In the summer of 1809 a Danish sailor named Jørgen Jørgensen declared Iceland free of Denmark; by 1826 he was a transported convict walking the Tasmanian interior.

Botanist William Jackson Hooker sailed with him and lost an entire summer's collection when the Margaret and Anne burned. Jørgensen was tried at the Old Bailey in December 1822 and transported to Van Diemen's Land. He proposed the concept behind the Black Line to Thomas Anstey in June 1829 and marched in it in 1830.

???? Music: Original soundtrack created for this documentary

Image credit: "Hobart Town, taken from the garden where I lived" (1832) by John Glover. Digital reproduction courtesy State Library of New South Wales. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 AU, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/au/deed.en. Modified: cropped and animated.

Sources
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Archives & Official Records
- Old Bailey Proceedings Online, December 1822 — the trial, charge and sentence
- Tasmanian Archives — CSO 1/320 (Jørgensen to Thomas Anstey, 8 June 1829); CSO 1/332; CSO 1/332/7578

Published Testimony & Primary Documents
- William Jackson Hooker — Journal of a Tour in Iceland in the Summer of 1809 (1811; expanded 1813). Hooker was aboard the ship, lived in the same house as Jørgensen for eight weeks, and lost his summer's collection in the fire. Appendix B prints Jørgensen's proclamations and his written defence.
- Jørgen Jørgensen — field journals, 1826-27. State Library of NSW, Mitchell Library, A1656 (C 125/1, the Central Plateau crossing; C 125/2, the west coast)
- James Rankin to Jørgen Jørgensen, 27 September 1830. State Library of NSW, ML A1055
- Jørgen Jørgensen — "A Shred of Autobiography," Hobart Town Almanack, 1835 and 1838

Books
- Anna Agnarsdóttir (ed.) — Sir Joseph Banks, Iceland and the North Atlantic 1772-1820 (Hakluyt Society, 2016)
- Sarah Bakewell — The English Dane (2005)
- N.J.B. Plomley (ed.) — Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals of George Augustus Robinson
- N.J.B. Plomley (ed.) — Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land (1991)
- Knut Gjerset — History of Iceland (1924)
- John Marshall — Royal Naval Biography, for the Sappho action
- Marcus Clarke — Old Tales of a Young Country (1871). Clarke states in his preface that part of the book is in Jørgensen's own words and part is his own. Used here for substance, never quoted.
- James Francis Hogan — The Convict King (1891). Hogan says plainly that he did not make a literal transcript and rewrote the autobiography.

Academic
- Anna Agnarsdóttir — "Eftirmál byltingarinnar 1809," Saga 27 (1989), for the shipping and famine figures
- John Connor — "British Frontier Warfare Logistics and the 'Black Line'," War in History 9.2 (2002)
- Lyndall Ryan — on the Black Line, Journal of Australian Studies 37.1 (2013)

Cross-verification
- Australian Dictionary of Biography — Jørgen Jørgensen (Dally, 1967); Thomas Anstey
- Dansk Biografisk Leksikon — Jørgen Jørgensen
- National Museum of Australia — the Black Line

Accuracy Notes
- The cause of the Margaret and Anne fire is undocumented. Hooker was aboard and never wrote down what started it. The sabotage account found everywhere else was published in 1902 by his son, ninety-three years after the voyage, by a man born eight years after the ship went down.
- The wedding dress was saved by the ship's steward, whose name is not recorded. Hooker credits him with extraordinary exertions. The story is usually told the other way round.
- Three sources place Jørgensen's grave in three different pieces of ground in Hobart. No stone survives.
- Norah's death date and her age rest on the Australian Dictionary of Biography alone. What she died of is not recorded, and the burial registers were not consulted for this account.
- Jørgensen originated the Black Line concept in his letter to Anstey of 8 June 1829, and he stood in the Oatlands muster on the extreme right of the line. No source gives him a sector, a head-count or a body-count. The reasoning behind the proposal is what historians read out of it; he never wrote it down himself.
- Luggernemenener's and Woolaytopinnyer's accounts of walking out through the Line were written down by George Augustus Robinson in the 1830s and reach us through N.J.B. Plomley's edition. They are Robinson's transcriptions, not verbatim first-person speech, and they are paraphrased in this episode rather than quoted.
- Jørgensen is usually said to have promised Icelanders a free constitution. That claim rests on the account of himself he published in Hobart twenty-six years later, not on any proclamation.
- Left out because the record does not support them: the "King of Iceland" title he never used, the face carved into the Ross Bridge, and the more colourful escapes and near-deaths that appear only in Marcus Clarke.