Hans Jonatan

Ruins of an old sugar mill, with a plantation house in the background, Frederiksted 1941.

Constitution Hill Plantation Christiansted, St. Croix painting by Frederik von Scholten. Hans Jonatan (12 April 178418 December 1827; also known as Hans Jónatan and Hans Jonathan) was an escaped slave, soldier, farmer and trader. His father may have been a white Dane; his mother was a black slave. Following his participation in the Battle of Copenhagen, after which he was initially given his freedom, he became the subject of a test case in Danish law on slavery. Fleeing to Iceland, he became the first known person of African descent to settle in the country. Later, he became the subject of a DNA study. 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. The details of the West African ancestry of Hans's mother were unknown prior to a genetic study.

Hans Jonatan was enslaved by Heinrich Ludvig Ernst von Schimmelmann and his wife Henriette Catharina.

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. Not long afterwards, Heinrich died, bequeathing Hans to his widow Henriette Catharine. In 1801, at the age of seventeen, Hans Jonatan escaped and joined the Danish Navy. He participated in the Battle of Copenhagen, for which he received recognition. Danish crown prince Frederick gave him his freedom as a reward.

Subsequently, Henriette had Jonatan arrested, claiming that he was her property and that she had intended to sell him in the West Indies. Jonatan and his lawyer argued before a Copenhagen court under judge Anders Sandøe Ørsted (who would later become Prime Minister of Denmark) that although slavery was still legal in the Danish West Indies, it was illegal in Denmark and Hans Jonatan could not be kept as a slave. However, in the case Generalmajorinde Henriette de Schimmelmann contra mulatten Hans Jonatan 1802, Ørsted sentenced him on 31 March 1802, to be returned to the West Indies.

Life in Iceland

Hans Jonatan escaped again, 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. In 1802, he arrived in Djúpivogur in Iceland. One of the first records of Hans Jonatan after 1802 is in the diary of the Norwegian cartographer Hans Frisak it

for 4 August 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.

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.

Despite the popular tale of former prime minister Davíð Oddsson being Jonatan's descendant, no sources back up that claim.

Biographies A biography of Jonatan by Gísli Pálsson was published in Icelandic in 2014. An English edition titled The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan was published in 2016. A documentary based on the book was premiered in 2017, where he is depicted by George Leite and Yiori Moorhead.

Legacy In 2023, Danish community theatre company Hammermøllens Teatergruppe performed the musical En fri mand (English: A Free Man) about the life of Hans Jonatan. The musical was written by Rasmus Mark Pedersen and Ulrik Trolle Schwartz, and Hans Jonatan was portrayed by Haile Grangaard Bach.