In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  ‘After he left Iceland,’ Haraldur said, ‘we don’t know what became of him.’

  The book did not look as if it had been read.

  Jorgenson’s two months as Protector of Iceland was the high point of his life. Arrested on his return to England at the hysterical urging of Count Tramp, he was charged with violating his parole and imprisoned with 800 men on the hulk Bahama. Confined beneath deck from 4 p.m. to 8 a.m., he lived in daily terror of being mutilated by Danish POWs after someone spread the rumour that Jorgenson had attacked Tramp with his sword. The fate of one victim, who lay dreadfully scarred in the hold of the hospital ship, preyed on his mind – ‘his face burned with gunpowder with Buonaparte in letters’.

  Jorgenson blamed the hulk as the place where he picked up the ‘vicious habits’ of drunkenness and compulsive gambling that led, ultimately, to his transportation. He spent his next 15 years in and out of jail. One September day in 1813 he looked through the bars of his cell in the Fleet Prison for debtors and recognised the high cheekbones of his Dog Day Queen. He had intended to marry Gudrun had he stayed on in Iceland, but she had shifted her affections to another bankrupt and now shared a cell in the Fleet with Phelps’s irascible supercargo, James Savignac, sleeping with him beneath an Icelandic eiderdown. Jorgenson joined them for a time in a curious ménage à trois. One evening, he wrote, ‘18 pots of porter and 2 bottles of gin were drank immediately after dinner and much more during the course of the evening’.

  From now on, Jorgenson put his faith in drink and gambling – ‘my besetting sin’ – plus petitions to the famous. He had a shopping list of influential personalities whom he pestered for money and sympathy. Cold-shouldered by former patrons like Banks (whose hardened opinion was that Jorgenson ‘deserved to be hanged’), he turned his attention to Mrs Fry, the brewer Samuel Whitbread and the Duke of Wellington. Not even the Regent was spared, Jorgenson looking forward to the moment ‘when you and I, when King and beggars shall one day stand trembling indiscriminately before the Throne of ineffable resplendousness to receive judgment.’

  Imprisonment had one further unfortunate effect on Jorgenson: he became an author. From 1810 until his death 31 years later in a Vandemonian ditch, he produced a series of directionless, prolix works across an ambitious range of subjects and in a variety of forms. Simultaneously with his first narrative of the Icelandic revolution, he wrote a play, Duke d’Angiens, a tragedy in Five Acts, dedicated to Lady Baroness de Banks and based on a royal would-be assassin of Napoleon. He also wrote a four-act comedy, Robertus Montanus or the Oxford Scholar; an account of his travels through Germany and Italy; plus a 429-page religious tract, the outline for a new economic system, and a narrative of his travels with the Tasmanian Aborigines.

  The most patient of his patrons – and most regular of his dedicatees (‘I was in prison, and ye came unto me’) – was Banks’s friend, the botanist William Hooker, whose life Jorgenson had saved in Iceland when their boat caught fire. Jorgenson never allowed Hooker to forget what he owed him. On two occasions Hooker had to plead for Jorgenson’s life and not a month went by when he did not receive a request to pay off a gambling debt or a printer’s bill. Once, after treating him to a Christmas dinner at the Crown Inn in Reading, Hooker was asked to buy up copies of Jorgenson’s latest work, The Copenhagen Expedition traced to other causes than the Treaty of Tilsit. ‘You know yourself at any other time, I would not say a word about such matters, but every little helps said the old woman, when she p—d into the sea.’

  After such a life, Jorgenson’s undoing was prosaic. On May 25, 1820, he was indicted at the Old Bailey for stealing a bed, two blankets and a quilt from his landlady in the Tottenham Court Road. In court, Jorgenson insisted that he was going to pay her back. ‘Did I not show you a £50 bill?’ The judge asked if this was true. ‘He showed me a two-penny stamp,’ said the landlady, contemptuously, ‘and said it was a£50 bill and that it came from Lord Castlereagh.’ The prisoner then made ‘an exceedingly long and unconnected defence’.

  He was sent to Newgate prison, but Hooker managed to get him a conditional pardon provided that he left England within a month. This he fully intended to do, but on the way to board his ship, ‘I had the misfortune to meet an old acquaintance on Tower Hill.’ A few months later, Jorgenson was detained again in one of his ‘wretched haunts’ and sentenced to hang.

  Once more, Hooker rallied to his rescue. This time, instead of to the grave, Jorgenson was transported to Van Diemen’s Land.

  Jorgenson’s adventures made a vigorous impression on Kemp. ‘He began to laugh, and continued laughing until the tears absolutely ran down his cheeks,’ was how one contemporary described Kemp’s reaction to a story that he had particularly liked.

  How much they had in common! Jorgenson, like Kemp, had known Van Diemen’s Land as a free man at a period when it was an uninhabited paradise. He had returned when it was a penal colony, as a convict. In between, he had ruled over an island half as large again. It is not too fanciful to see in Kemp’s generosity towards him the response of a brother in spirit. Kemp had unseated an unpopular Governor. Kemp had known the gambling table, the bar, the bankruptcy court. And had he not, like Jorgenson, been ‘wonderfully industrious in raising enemies’? They were a pair of long-winded, conceited romantics; twins in everything, and above all in their self-belief. These words that Jorgenson wrote to Hooker could have been addressed as easily to Kemp. ‘There are some curious peculiarities attached to my character which baffle the penetration and judgement of my best friends and well wishers, and which indeed puzzle my own mind to such a degree at times that even in my most solitary hours and in the midst of the deepest meditation I cannot understand myself … Yet after taking a careful and repeated survey of my own mind, I think Genius may often be mistaken for madness. My good-natured friend do not smile at my presumption, I talk to myself when I talk to you …’

  In a gesture Kemp was never to repeat, he offered Jorgenson £50 for his part in uncovering the forged treasury bills. Then, on January 15, 1827, he pushed the boat out further than he had done for anyone. He wrote a petition to Lieutenant Governor Arthur urging that Jorgenson be freed, and had the letter signed by 16 other merchants. A few months later Jorgenson received his ticket-of-leave.

  It was not a free pardon – that would not come until 1835. He had to be in his lodging by curfew, attend church on Sunday and report once a month to the district muster. But the pass allowed Jorgenson to work for money and to hold a government position. So he became a policeman.

  Jorgenson’s last 15 years in Van Diemen’s Land did nothing to curb his boastfulness. As a district constable, he was in charge of one of the roving parties sent out in search of Aborigines. His failure to find any members of the Oyster Bay tribe was no impediment to his becoming a self-proclaimed expert on their culture, habits and languages (‘I am the only one who possesses the vocabularies complete’). As an employee of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, he made three expeditions in the unrealistic hope of finding grazing routes – in the last of which the Company’s surveyor Clement Lorymer drowned before his eyes. (‘I have now explored the whole of that part of Van Diemen’s Land which is marked “unknown” … there are few who are better acquainted with this island, its mountains, gulleys and rivers than myself.’) As a writer, he lost none of his prolixity. His Observations on the Funded System appeared with a preface of 44 pages, and in 1834, grossly influenced by Kemp, he published in pamphlet form An Address to the free colonists of Van Diemen’s Land on Trial by Jury, and our other constitutional rights. ‘I have,’ he wrote, ‘at various periods exercised great influence over the colonial press.’ Not enough, however, to recover seven pounds and five shillings owed to him as a sub-editor on The Colonist – his action against the paper being rejected on the grounds that he was employed to write addresses on envelopes.

  A stone or two below him staring out at the ducks were the chiselled sandstone features of Jorgenson’s ‘queen’.

  Only
in his role as a husband did his relentless optimism falter. He might have married Gudrun or the god-daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse, to whom he was engaged when on a mysterious spying mission for the British government. Instead he married Norah Corbett, an abusive and illiterate ex-dairymaid from Limerick of ‘extremely drunken habits’.

  That evening I drove north to Campbell Town and walked up Tragedy Hill to a pale orange house with a tin roof. A flowering hedge of heather and protea spilled over a wooden fence, and along the Western Tiers a forest fire was competing with the sunset. The house was once the Campbell Town Inn where Jorgenson was lodging when he met the 23-year-old Norah.

  He had arrived in Campbell Town to track down some sheep-rustlers. Norah was living with them in the bush. One day she walked into the Inn: five foot four, dark brown hair, brown eyes. An instant attraction was formed. She moved into Jorgenson’s room and agreed to testify against her former companions.

  Norah’s evidence resulted in three convictions, but her betrayal unbalanced her. Her reputation as a police spy made her the target of whispered remarks, according to Jorgenson, such as ‘there goes the woman who hanged so many men’. Two members of her gang waited for days by the road with the declared intention of shooting both her and Jorgenson. Norah took to leaving the Inn disguised as a man. All this, combined with her addiction to ginger beer and gin, resulted in ‘a visible derangement of intellect’. After she tried to commit suicide a fourth time, by swallowing a mouthful of copper sulphate, Jorgenson paid a man to watch her.

  Jorgenson’s employer in the district, Thomas Anstey, knew nothing about Norah, save for ‘her propensity to beat and scratch Jorgenson when she is intoxicated’. There were frequent complaints of the two of them fighting in the street. Increasingly, it was Jorgenson who came off worst. In Anstey’s opinion, Norah wasn’t the only one suffering from mental delusions, and he did his best to argue Jorgenson out of his ‘infatuated attachment’. But the policeman’s passion could not be subverted ‘by reason or reflection’. Anstey concluded – correctly: ‘His ruin is inevitable if he marries this woman.’

  In his obstinate choice of wife Jorgenson most deserved his description of himself as ‘a veteran of misfortune’. They married in New Norfolk, far from where anyone would recognise them, but within a year she had been removed from her husband and placed for three months in the Female Factory in Hobart, where she spent a further two sessions. Her crimes included theft and assaulting other women, but the most common charge was drunkenness.

  In the end, Jorgenson could not cope. A year before his death he presented his last petition, begging for the police to lock up his wife for a further six weeks. She was, he wrote, past redemption. ‘She lugs me continually down hill with her. I do not like to appear myself for fear of future violence.’ He did not care if he never saw her face again.

  Jorgenson’s last link with the life he had left behind came in the shape of a visit from the son of his old friend, William Hooker.

  Joseph Hooker was on a voyage to Antarctica on the Erebus. Calling in at Hobart on the way south, he went ashore at his father’s request to look up Jorgenson. He was ‘an extraordinary man’, his father wrote. ‘I stood him friend for as long as I could, but he proved too bad for me … The man’s life would form a perfect Romance if written with the Strictest Attention to truth … His talents are of the highest order, but for his character, moral and religious, it was always of the lowest order.’

  The figure that Joseph Hooker tracked down was lachrymose, half-tipsy, dressed in rags. After their final meeting, at which Jorgenson called on him and begged for half a crown, looking miserable, Hooker wrote to his father: ‘His drunken wife has died and left a more drunken widower; he was always in this state when I saw him and used to cry about you. I have consulted several persons, who have shown him kindness, about him, and have offered money and everything; but he is irreclaimable; telling the truth with him is quite an effort.’

  On the way back from Antarctica, the Erebus docked again in Hobart, where Hooker learned that Jorgenson’s body had been picked up in a ditch a few weeks before. He had died of pneumonia in January 1841 and his body had lain in the open for a day before it was discovered. But then Jorgenson had always known that the joys of human life were fleeting. ‘They may be likened to two friends meeting each other on a hasty journey, who ask a few questions, and then part perhaps forever, leaving nothing behind but a tender regret.’

  I could not deny that a reason his story interested me was my wife’s ancestry. Although raised in Canada, she was Icelandic. This meant that our son would be half-Icelandic. Like Jorgenson, he would have a stake in two islands literally poles apart – and I wondered if one day, like W.H. Auden, he would travel through Iceland on a bus and spot the familiar shape of Australia in a patch of snow.

  Back home, Peter had finished cleaning out the possum shit. ‘Ah, you won’t get them in now.’

  I explained what I had been doing, and it stirred him to tell me in the casual, understated way so typical of Tasmanians how his niece in Hobart was involved romantically with the Crown Prince of Jorgenson’s native land. At first, I was wary. This was the kind of thing that Jorgenson used to boast about – how he ‘figured in courtly scenes and made much stir on the literary and political world of Europe’. But a few months later I opened the Mercury and there was the news of their engagement. One day Mary Donaldson, my possum-catcher’s niece, stood to be Queen of Denmark.

  XIX

  RESCUED BY JORGENSON, KEMP THRIVED FOR A WHILE. APPROACHING 60 and wearing spectacles, he looked out on a busy port, macadamised streets and shingled roofs that reminded Mrs Prinsep, a visitor to his store, of no place other than ‘old England’. She wrote in a letter in 1829: ‘I dare say you have never dreamt of Van Diemen’s Land as of any thing else than a kind of wilderness; an appropriate insular prison for the vagabonds who are sent to it yearly from England. You have never supposed that it has a beautiful harbour, a fine metropolis, with towns, streets, shops, and pretty shopkeepers, like some of the larger towns of Devonshire …’ As she walked up Macquarie Street towards Kemp’s emporium, ‘I enjoyed a thousand English associations … cats and cottages, ships and shops, girls in their pattens, boys playing at marbles; above all the rosy countenances, and chubby cheeks, and the English voices.’ The only discordant note was the extraordinary number of spirit shops – about 50.

  ‘While I am now writing it is snowing on the mountain opposite my cottage.’ So Kemp described the Hobart winter of 1816 in a letter to Potter. During the long dark evenings of June and July, he sat by his fire with books and tracts borrowed from the library. A growing number of them warned against the dissipation caused by drinking the gin he sold: Satan’s Snares, Don’t Go to the Gin Shop and The Bottle (drawings by Cruikshank). ‘I don’t think much of them,’ he once said in disgust, returning some Puseyite tracts. ‘The writers were paid for saying what they did.’ At this, a look of pious horror crossed the face of the neighbour who had lent them. ‘What, Mr Kemp? Do you think that a minister of the Gospel would sell himself in that way?’ Kemp answered: ‘Well, Sir, as to that I have my own opinion. I am all for the right of private judgment, Sir.’ While Kemp’s wife studied manuals like Kind Words for the Kitchen and Female Excellence or Hints for Daughters, Kemp liked to ‘peruse’ the London Times that arrived six months late, along with the Christmas editions of Punch, the Illustrated London News, the Quarterly Review. In later life, he admired Arthur Stanley’s Life of Thomas Arnold and Charles Dickens’s novels which he read in serial form. Kemp recognised Vandemonian connections in at least two of Dickens’s most striking creations: the pickpocket Fagin in Oliver Twist and the convict Magwitch in Great Expectations. The character of Fagin is said to have been inspired by ‘Ikey’ Solomon, who in 1831 was transported to Hobart for 14 years for receiving stolen goods; Magwitch was a fugitive from the same hulks in which Kemp’s friend Jorgenson had been incarcerated.

  On Jorgenson’s death, Kemp was
one of but a handful of settlers who had known the colony since its foundation. He identified its fate chiefly with his own. In Kemp’s opinion, it was owing to his persistent lobbying that Van Diemen’s Land had become separated administratively from New South Wales in 1825. But Kemp would not rest until the colony won the right to govern itself, independent of London and its meddling Lieutenant Governors.

  In 1829, he cornered the author of the first Australian novel, the locally printed Quintus Servinton, in Hobart’s Commercial Rooms. He told Henry Savery that ‘until we have a House of Assembly and trial by Jury, we shall do no good, Sir.’

  Kemp’s House of Assembly was a castle that would remain in the sky for a quarter century more, but he was preparing for it, he told Savery, by ‘practising talking’.

  ‘Whose style of eloquence do you most admire, Sir?’

  ‘Whose style, Sir? Few equal to my own …’

  His laws, he said, would include an Act to annul all former Laws and Acts (‘nothing like a clear stage, and plenty of elbow-room’) and an Act to compel everyone to eat a daily hot lunch, with two pounds of meat per head, ‘so as to encourage the consumption and raise the price of livestock’.

  Savery wrote of Kemp as having ‘a considerable degree of eagerness in his manner’. But on the next occasion they met he considered that Kemp was less animated, and that his ‘hasty impetuosity’ which had at first startled him had declined into ‘a look of moody, disappointed ambition’. Over a drink at the Waterloo Hotel, Kemp complained to a visitor from England: ‘Good God Almighty, Sir, the colony is ruined. All going to the Devil.’

  Another bee in Kemp’s intransigent bonnet was transportation. Transportation ceased to New South Wales in 1840, but not for another 13 years to Van Diemen’s Land. Until 1853, convicts came into the island at the rate of 5,000 per year and from all quarters of the Empire: South Africa, Ireland, India, China, Canada, New South Wales. At the same time, assignment was replaced by the probation system. The convicts worked in gangs and lived together in a network of remote stations, including one established on Maria Island and another on a spectacular cliff outside Swansea. It was during this period that Van Diemen’s Land consolidated its reputation, as the Gippsland Guardian put it, as ‘that pandemonium of the most wicked and debased of England’s children’.