The English Dane: from King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict Free

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Sarah Bakewell has a fine story to tell, and she is its skilled servant. It is the story of Jorgen Jorgenson, an extraordinary Georgian figure who would have been invented by some novelist had he not in fact existed. As soon as you have said he is a revolutionary you must also say he was an anti-Napoleonic Anglophile. As soon as you say he was an enthusiast you must entertain the possibility that he was, to quote Bakewell, "Toad of Toad Hall", and as soon as you say he was one of the founders of Van Diemen's Land and grand protector of Iceland, you have also to mention that he was a British convict. Jorgenson is remembered both as king of Iceland for one heady summer at one end of the globe, and the Viking of Van Diemen's Land at the other, and to an extent he seems a being created by the Earth's zapping north-south electric field. When the Prince of Denmark recently wedded his Tasmanian Van Diemen's Land wife, he declared he followed in the earlier Dane, Jorgenson's, footsteps with just as much hope and just as much confidence. The prince did not mention Jorgenson's endlessly zealous, inventive and disordered brilliance. The son of the clockmaker to the Danish king, Jorgenson was not a creature of orderly cogs but of lightning, born ina year on the cusp The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict turbulence. Through Bakewell's re-creation of Jorgen's own coruscating career, we encounter all the major questions of the day — French republicanism, English unwritten constitutionality; imperial hubris on the part of both the above; deism and Christianity; romanticism, enlightment; the rights of man and of self-determination; and crime, punishment, and self-redemption. It would fortunately be impossible for a reviewer to give away all the dramatic shifts of Jorgenson's life. Sufficient to say that as a child, appalled by the Terror in France, he became a Danish Anglophile. Having developed in his late teens a desire to travel to the new British colonies in the region then known as New South Wales, he engaged in sealing in the far Southern Ocean. Jorgenson was first mate of his vessel Lady Nelson by the time it was used by the authorities to make the first settlement on the large island of Van Diemen's Land. He had commanded a ship in the south Pacific by the time he returned to Europe. In his Anglophilia suffered the shock of a morally questionable British attack on Copenhagen and the Danish fleet, undertaken to prevent a French seizure of Danish vessels. Bakewell's re-creation of the three nights of terror endured by Danish citizens under a rain of rocket-propelled incendiaries is a remarkable reminder that the terror of technological war was not a 20th-century invention. When Denmark threw in its lot with Napoleon, Jorgenson loyally found himself at sea commanding one of the surviving Danish privateers. When the ship was engaged and dismasted by a British warship, Jorgenson became a not entirely dissatisfied prisoner of war. While a prisoner at large and in communication with the explorer and The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict Sir Joseph Banks and others, he became involved with an English merchant and was party to a plan to run a shipload of goods into Iceland, which was under a Danish edict not to trade with England. The adventure to Iceland convinced Jorgenson that the Icelanders needed deliverance from Denmark's oppressive hand and raw terms of trade, and ought to be brought under the protection of Britain. Count Trampe, the unattractive Germanic-Danish viceroy of Iceland, was surrounded and arrested, and Jorgenson became benign dictator under a new flag, three white cod on a blue background. The whole battle between despotism and democracy which had Europe by the throat in those years was played out in miniature in Reykjavik and the provinces of Iceland. It must be said that during his brief, dazzling summer of power, Jorgenson behaved without corruption and with a The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict of good sense, but among the Icelanders themselves he ran up against factions that seemed more numerous than the population, and against British ambiguity towards being presented with a new dependency. Jorgenson's downfall led to his return to England as a prisoner, and his committal to a Thames River prison hulk, Bahama, among fellow Danish officers. Not only did he survive, but he produced, as he often did in misfortune, manuscripts for publication, one on the revolution in Iceland, another an autobiographical novel, and two plays. Released, he lived in London. He spent time in sponging-houses privately run debtors' prisons and at last, despite English friends, in the King's Bench debtors' prison. He bounced between prison and communications with cabinet members and other influential Englishmen with great style, and still wrote avidly. He spied in, and wrote a travel book about, France and Germany, with a bewildered critic in the Edinburgh Review complaining of the finished book that as well as the promised subject it insisted on recycling "Plutarch's Lives, touching Scipio and Hannibal, Leonidas and Caesar, with all of whom, as well as with Plato, he occasionally claims acquaintance. Inevitably, he found The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict in Newgate prison, where he wrote and published a book on Christianity which created a brawl between deists and conventional creationists, perhaps the most esoteric and unselfinterested conflict ever to be found in the history of penology. He had first been put in Newgate for stealing his landlady's bedlinen and sentenced to seven years' transportation. He suggested directly to Lord Castlereagh that he be allowed to transport himself to a foreign place, but did not remove himself from Britain when his wish was granted. At last he was recaptured for being at large in Britain while under sentence of transportation. Due to intervention by weary English friends his sentence was commuted to transportation for life. He worked in the prison hospital, and when he was transported on the ship, Woodman, to Hobart in Van Diemen's Land, he performed excellent paramedical services. The Van Diemen's Land section of his tale is magnificently recreated by Bakewell. Even while a prisoner, Jorgenson was an explorer in country so rough that still no road traverses it; a friend to the Tasmanian Aborigines and The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict an enforcer of edicts against them; and a hunter-down of Irish and English bushrangers. He became the lover of one such absconder, the Irish woman Norah Corbett, whom he would turn to The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict way of the The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict and marry disastrously. Indeed, his sexuality seemed at its highest only in high latitudes, for his passion for Norah reminds us of his earlier passion for the Icelandic Gudrun Johnsen in Tasmania is a place of fables and strangenesses, as Bakewell conveys and as Nicholas Shakespeare demonstrated in his superb In Tasmania. In all his passionate re-creations of himself, Jorgenson was an appropriate figure in this exotic location. He died inbut not before rising, an alcoholic but literate wreck, at a meeting to promote self-government for Van Diemen's Land, as a means of laying to rest "the barefaced calumnies heaped on our colonial society, charging the colonists of all classes with utter depravity, and general demoralisation". Bakewell's conclusion is that "Jorgen Jorgenson was a unified man after all," despite the tendency of his contemporaries to see him as a set of random impulses. Indeed, her affection for him adds grace to this wonderful, intelligently told story. Education Schools Teachers Universities Students. A creature of lightning. King of Iceland, prisoner, writer and fearless campaigner, Jorgen Jorgenson was a 19th-century man for all seasons. Buy The English Dane at the Guardian bookshop. Thomas Keneally. The English Dane: A Life of Jorgen Jorgenson - Sarah Bakewell - Google книги

This gripping nineteenth-century adventure stars Jorgen Jorgenson, who ran away to sea at fourteen and began a brilliant career by sailing to establish the first colony in Tasmania. Twists of fortune then found him captaining a warship for Napoleon before joining a British trading voyage to Iceland, where he staged an outrageous coup and ruled the country for two months. Much lay ahead, from imprisonment in the hulks to patronage by Joseph Banks and The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict in Europe as a British spy. But Jorgenson was dogged by his own excesses, and ended up transported as a convict to the very colony he helped to found. Here he reinvented himself again as an explorer, and, despite his sympathy for the people, was caught up in the terrible Aboriginal clearances. Using unpublished sources and letters, Sarah Bakewell tells his astonishing tale with dazzling verve. A Very interesting story. Sarah Bakewell. English Jorgenson. A rogue in grain. The unknown. A precarious existence. Jorgenson the Australian. Picture Section. After studying at the University of Essex, she was a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict before becoming a full-time writer, publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart and How To Live. She lives in London, where she teaches creative writing at City University and catalogues rare book collections for the National Trust. A Danish boy In 9 A species of gloomy delight. The English Dane by Sarah Bakewell

During the Action of 2 March his ship was captured by the British. In he sailed to Icelanddeclared the country independent from Denmark and pronounced himself its ruler. He was also a prolific writer of letters, papers, pamphlets and newspaper articles covering a wide variety of subjects, and for a period was an associate of the famous botanists Joseph Banks and William Jackson Hooker. He left over a hundred written autographs and drawings, most of which are collected in the British Library. Two of his brothers were watchmakers; the elder, Urban Jurgensenwas of international renown. In he joined The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict crew of the Lady Nelson. He has been called the founder of the city of Hobart Town, now Hobartand is still a local hero. He became mate aboard the whaling ship Alexanderand in her returned to Britain, arriving at Gravesend in June Inwhile on parolehe suggested to a merchant that a voyage to Iceland could be profitable as the island was suffering from food shortages at the time, due to the Danish monopoly on Icelandic trade. That voyage failed to trade any goods as the ship was British and by that time Denmark and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were at war. On arrival in Iceland the ship's crew found the Danish Governor, Count of Trampewould still not permit trading. His intent was to establish a liberal society in the spirit of those emerging in the Americas and Europe at the time. He was released The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict When released from prison inhe travelled to SpainPortugal and Gibraltar and upon his return to England was again imprisoned when his creditors caught up with him. While he was never involved in the battle, he was situated relatively close to some of the action. A sentence of death was commuted thanks to the actions of a prominent friend and he spent another three years in Newgate before he was transported to Australia in From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in Icelandic. November Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Icelandic article. Machine translation like DeepL or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation. Cambridge University Press, Pirates since the s. Piracy portal. Category Portal. Convicts in Australia. James Blackburn Francis Greenway. The Transports The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict Country's Good Categories : births deaths 18th-century Danish people 19th-century Danish writers 19th-century male writers 19th-century Icelandic people 19th- century Australian people 19th-century pirates Danish sailors Danish pirates Danish explorers Danish criminals Danish expatriates in the United Kingdom Danish emigrants to Australia Privateers People from Copenhagen Napoleonic Wars prisoners of war held by the United Kingdom Royal Dano-Norwegian Navy personnel Danish military personnel of the Napoleonic Wars People imprisoned for debt Spies of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Prisoners sentenced to death by the United Kingdom Convicts transported to Australia Van Diemen's Land people Heads of state of Iceland British people in whaling Sealers 19th-century Australian historians Sea captains. Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Download as PDF Printable version. Wikimedia Commons Wikisource. Frederich Trampe The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict Governor of Iceland. Privateering Exploring Tasmania. Protector of Iceland 26 June — 22 August