In Tasmania (10 page)

NEXT MORNING, I DROVE NORTH TO ROSS AND LEANED OVER THE
majestic sandstone bridge that spanned the Macquarie River. I was searching for the face of the Anglo-Danish convict who rescued Kemp's empire. I found it carved into the third arch. His visionary gaze fixed on a family of ducks, he did not have the pose of an informer. He had a thick moustache and a crown on his head. Kemp had looked on him in a fraternal light, and not simply because the man had saved him.

I first heard Jorgen Jorgenson's name on our trek through the Central Highlands. As we emerged after eight days in the bush onto the shore of Lake St Clair, our guide mumbled through his patriarchal beard that one of the earliest Europeans to trek through this landscape – four years after the cannibals Greenhill, Travers and Pearce – had been the ex-King of Iceland.

All eight of my wife's great-grandparents came from the north-west coast of Iceland. She pricked up her ears. She had never heard of a King of Iceland.

‘He was the only monarch,' our guide said sombrely, ‘to have left London for the antipodes in a convict ship.'

Jorgenson's connection to Kemp began one evening in January 1827 when he was drinking in a pub in New Town Road and overheard a man boast that he was about to make his fortune from £5,000 of forged treasury bills. The Dane reported him, the bills were found, and the man – the son of a Bristol solicitor – was hanged, his last words on the scaffold being: ‘I am sure I shall go to heaven, I can see heaven.' Kemp admitted that had the forgeries been presented at his warehouse or store they would have ‘ruined' him.

Kemp demanded to meet the man responsible for saving his business. He shook hands with a younger version of himself, a bow-legged 46-year-old with an oval face, thick lips and a weak chin. Kemp recognised him immediately: the previous August, Jorgenson had come to ask Kemp a favour. Jorgenson then had been setting off on an exploration of the north-west on behalf of the Van Diemen's Land Company. Since he would be passing through Kemp's land, might Kemp give him a letter of recommendation? Kemp had done so. As a result, Jorgenson went on to meet ‘with the most hospitable reception, particularly on the estate of Mr Kemp', and on his return to Hobart he moved swiftly when he learned that Kemp's interests might be threatened. He told Kemp that ‘his motives for coming forward were to have a valuable property restored to its rightful owner'.

Overcome by a deviant spirit of gratitude, Kemp asked Jorgenson about himself. Jorgenson threw out his arms and began talking, which he had a habit of doing non-stop. The story that Kemp heard would move him to his first recorded act of generosity.

 

Kemp's saviour was a pedantic and boastful fantasist, transported to Van Diemen's Land for pawning his landlady's bed-blankets. He had arrived in Hobart with a guinea in his pocket nine months before, one of 144 prisoners on board the
Woodman
. He watched the broad sweep of the Derwent come into sight, the farms with their pleasant looking cottages, and was strangely affected. He had been here, as a British sailor, 23 years before, before even Kemp – ‘when no white inhabitant occupied a single spot in Van Diemen's Land, and when all around was a wilderness'.

He told Kemp his life story. He was born in Denmark, the son of the royal watchmaker, but from the age of 14 had served on British ships. In 1803, he sailed with Flinders up the east coast of Australia and helped the first settlers to disembark at Hobart. The spot occupied by the Bank of Van Diemen's Land (founder and President: A.F. Kemp) ‘was then an impervious grove of the thickest brushwood, surmounted with some of the largest gum trees that this island can produce'. Jorgenson had axed some of them down.

The two men shared further connections. In January 1804, as First Mate, Jorgenson had assisted in a marine survey of the coast around Port Dalrymple. It was owing to the
Lady Nelson
's exploration of the Tamar that Governor King had decided to dispatch Paterson to form a settlement at the river mouth. Quite possibly, Kemp and Jorgenson had sailed together, Jorgenson in charge of the sloop that attempted to convey Paterson's expedition from Sydney in June 1804, before a gale drove them back.

And something else they had in common. Like Kemp during his seven-month reign in Port Dalrymple, and afterwards in Sydney, Jorgenson knew what it was to govern. He had spent the intervening years ‘at the opposite extremity of the globe' where, before his slide into gambling and drink, he had become ruler of Iceland.

 

On honeymoon in Reykjavik, I visited a two-storey white building in Austurstræti, not far from the centre, that now houses a bar called Pravda. The rain slanted in from the bay, drenching a pair of greylag geese, and in the bar the mutter was of how to overturn the whaling ban. The building was 200 years old, with a tin roof. It was here on a rainy day in 1809 that the 29-year-old Jorgenson installed himself as ‘Protector of the whole of Iceland, and Commander in Chief by Land and Sea'.

Jorgenson wrote three versions of the coup. The further away in time and geography from the event, the more important his role in it.

From Van Diemen's Land, where he claimed to have been the first man to harpoon a whale in the Derwent, Jorgenson had sailed to Europe. His arrival coincided with Denmark's declaration of war on England. He captained a Danish privateer, but was captured off Filey following a battle with HMS
Sappho
that lasted 44 minutes. In his defence, he said that most of his crew were drunk.

While on parole, he met Samuel Phelps, a soap-maker impatient for tallow. Jorgenson had learned of a consignment of 150 tons waiting in Iceland for a market. He convinced Phelps that the population were starving under their Danish rulers – so hungry that they had stripped the moss off the mountains – and would seize the chance to exchange their tallow for food. He did not reveal that he was a POW who should properly be in Reading.

Inspired by Jorgenson's assurance of rich pickings, Phelps chartered a boat with a cargo of barley, rum and hats, and hired Jorgenson to come along as interpreter.

They arrived in Iceland on a black December day to discover that the absent Danish governor had forbidden all trade with the English. Local merchants would have nothing to do with Phelps. His cargo was unloaded unsold and he and Jorgenson sailed back to England to fit out another ship. Instead of the hoped-for tallow, they carried stones. The expedition had been a disaster.

In London, Jorgenson introduced Phelps to Sir Joseph Banks, an ardent Icelandophile who favoured Britain's annexation of the island. The botanist was well disposed to Jorgenson – he had already lent him money and Jorgenson had presented him with a pair of Tahitian men (the son of a Tahitian chief and his young servant) – and Banks, at least to begin with, had been fascinated to learn about Jorgenson's experiences of mapping the Tamar, from where Colonel Paterson had sent him the heads of a male Aborigine and a female thylacine.

Jorgenson exaggerated to Banks the warmth of their reception in Reykjavik (‘The joy of the natives was great'). It would be easy to capture Iceland. Phelps offered to do the job with a privateer. Bank's over-enthusiastic response paved the way for a dramatic invasion.

In June 1809, one year after Kemp unseated Bligh, Jorgenson and Phelps sailed into Reykjavik, a town of 60 wooden houses coated with red clay and tar. This time the Danish Governor, Count Tramp, was
in situ
. Inventing a rumour that a company of 100 armed Icelanders were about to storm his ship, Phelps ordered his arrest.

On the morning of Sunday 25 June, Phelps, Jorgenson and 12 British sailors marched through Reykjavik and deposed Tramp as he sat in his house after church. According to the third and final account that Jorgenson wrote, in an alcoholic stew, for the
Hobart Town Almanac
: ‘I went straight to the Governor's house, and dividing my little troop into two bodies, I stationed six before and six behind the building, with orders to fire upon anybody that should attempt to interrupt me. I then opened the door and walked in with a brace of pistols. His lordship, Count Tramp, was reposing upon a sofa, all unsuspicious of what was in progress, and was completely surprised by my abrupt appearance.' And that was that. Jorgenson was not aware of any revolution ‘more adroitly, more harmlessly or more decisively effected than this'.

In Count Tramp's account, written in sober fury in Brown's Hotel in London, Jorgenson was the last man into the room. Jeering at Tramp from behind everyone else's shoulders, he had insinuated that the Governor was a spy, at which Tramp threw him a look of such contempt that Jorgenson shot out of the door. From now on, Tramp fixed his sights on Jorgenson as the main object of his revenge.

Tramp was led away without a shot fired and locked up in a dirty cabin on Phelps's chartered boat, where a tearful secretary brought him his bedclothes. Otherwise, his capture was regarded by one or two churchgoers ‘with perfect indifference'.

Phelps was in Iceland to trade, but someone had to run the country. He was happy to leave the day-to-day task to Jorgenson, who spoke the language. Jorgenson leaped at the role with the quixoticism of a ‘petit Napoléon'.

Jorgenson had come to Iceland imbued, like Kemp, with the principles of the French Revolution. He now had the opportunity of a lifetime to put them into practice. The island of 50,000 people was under the ‘tyranny of Danes', and although himself a Dane, he had lived since the age of 14 on English ships, imbibing ‘the maxims, the principles and the prejudices of Englishmen'.

Determined to do his best for these downtrodden people, he formed a militia – six vagabonds released from prison, sneered Tramp – and rounded up all weapons: about 20 muskets and some metal-tipped pikes for walking on the ice, or to fend off polar bears that occasionally floated over from Greenland on icebergs. He next issued a series of fantastic proclamations, stamped with his seal and using the royal address: ‘We, Jorgen Jorgenson'. His package of laws included independence from Denmark, suffrage for all males, the recall of parliament, proper new bedsheets for the boys' school at Bessastadir and a systematic training of midwives. Jorgenson also designed a new flag – a shoal of three white cod floating on a marine blue background. But there was no adequate dye available, and the strip of bleached canvas that he hoisted above Phelps's warehouse to the salute of eleven guns was a dirty purple.

 

Jorgenson's ‘reign' was more benign than Kemp's junta in Sydney. He did not seek to enrich himself and he never pretended to be King of Iceland. The Danish press liked to call him this in order to show the Icelanders as stupid. But the name caught on and so he became ‘King of the Dog-Days', his rule of eight weeks and one day coinciding with the rising of the Dogstar Sirius and the long clear days of the Icelandic summer, ‘when the grass is so tender that even the dogs can eat it'. His adventure spawned a musical, a pantomime and a television comedy show, in all of which he is cast as a buffoon. But in the Hotel Holt in Reykjavik, I met Anna Agnarsdottir who had written a thesis on Jorgenson and who regretted that he had not stayed longer in power. ‘We now have a new view of him in Iceland as someone who really wanted to help us,' said Anna, who was Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. ‘I feel it's just a pity no-one took more note of him. The extraordinary thing is that he didn't fire the people with enthusiasm. It's as if he never arrived. That's what I find so tremendously sad. He left nothing. We had to wait for another 135 years for independence.'

The only reminder of his rule is a strip of wallpaper that he donated to a house where he stayed in Hafnarfjördur while on a tour of the countryside. To consolidate his hold on the island, he rode north for ten days, over the heaths of Mosfells and past the abrupt volcanic rockface of Thingvellir, sitting on a small Icelandic pony so that his legs brushed the turf. He had his militia with him, but nobody attacked. The population were more bewildered than overjoyed to be greeted by their new Protector. One woman refused to let him graze his pony in her field. Another Icelander wrote him a letter posing the question that many would want to know: ‘But who are you? Everywhere you will be cast away, hated, banished, cursed … You have only eternity left to you. I urge you immediately to embark on a new and better life.'

A rare enthusiastic note was sounded by Gudrun Johnsen, a good-time girl, who earned the nickname of ‘the Dog Day Queen'. She swiftly overturned Jorgenson's initial prejudice against Icelandic women as ‘stout and lusty but excessively filthy'. In the closing days of his rule, he danced with her through the night at a ball in the Danish merchants' club.

Jorgenson's nemesis was a correct and aristocratic British naval officer who sailed into Reykjavik in August and was perplexed to see a dirty purple flag ‘unknown to any nation' fluttering in the sky. The Hon. Alexander Jones's concern mounted as he read a proclamation declaring the island free, neutral, independent, ‘and at peace with all nations' and converted into horror when he encountered Jorgenson incorrectly dressed in the uniform of a post captain. Jones interviewed Count Tramp, who let out a geyser of scalding complaints against Jorgenson that had been accumulating in his ‘filthy' cabin. Jones decided that the best course was to escort Tramp, Phelps and Jorgenson back to England.