‘He deserves to be hanged,’ Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society
‘He is a person without principle and of manners most low,’ Count Von Trampe, Danish Governor of Iceland
‘He imbibed all the quixoticism of a petit Napoleon,’ Samuel Phelps, London Soap Merchant
‘He is a good-natured madman, nobody’s enemy but his own,’ Captain Alexander Jones of the Royal Navy
‘He undoubtedly saved my life. Besides, his pleasant manners, and his goodness of heart, have excited in me a friendship for him,’ William Jackson Hooker, promising young naturalist
– Five Character References from the Year 1809
On the streets of Reykjavik, trying to find a bus to Borganes, I met a charming fellow. He stank of drink and was on his way home from something called the Solstice Music Festival. He told me Radiohead had been playing. I expressed my polite approval.
He then said, ‘What are you talking about? Those guys have been whining for years. Now they’re multimillionaires and they’re still whining.’
The guy was a real streetcorner philosopher; I missed my bus listening to him.
At one point he said, ‘Where you from anyway?’
‘Tasmania,’ I hazarded.
‘Tasmania?’ he said. ‘Well, I’m from Reykjavik, but really could be from anywhere. I’ve got Scottish, Irish, Scandinavian, Basque blood. I’m a real mongrel, a sailor. Look at this,’ he said, turning side-on and pointing at his nose. ‘That’s a piece of France. That’s a real French nose.’
I lacked the wit to reply that actually he had a very nice nose.
It emerged he was a muso. ‘Sigur Ros. I grew up with those guys. I used to play music with them.’ Then he introduced himself: ‘The name’s Olvus,’ he said. ‘Olvus not Elvis.’
‘Do you have any CDs?’ I asked him in my innocence.
‘CDs?’ he responded with incredulity.
‘No-one has CDs anymore, Konrad. They’re just like books. They don’t exist. Just like people. Everything’s in the clouds. I’m in the clouds. Look me up. The name’s Olvus. Olvus not Elvis.’
He paused, then asked, ‘What you doing here?’
I told him I was researching a book on Jörundur Hundadaga Konungur (or Jorgen the Dog-Days King, as the Icelanders call him), the revolutionary who ended his days as a British convict in Tasmania.
‘You know across the road there,’ he told me, ‘is the Prime Minister’s Office.’ And he signalled a large white building that resembled an overblown barn. ‘That used to be the gaol from which Jörundur released the brigands during his revolution.’
‘Is that right?’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ said Olvus.
II.
It was certainly one of the crazier episodes in Britain’s long imperial moment. In June 1809, a Lambeth soap boiler and a Danish prisoner of war loafing around London, assisted by a very eminent botanist, sailed off to Reykjavik and proclaimed a revolution.
The soap merchant was a Mr Samuel Phelps.
The prisoner of war was the soon-to-be notorious Jorgen Jorgensen.
The botanist was none other than Sir Joseph Banks, who sailed with Cook on the Endeavour and then enjoyed an illustrious career as President of the Royal Society for forty-one years, Privy Councillor, ‘Father of Australia’ (for patronising that infant the Colony of New South Wales), and personal friend of George III with whom he shared a great love of flowers.
At the outset, Banks was pivotal. He secured the trading licence under which Phelps and Jorgensen sailed off to Reykjavik in the name of free trade. He, too, had harboured a romantic attachment to Iceland as a sort of northern exotic ever since he travelled there in his youth to conduct an inquiry into volcanoes. Now, years later, during the Napoleonic Wars, Banks had emerged as the island’s protector, facilitating trade, when Iceland faced starvation due to a British naval blockade in force against its colonial master, Denmark.
That, in brief, is the backdrop.
For, soon after they beached their rowboat on the black sands of Reykjavik beach, the English party discovered the Danish Governor, Count Von Trampe, had posters nailed up forbidding, on pain of death, trade with the English (this despite a British sloop-of-war recently negotiating at gunpoint a trade agreement with the Governor). The response of the soap merchant was swift. Joined by Jorgensen and half a dozen sailors armed with a few cutlasses and a couple of old muskets, he called on the Governor and arrested him. Count Von Trampe was led away across the boggy field outside his residence to be locked up on the English vessel in the harbour. Icelanders, armed with pikes for ease of movement on the frozen ground, looked on with perfect indifference. The following day, 26 June 1809, Proclamation Number One appeared, announcing that Danish authority had ceased. It was signed by Jorgen Jorgensen in no particular capacity.
The Icelandic Revolution had begun.
Jorgen Jorgensen was duly appointed ‘Protector’. He was a Danish clockmaker’s son and now with great gusto he set about upending the wheels and dismantling the springs of Denmark’s rusty colony. He announced Iceland was free and independent under British protection. He released the inmates from the gaol and confiscated weaponry. He declared all debts to the Danish crown and Danish commercial houses null and void. He abolished internal passports. He instituted trial by jury. He sequestered Danish monies and property. He established a personal guard of eight, some of whom were former inmates (the gaol became the barracks). Occasionally he swore. On his tough little pony, wearing out his stockings and shoes, he embarked on a tour of the north. He announced his intention to resign within a year and restore the Althing, the ancient parliament dissolved by the Danes. He declared all Icelanders would have the vote. He invented his own seal: J.J., and a new flag: three white codfish on a blue background.
Where the ‘revolution’ would have ended is unclear. In forty manic days, Jorgensen and Phelps (busy acquiring tallow for his soap) met very little resistance, until the deus-ex-machina appeared. The HMS Talbot was out on routine patrol in the North Atlantic. Arriving in Reykjavik, Captain Alexander Jones very quickly said: ‘This is not how we do things.’ The fact that Jorgensen was technically a Danish prisoner of war on parole was not the least astonishing detail. Phelps, Jorgensen, and Von Trampe were all ordered back to London (Phelps carping that ‘Government should interfere as little as possible in trade and commerce.’)
We have a record of these events not least because Banks sent along his protégé, William Jackson Hooker, to botanize. Hooker became Jorgensen’s closest friend, even moving with him into the Governor’s residence when he occupied it. His Journal of a Tour in Iceland in The Summer of 1809 gives an eyewitness account; and it is interlarded with the odd footnote bearing Jorgensen’s fingerprints.
III.
Traditionally, in Iceland, Jörundur the Dog-Day King has been seen as a carnivalesque figure, the sailor as rebel, a sublime idiot, or merry fool. Yet more recent excavations have unearthed the image of a more complex, plural, extraordinary man.
At the University of Iceland, Anna Agnarsdóttir has been his chief excavator. She highlighted for me the very advanced nature of his politics – ‘the idea of no property qualifications for the vote was quite amazing’ – and the depth of his social concerns. In his defence of himself, Jorgensen would dwell on the poverty and disease of the Icelanders; Hooker joined him on an inspection of Iceland’s squalid Latin school. Both described at length the rickety staircase, the intolerable stench coming from the kitchen of sheep guts and off milk, the sordid dormitory where on seaweed mattresses the students slept three to a box. And with Halldór Laxness, they might have said, ‘All of their faces were ugly, each in its own particular way.’ Before Jorgensen came unstuck, he was about to launch a social programme. In addition to cleaning up the Latin school, he was acutely conscious of a need for more midwives (infant mortality ran at a horrific fifty per cent).
Fresh scrutiny, too, has been given to Jorgensen’s relationship with Sir Joseph Banks. The Dane had long had an emotional attachment to the English (despite witnessing the firebombing of Copenhagen in 1807) and had known Banks since 1806 when he returned to London from the South Seas with two Tahitians in need of assistance.
It emerges that as early as 1801, from his perch at 32 Soho Square (which these days houses the London headquarters of Twentieth Century Fox), Banks was advising William Pitt the Younger’s administration that it would be perfectly simple to annex Iceland ‘without striking a single blow.’ In 1807, he returned to his theme, writing to his friend, the Home Secretary, suggesting Iceland could be joined to Britain ‘and never hereafter separated,’ if a gunship with a negotiator were dispatched and leading Icelanders encouraged to shift their loyalties, depositing the Danish Governor on a ship in the harbour. Again, in April 1809, just weeks before Phelps and Jorgensen sailed, he was writing to the Secretary to the Admiralty, William Wellesley-Pole, urging annexation. From this correspondence it is clear Banks personally discussed annexation with Phelps and Jorgensen.
The considered view on these mystifying documents is that the prisoner of war and the soap boiler were not acting on the botanist’s instructions, not least because His Majesty’s Ministers had said ‘No’ to annexation, and Jorgensen, moreover, had declared the island independent, which was never the idea. But perhaps there were misunderstandings? Certainly, Banks – no revolutionary – had misjudged his man.
The upshot, nevertheless, was clear. Soon after Jorgensen’s arrival back in London, Banks was supporting Danish officials in their case to have the revolutionist returned to Copenhagen – then at war with Britain – where definitely he would have hung. Quite correctly, the Foreign Office demurred. (Later, Jorgensen would return the favour and work for London as an intelligence asset on the continent.) A ‘Case of Very Special Circumstances’, as the King’s Advocate dubbed the entire Icelandic fiasco, was then tossed back and forth between government lawyers. Jorgensen was left to rot on a hulk in the Medway. He rotted there for ten months. When, eventually, he was released, the ‘Protector’ was a changed man. He now had a gambling addiction and was about to enter the spiral that would see him ejected to the other side of the world as a convict in Tasmania.
Through all this, only William Jackson Hooker, against the advice of his mentor, stood by his friend – visiting him in prison, giving him money, lobbying government. Hooker’s career did not suffer. He would end his days as Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. There, quite radically, he opened the gardens to the public.
IV.
Lately, of course Reykjavik has experienced new turbulence. In the winter of 2008-2009, following the Icelandic financial meltdown, the Pots-and-Pans Revolution led to the downfall of a government. Almost thirty criminal convictions of Icelandic businessmen, officials and bankers ensued, for insider trading, breach of trust and market manipulation. This spring, revelations in the Panama Papers fuelled fresh demonstrations and the fall of another Prime Minister. Perhaps not surprisingly, the spirit of Jörundur has been glimpsed at the feast.
At his home in Reykjavik, over thick black coffee, which he calls ‘the beans of life,’ I listened to Einar Már Guðmundsson, who last year published a novel on Jorgensen, Dog Days, which won the Icelandic Literary Prize. Einar told me a tale from the Pots-and-Pans Revolution, so named after the banging of kitchen utensils outside the Althing. Eggs had recently been thrown and the then Prime Minister had called the protesters ‘a rabble’. To underline their demands for a new Iceland, one group Einar described as ‘those associated with the fun stuff’ wanted to hoist Jorgensen’s old flag – three white codfish on a blue background – over the Althing. In the event, they went with a second image. One enterprising young anarchist climbed onto the roof and raised a flag with a pink piggy bank on it, the corporate logo of a supermarket chain linked to one tycoon associated with the economic wreckage.
The Icelandic Pirate Party has been the main beneficiary of the traditional parties being in such bad odour. With policies like greater transparency in government, more direct democracy (in the form of referenda), drug decriminalisation and an overhaul of copyright laws, they have led in polls, remarkably for a party founded in 2012 by Internet activists, poets and idealists. Elections are now expected this autumn. Out of curiosity, I went to see them at their headquarters by the seal-grey waters of old Reykjavik harbour. I asked if they had any sentimental attachment to Jorgensen? The Pirate General Manager, a young woman called Bylgja, immediately referred me to the party symbol. ‘If you look there,’ she said, ‘you will see that on that pirate sail there is a fish. The fish is from Jörundur’s flag.’
Later, I met the fellow behind the symbol. His name was Svafar. We sat in a bar off Austurvöllur Square, the site of the recent protests and of the old boggy field over which, two hundred years before, the Danish Governor had been led away by cutlasses to the English ship waiting in the harbour.
‘We liked the idea of Jorgensen and the rabble taking control,’ Svafar the Pirate told me with a smile.
Konrad Muller is writing a novel about one city and two islands at the ends of the world. His writing has appeared previously in The London Magazine.