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View Full Version : The awesome story of Hans Jonatan, the black slave who settled in Iceland



Deneb
05-11-2019, 09:21 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Jonatan

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 for August 4, 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 Borgargarđur working at the Danish trading station in Djúpivogur. He took over the running of the trading post in 1819.[3] By February 1820, Hans had married Katrín Antoníusdóttir from Háls. They had three children; two survived childhood, and their living descendants now number nearly nine hundred. Hans Jonatan died in 1827.

In 2018, scientists achieved a genetic breakthrough when they reconstructed a part of his genome solely using samples from his descendants and none from his remains. This was the first time that a human genome had been reconstructed without using physical remains. For the study, 788 of his descendants were identified, and DNA samples from 182 family members were taken. The study was aided by the extreme rarity of African heritage in Iceland, the homogeneity of the country's population, and its comprehensive genealogical database. The samples were analyzed against known signs of African DNA, recreating about 38% of his mother's DNA profile and thus 19% of his own. It was determined that his mother's ancestral origins were from a region now encompassing Nigeria, Benin, and Cameroon.[5]

Grace O'Malley
05-11-2019, 09:31 AM
Here's a picture of him. It looks to me like his mother wasn't fully African looking at him.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/04/13/world/13Denmark2/merlin_136748310_2fc7bfce-22e3-4463-a47d-e6b17b175125-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale

Here he is with his wife and children.

https://metode.cat/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/familyhansjonatan-550.jpg

Here's some of his descendants.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2018/01/15/23/482C9C4C00000578-5272825-image-a-69_1516059373542.jpg

billErobreren
05-11-2019, 09:32 AM
Ooh, did he come from the Virgin Islands? That would kind of make sense. There's articles about negroes leaving descendants in Scotland and England so this isn't a major shock.

Yup! Frederiksted, should've known

Smeagol
05-11-2019, 10:16 AM
Looks like an octoroon.

billErobreren
05-11-2019, 10:33 AM
Looks like an octoroon.

meh...That's a tad generous, he's probably a quadroon

Smeagol
05-11-2019, 10:47 AM
meh...That's a tad generous, he's probably a quadroon

Maybe, hard to tell from photo quality. His kids look fully white though.

billErobreren
05-11-2019, 11:08 AM
Maybe, hard to tell from photo quality. His kids look fully white though.

kinda jewy looking to me which wouldn't be impossible there were loads of Sephardic Jews that came to settle in the Danish West Indies

Pansarkamrat
05-11-2019, 11:14 AM
So this explains green eyes in europé.

Yinwang888
05-11-2019, 01:08 PM
"and then he took over the trade station"

I love this part of the story. Shows racism is culture dependent I think. In a population naďve to black people (Icelanders) probably mostly just associated him with the merchant caste.

Yinwang888
05-11-2019, 01:09 PM
"and then he took over the trade station"

I love this part of the story. Shows racism is culture dependent I think. In a population naďve to black people (Icelanders) probably mostly just associated him with the merchant caste.

TeutonicBoyars
05-11-2019, 05:10 PM
Here's a picture of him. It looks to me like his mother wasn't fully African looking at him.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/04/13/world/13Denmark2/merlin_136748310_2fc7bfce-22e3-4463-a47d-e6b17b175125-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale

Here he is with his wife and children.

https://metode.cat/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/familyhansjonatan-550.jpg

Here's some of his descendants.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2018/01/15/23/482C9C4C00000578-5272825-image-a-69_1516059373542.jpg

His father was likely a White Dane, apparently. I suppose his African mother could have been mixed too, because he certainly doesn't look very African.