A Trail Gone Cold | Hacker News Reader

A Trail Gone Cold

damninteresting.com

156 pointsPetiver16 comments

> The courts had not found Hans guilty of any crime, but unless he chose to appeal the verdict, he was required to turn himself in to Henrietta Schimmelmann within 15 days. The court does not seem to have noticed that, as a strategy for containing a runaway, this plan left something to be desired.

It’s entirely possible that the court had noticed exactly that, and spelled it out as clearly as it was legally able without actually writing ‘here, have a fifteen day head start!’

Fascinating!

Here is the relevant open-access editorial published in Nature Genetics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0049-4

And the research article "Reconstructing an African haploid genome from the 18th century" (which is unfortunately neither open-access nor available on PubMed Central.... perhaps this article also needs to be "freed") : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-017-0031-6

https://imgur.com/a/7sMeTfj

This kind of thing is the "best of HN" - encountering an interesting story with some scientific/technical elements that I otherwise would not have seen.

It's a very interesting article, and maybe I'm missing something but I am confused at where they get some of the details in Iceland. At the beginning they say there is just the census record and nothing else, then later they specify that Hans arrived in June 1802 which seems to show better records, but what are those records? It's unclear to me if some of Hans' writing survived or what exactly they are using as their source.

The Nature paper cites the book The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan by Gisli Palsson [1] as its main source.

The sources for the book seem to be the census of the hamlet of Djupivogur from 1802 onwards and some "memoranda of transactions with customers, stock taking, and other aspects of his work" that survive. The memoranda I think is the complete books of the general store that are archived in the National Archives, Reykjavik. The book has some photos [2] - his very fancy signature is quite legible.

It says he is mentioned many times in the census: as a mate on a sailboat (possible owned by the store) in 1804, a donation to the poor he made in 1808, registered as an assistant and workman, in a district council meeting in 1810 his assets were recorded as "a ewe, three yearling lambs, and a horse", then no records until 1815, and by 1817 he owned two boats. The census listed him as a freed slave from Kantitusjanhill, St. Croyx since he was honest about his background.

That's about as far as I read. My impression is that it’s more of a pop-history book than a painstakingly sourced academic tome. Lots of “probably” and “must have” speculation.

[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo219363...

[2] https://imgur.com/a/VUmXpq0

> The memoranda I think is the complete books of the general store that are archived in the National Archives, Reykjavik.

Wow, it's fascinating they still have those.

> … the acceptance of which, he added, would keep him from having to set fire to the captured Danish ships with the crews still inside.

Bone-chilling.

A very interesting read.

Very. That "owner" who wouldn't quit, even in the face of a written decision from the crown prince, made my blood boil.

It sounds like that letter was never presented to court?

I might have missed it, but I'm not even sure it was shown to Henrietta herself?

Article is vague on that. Seems to suggest she never saw it yet was worried about impact on other slaves.

It's odd but perhaps believable that potentially the only access to a government document was the recollection of someone who saw it.

Truly damn intresting

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