Jørgensen

The name at the root of Jorgensen is Greek. Georgios meant the earth-worker, the farmer, and it travelled north attached to the dragon-slaying saint who carried it, honoured across the north in the centuries when Danish parents took christening names from the calendar of saints. German mouths made Georgios into Jurgen; Danish mouths rounded it again into Jorgen, written with the slashed o, and a boy christened for the saint gave his sons the only surname the country then had, his given name with -sen after it.

In 2009 Jorgensen was the tenth most common surname in Denmark, borne by about 1.8 per cent of the population, and the twenty-second most common in Norway. The slashed o did not survive the Atlantic; emigrants wrote themselves Jorgensen or Jorgenson to fit an alphabet with no room for the letter.

Jorgen Jorgensen was born on 29 March 1780, the second son of the royal watchmaker Jurgen Jurgensen. It was a house of clocks: two of his brothers were watchmakers, and the elder of them, Urban Jurgensen, was of international renown. The family wrote the name in the German fashion, Jurgensen, and the second son spent his life unspelling it, signing himself Jorgensen and then, from 1817, Jorgenson. One surname, three spellings, inside one Copenhagen household.

He did not stay for the workshop. At fifteen he finished school and was apprenticed to Captain Henry Marwood of the British collier Janeon, and by 1799 he had sailed to Cape Town, in 1800 to Port Jackson, the new British colony in Australia, and on to New Zealand. In 1801 he joined the crew of the Lady Nelson, and as one of her company was present at the founding of the first settlements at Risdon Cove and at Sullivans Cove in Van Diemen's Land, later renamed Tasmania.

Sullivans Cove became Hobart Town, and then Hobart. Jorgensen has been called the founder of the city and is a local hero there still, a considerable thing for a Dane who arrived as a hand on a survey brig. He worked his way home as a mate aboard the whaler Alexander, reaching Gravesend in June 1806.

In 1807, visiting his family, he witnessed the Battle of Copenhagen, and was soon given command of a small Danish vessel, the Admiral Juel. In the action of 2 March 1808 she fought HMS Sappho, was taken, and her captain was treated by the British as a privateer rather than a naval officer. He was released on parole into an England at war with his own country.

Iceland was short of food under the Danish monopoly on its trade, and Jorgensen put it to a merchant that a voyage there could pay. He went out on the Clarence as interpreter and the venture failed, the ship being British and the two kingdoms at war. On a second voyage the Danish-Norwegian governor, the Count of Trampe, again refused to permit trading, and Jorgensen arrested him. He proclaimed himself Protector of Iceland and promised to reinstate the Althing as soon as Icelanders were in a position to govern themselves, meaning to found a liberal republic on the examples of the United States and the French First Republic.

It lasted until HMS Talbot arrived two months later, restored the Danish government and carried him back to England, where the Transport Board tried him not for taking an island but for breaking his parole as a prisoner of war. He was released in 1811. Icelanders still call him Jorundur hundadagakonungur, Jorgen the Dog-Days King, for the weeks of the dog star during which a watchmaker's son from Copenhagen governed their country.

The British Foreign Office turned him next into an asset: he was recruited into the intelligence service and travelled through France and Germany as a spy while the Napoleonic Wars ran down, and in 1815 he saw the field of Waterloo, close to some of the action though never in it. Accused of theft in 1820 he was sent to Newgate, where a death sentence was later commuted through the intervention of a prominent friend. In the condemned cells he wrote a book and put on its title page the only style he thought worth claiming: Jorgen Jorgenson, Late Governor of Iceland.

He was transported in 1825 aboard the Woodman, and five months at sea brought him in 1826 back to Tasmania, where he had stood at the first landing. The colony made use of him. In 1827 he helped stop the circulation of forged treasury bills, and local merchants headed by Anthony Fenn Kemp petitioned the governor for a ticket of leave for him; he led several explorations of the island for the Van Diemen's Land Council, served it as a constable, married Norah Corbett in 1831, and argued in print in 1834 for trial by jury and the constitutional rights of the free colonists.

He took a free pardon in 1835, stayed, and died in the Colonial Hospital on 20 January 1841. His notes on the Aboriginal languages of Tasmania were printed after his death. An associate of the botanists Joseph Banks and William Jackson Hooker, he left over a hundred autograph papers and drawings, most now in the British Library, and Marcus Clarke called him one of the most interesting human comets recorded in history.

Sophus Mads Jorgensen, born 4 July 1837, is counted one of the founders of coordination chemistry, the study of how metal atoms bind the molecules that cluster around them. He was a pioneer of the chain theory, and between 1893 and 1899 he conducted the long public argument with Alfred Werner that the field remembers him for. Jorgensen's own theories were in the end shown to be wrong.

That is not the whole of it, and it is why he is still named. The experimental work he did to defend his position supplied much of the basis on which Werner's rival theory was built, so the field was carried forward as much by the man who was mistaken as by the man who was right. Alongside it he made major contributions to the chemistry of platinum and rhodium compounds.

He sat on the board of the Carlsberg Foundation from 1885 until his death on 1 April 1914, and was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1899. His last book, a history of the chemical concept of acid down to 1830, appeared posthumously, edited in part by his son Ove.

Ejler Andreas Christoffer Jorgensen was born on 16 July 1838 at Somme Herred in Roskilde, eldest son of the parish priest Soren Hillerup Jorgensen and Conradine van Deurs. He trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where he was a student in 1860, and in 1873 took the crossing to the United States. He worked in San Francisco as a landscape and portrait painter, went out to paint in Hawaii in 1875, and died at Oakland, California, in December 1876. The Honolulu Museum of Art holds his work.

The other Jorgensen of that American decade was born into the country rather than arriving in it. Joseph Jorgensen, born in Philadelphia on 11 February 1844, took his degree from the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1865 and served as a cadet surgeon in the United States Army in the last part of the Civil War, and again from 1867 to 1870.

Medicine gave way to Virginia politics. He sat in the state house of delegates for Prince Edward County from 1872, was postmaster of Petersburg from May 1874, and resigned in June 1877 on being elected to Congress. He held the seat as a Republican for three terms, from March 1877 to March 1883, by widening margins: 51.91 per cent of the vote in 1876, 60.71 in 1878, 70.1 in 1880. President Arthur made him register of the land office at Walla Walla in 1883, and he died at Portland, Oregon, in January 1888.

Adolf Ditlev Jorgensen was born on 11 June 1840 at Grasten in the Duchy of Schleswig. He went through the Flensborg lærde Skole from 1853, entered the Latin school there and graduated with distinction in 1859, and by 1863 was teaching at the Alten Gymnasium in Flensburg. In 1864 he left for Copenhagen.

He entered the Danish archives as an assistant in 1869, became deputy clerk in 1874, and was made National Archivist in 1883. The office in his hands was not a desk but a construction project: he modernised the management of the national records and established three provincial archives, so that a country's documents were held where the country was and not only in its capital. He was elected to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1883 and made a commander, second degree, of the Order of the Dannebrog in 1894.

He also wrote the history he was preserving, from Bidrag til Nordens Historie i Middelalderen in 1871 and Den Nordiske Kirkes Grundlæggelse across 1874 to 1878, to a survey of the Danish archives themselves in 1884 and lives of Georg Zoega, Niels Stensen and Johannes Ewald. His Forty Tales from the History of the Fatherland, of 1882, put the same material into the hands of schoolchildren.

Jens Johannes Jorgensen was born at Svendborg on 6 November 1866, went up to Copenhagen to study in 1884 and quit in 1888 for the circle of cultural radicals around Georg Brandes, the critic who boasted of dispelling the darkness of Christianity. He broke with Brandes and his school and set up as the standard-bearer of symbolism against naturalism, editing his own magazine, Taarnet, the Tower, through 1893 and 1894.

The turn came through friendship. Mogens Ballin, a young Jewish silversmith who had converted to Catholicism, took him in 1894 to the Basilica of San Francesco at Assisi, and Francis of Assisi occupied the rest of his life. Jorgensen was received into the Catholic Church in 1896, translated the Fioretti into Danish in 1902, and in 1907 finished the biography of St Francis that made his name. It brought him honorary citizenship of Assisi in 1922 and of his native Svendborg in 1936, and five nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He was not only a writer of saints. In 1915 he published Klokke Roland, a documentary novel on the German invasion of Belgium, calling it a heinous act with bloody consequences for the Belgian people. It ran to twenty-one printings in Denmark and appeared in French and English in 1916, and it enraged the German authorities, who demanded legal action against Jorgensen and against Politiken, which had reviewed it warmly.

He settled in Assisi from 1915, left for Vadstena in Sweden during the war years of 1943 to 1945 to begin his work on St Birgitta, and came home to Svendborg in 1952, where the town gave him free use of his childhood house in Lady Alley. He died on 29 May 1956. Three of his poems still stand in the Danish Folk High School Songbook, a quieter survival than a Nobel Prize and probably a longer one.