Michael Jebsen

Michael Jebsen (27 September 1835 – 30 September 1899) was a ship's captain and ship owner. He is seen by the company as a progenitor of what became the Jebsen Group, a trading and manufacturing company co-founded in Hong Kong on 1 March 1895 by his son Jacob Jebsen (1870–1941). During the early 1870s, with his own business interests increasingly centred on Europe, he returned to the town of his birth which was by now in Germany. In his final years he turned to politics, becoming a local senator in 1883 and a member of the national parliament ("Reichstag") in 1890.

Life

Family provenance and early years Michael Jebsen was born into a Protestant family in Apenrade, a flourishing bilingual trading port in a sheltered location on the eastern side of Schleswig, still an independent duchy, but increasingly coveted by the rulers of adjacent Denmark and nearby Prussia. Jebsen's father was also called Michael Jebsen (1793–1863) and was also a ship's captain based in Apenrade, where the Jebsens had been prominent members of the shipping community since the early years of the eighteenth century. were the youngest of their parents' children. His years at sea were not entirely uninterrupted, however. After several trips to South America he disembarked at London and then returned home early in 1853 to attend a navigation school in Loit-Skovby run by a retired ship's captain called Peter Boysen. Jebsen already knew Boysen, who had commanded the "Georg Heinrich" when Jebsen was working his first voyage. There is a suggestion that around this time, identifying the competitive advantage that might be available from focusing on steam ships rather than on traditional sailing barques, he developed plans to found his own shipping company, which could help to revive the shipping industry in his home town, but these plans had to be postponed, partly because of geo-political developments, and during most of the 1860s he was working out of Hamburg. (while south Schlesig remains part of Germany). During the 1890s, following the chancellor's reluctant resignation, there was a great surge in the construction of Bismarck monuments. This resonated particularly strongly with the German-speaking minority in North Schleswig. Michael Jebsen took a lead in the campaign to fund and construct an appropriate meeting place for the German speakers on the Knivsberg projection a couple of kilometers inland, to the north of Apenrade. Jebsen was a co-founder of the Knivsberg Society set up in 1893, and he was its first chairman, launching the fund raising with his own 10,000 Mark donation. His special focus was on the erection of a Bismarck memorial tower at the highest point of the outcrop, and the foundation stone of the construction was duly set in place in 1895. However, Michael Jebsen was no longer available to preside at the dedication of the memorial, which was instead undertaken, in 1901, in the presence of his son.

Death During the late summer of 1899, while visiting a spa resort, Michael Jebsen was taken ill. He was transferred to Berlin where he underwent an operation and, on 30 September, died. Two months later, in a ceremony that was very much quieter than must have been envisaged on 28 May 1899 when he couple announced their engagement, his daughter Johanne married her cousin, Heinrich Jessen, consolidating family connections that underpinned the Hong Kong-based Jebsen Group.