Hans Jonatan

Hans Jonatan (1784-1827) was the subject of an important test case in Danish law on slavery. Fleeing to Iceland, he became one of the first people of colour to live in Iceland. A biography of Jonatan by Gísli Pálsson was published in Icelandic in 2014. An English language edition entitled "The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Saga of Hans Jonatan" will be published by University of Chicago Press in September, 2016. ^[1]

Parents

Hans Jonatan was born a slave on the plantation at Constitution Hill on the island of St Croix in the Caribbean, which had become a Danish colony in 1733 when purchased by the Danish West India Company from France. His paternity is uncertain, but his father was certainly white; his mother was Emilia Regina, a black 'house slave' who is first recorded in 1773 at the St Croix plantation of La Reine, where she was presumably born. In 1788, Emilia had a daughter, Anna Maria, this time by a black man, Andreas, who at the time was a house slave too; but their fates are not recorded.^[2] The details of the West African ancestry of Hans's mother are not known, though it may be revealed by ongoing genetic research.^[3]

Hans Jonatan was owned by a Dane, Heinrich Ludvig Ernst von Schimmelmann.^[4]

Life in Denmark

In 1789 the Schimmelmann family moved to Copenhagen as the plantation business took a downturn, bringing Emilia Regina and, later, Hans Jonatan with them.^[5] Not long afterwards, Heinrich died, bequeathing Hans to his widow Henriette Catharine von Schimmelmann. In 1801, at the age of seventeen, Hans Jonatan escaped. It appears that Hans Jonatan joined the Danish Navy 'and fought in the Napoleonic War, for which he received recognition and respect among Danish aristocrats'.^[6][3] Later taken by the police, he and his lawyer Algreen-Ussing argued in 1802 before a Copenhagen court under the judge Anders Sandøe Ørsted that although slavery was still legal in the Danish West Indies, as slavery was illegal in Denmark, Hans Jonatan could not be kept as a slave. However, in the case Generalmajorinde Henriette de Schimmelmann contra mulatten Hans Jonathan 1802, Ørsted sentenced him on March 31st 1802 to be returned to the West Indies.^[7][5]

Life in Iceland

Hans Jonatan escaped again, however, and his fate remained unknown to the Danish administration. It was only around the 1990s that the rest of his story was pieced together and started to become generally known.^[7][5] His movements immediately after 1802 are unknown, but in 1805 he arrived in Djúpivogur in Iceland. Our first record of Hans Jonatan after 1802 is in the diary of the Norwegian cartographer Hans Frisak for August 4th 1812:

The agent at the trading post here is from the West Indies, and has no surname ... but calls himself Hans Jonatan. He is very dark-skinned and has coal-black, curly hair. His father is European but his mother a negro. He was twelve years old when he came to Denmark from the West Indies along with the governor Schimmelmann, and twenty-one when he came to Iceland seven years ago.^{[note 1]}

Frisak hired Hans Jonatan as a guide. Hans lived as a peasant farmer at Borgargarður working at the Danish trading station in Djúpivogur. He took over the running of the trading post in 1819.^[5] By February 1820, Hans had married Katrín Antoníusdóttir from Háls. They had three children; two survived childhood, and their living descendants now number nearly five hundred;^[3] among the most famous is one-time prime minister Davíð Oddsson.^[8]

Hans Jonatan died in 1827.

Notes

References

Citations

http://hi.academia.edu/httpstarfsfolkhiissimaskra874

Sources

• Loftsdóttir, Kristín; Pálsson, Gísli (2013). Naum, Magdalena; Nordin, Jonas M., eds. "Black on White: Danish Colonialism, Iceland and the Caribbean". Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena (New York: Springer) 37: 37–52. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-6202-6_3.