me his family tree, and he and his wife play a game on an online genealogy application, competing to see who has the closest kinship to famous personalities of Icelandic history – or who is the furthest from current politicians. Rangers in the Thingvellir National Park point out sites where certain recorded events happened 1000 years ago. A dairy farmer tells me who owned his farm 800 years earlier. Ólafur Stephensson shows me a photographic archive of 8000 images of the village he lives in – population about 200.
In Tasmania, we have more than 35,000 years of human history, but the vast majority is unknown to us. Although Tasmania has produced more than its fair share of ethnographic material and historiography, our history is characterised by absence and unknowing. Our history is driven by what is lost. In many ways Tasmanians are steeped in memory and nostalgia, but there is also a streak of amnesia through the island. Archaeological evidence has given us much, but there is significantly less known about what was happening in Tasmania a millennium ago than there is in Iceland.
Predictably, Jørgensen figures in Tasmanian historiography too. Crashing head-first into various aspects of early 19th century European politics, Jørgensen’s later career as a convict in Van Diemen’s Land (after having slipped into the vices of gambling and alcoholism) would drag him into the conflict between Aboriginal and British populations. Jørgensen was a major figure in the Black Line, the levée en masse intended to “round up” the remaining Aboriginal population in 1827. But on top of that, Jørgensen had experienced largely friendly relations with western Tasmanian Aboriginals while working as an explorer for the Van Diemen’s Land Company. He recorded original observations about social customs among the Aboriginal communities he met, and even became one of the few Europeans to record an amateur Aboriginal lexicon and lyrics to a song.
“Upon the whole the Aboriginal languages are neither harsh nor uncouth,” he wrote. “On the contrary the songs of the Aborigines have a very pleasing effect.”
My hike would lead me from Reykjavík to Akureyri. As I crossed the country’s barren interior, I would barely see a soul. All of my provisions would be on my back. I had a great time. Jørgensen’s route took me through some impressive, distinctive and unforgettable landscapes. His own intention during the revolution that no-one asked for was to meet with the north coast merchants and governors. Historian Helgi Briem suggests that although he began with pecuniary motivations, Jørgensen gained a genuine sympathy for oppressed Icelanders, and truly meant to change their circumstances as their protector. The hospitality of subsistence farmers in their turf houses far from the towns, as well as the exquisite scenery, had stirred the revolutionary. “Perhaps one can say that he fell in love with Iceland,” Briem writes.
Briem was writing in 1943, the year before Iceland at last regained its independence after 700 years of colonial ties to Norway or Denmark. This is the zenith of the romanticisation of Icelandic history, and Jørgensen’s attempted revolution has been adopted by it. He has passed into mythology. But that is what is interesting: the Dog-Days King is well and truly alive in the memory of the Icelanders, albeit in various forms.
Everyone I met had a story or an opinion of Jørgensen, but not all were historically faithful. A well-known 1960s play – Thið munið hann Jörundur, ‘We Remember Jørgen Jørgensen’ – had cast Jørgensen as an inept, loveable fool who taught a mute girl to sing. (In the old fishing village of Sauðárkrókur, on my birthday, I got drunk on beer that had been flavoured with hops grown in Tasmania’s hop fields. By the end of that night, I was singing a tune from that play, Sem Kóngur Rikti Hann: ‘Like a King, He Reigned’.)
Elsewhere, I was told that Jørgensen was “an absolute idiot” whose head had been cut off by the Queen of England; others compared him to Don Quixote, or thought that he had caused more harm than good to the country.
Whenever I told Icelanders I had come in order to follow the footsteps of Jørgen Jørgensen, I was greeted with enthusiasm. Not only did I hear textbook histories of the Danish adventurer, but I also heard personal stories. Upon my return to Reykjavík, Jón Torfason arranged for me to speak to audience of about 75 people regarding my journey. One gentleman, a marine scientist, bought me a beer and started to tell me his own Jørgensen tale. His ancestor, a Danish trader, met Jørgensen in 1809 and begged him to use his power to annul his marriage in Copenhagen so that he could marry his lover, a Greenlander. Although all of Jørgensen’s other legislations were reverted when his reign ended abruptly and the Danish Governor was reinstated in September 1809, this trader’s divorce stood. He was able to marry the Greenlander, and my interlocutor was their descendant.
“Without Jörundur,” he chuckled, “I would not exist.”
The image of the hapless captain in Thið munið hann Jörundur is mirrored on the other side of the globe by the carving of Jørgensen’s face on the Ross Bridge, an absurd crown on his head: the former King of Iceland. There is plenty of humour in the biography of Jørgen Jørgensen, but Jørgensen also plunged into the depths of some of the major events and ideas of his day, into the intrigues of European war and colonial expansion, romantic exploration and early anthropology.
Despite his personal faults, he was an active player in world history, and through his own writings has helped fill in some of the gaps in Tasmanian history.
This article was first published in issue 80 of Forty South magazine.
Bert Spinks writes poetry, and poetic prose, about wilderness. He has also played football on Queenstown’s gravel oval. In this blog, he fills in some of the space between these essentially Tasmanian extremes.
More of Bert Spinks’ writing can be seen at www.storytellerspinks.com.
