RESTLESS DANE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 784, 30 July 1954, Page 14

RESTLESS DANE

THE VIKING OF VAN DIEMEN’S LAND, by Frank Clune and P. R. Stephenson; Angus and Robertson, Australian price 25/"HIS life of Jorgen Jorgensen is a catalogue of strange and stormy adventures. A Dane by birth (1780), Jorgensen became an officer in the British Navy and voyaged far and wide in Australian and South Pacific waters. He won the respect of W. J. Hooker, the botanist, later to be repudiated in his degradation by J. D. Hooker, the son. During the Napoleonic wars he was for a brief period the self-appointed Protector of Iceland, and later, travelling in Europe as a sort of unofficial Government agent, was a spectator at the Battle of Waterloo. Becoming a victim to gambling he was imprisoned for debt, sent to New-

gate for theft, condemned to death, re prieved, and transported to Tasmania, where, under conditional pardon, he was variously clerk, policeman, explorer, journalist, and husband of an _ incorrigible Irish slut. He published books on religion, the national debt, history, travel, the aboriginal language of Tasmania, and finally, A Shred of ° Autobiography, which in later years was often plagiarised. He died in Hobart, an outcast, in 1840. Concerning Jorgensen, W. J. Hooker wrote in 1833: "That man’s life would form a_ perfect Romance, if written with the strictest attention to truth." It did, in fact, become the inspiration for Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life. The volume now under review is a painstaking study "written with the strictest attention to truth." Its chief defect is its tedious length resulting from. the- inclusion of much irrelevant detail and imaginary reconstruction of scenes.

L.J.

W.