Jørgen Jørgensen died in 1841, but only after being imprisoned five times, taking over a country by himself, spying on Napoleon and precipitating the complete genocide of an entire people.
Besides having a name like a World’s Strongest Man contender, Jørgen Jørgensen was a 19th century traveler and proto-journalist. At 21 he sailed to Australia on a coal ship and watched the founding of the first town on Tasmania. After his return to Europe, he attempted to lead a British trading voyage to Iceland only to be turned back because the Napoleonic wars had halted all trade between Denmark and Great Britain. Jørgensen wasn’t happy about this, so he sailed back to Iceland and took it over. By himself. For two months he tried to establish a liberal republic in the country, promising a return to the traditional Icelandic parliamentary system, before the British got wind of his hijinks and arrested him.
He was in jail for less than two years, (although two years in a 19th century British jail is long enough to teach anyone a lesson), released, drank a lot and was thrown in jail again. A year later he was once again a free man and traveled throughout Europe, avoiding the debts he’d accrued boozing, gambling and taking over countries. His creditors eventually found him and put him in jail for a third time.
After several letters to The British Foreign Office, somebody decided he’d make a better spy than prisoner and sent him to keep watch on Napoleon’s Europe in the waning days of the war. He translated secret documents, skulked through France and Germany and apparently did the British some good because they didn’t put him in the clink again for a while.
When the war ended he continued traveling and wrote the 400 page opus Travels through France and Germany in the years 1815-1817. The book bombed terribly and Jørgensen went back to boozing and gambling, but being too broke to continue he hatched a brilliant scheme to pawn all his landlady’s furniture. So he was arrested. Again.
Jørgensen found Jesus and began preaching to fellow convicts, which earned him another pardon on the condition that he left England for good. He got extremely drunk and forgot. By this point the British had had enough of Jørgensen’s nonsense, so they finally sentenced him to death in 1822.
Being a resourceful man, Jørgensen had his sentence commuted to exile and was sent to Australia in 1825. There he explored Tasmania and eventually participated in the Black Line operation, which lead to the extermination of every last native Tasmanian.
Perhaps ironically, Jørgensen’s last real adventure was being appointed to a police team that hunted outlaws in the Australian bush. He wrote several more books and pamphlets, continued drinking heavily and died sad and broke on January 20th, 1841.
The English Dane
Dictionary of Australian Biography
Wikipedia