[HN Gopher] A Trail Gone Cold
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       A Trail Gone Cold
        
       Author : Petiver
       Score  : 95 points
       Date   : 2024-10-02 03:45 UTC (19 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.damninteresting.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.damninteresting.com)
        
       | jmclnx wrote:
       | A very interesting read.
        
         | AnimalMuppet wrote:
         | Very. That "owner" who wouldn't quit, even in the face of a
         | written decision from the _crown prince_ , made my blood boil.
        
           | IncreasePosts wrote:
           | It sounds like that letter was never presented to court?
        
       | davidw wrote:
       | This kind of thing is the "best of HN" - encountering an
       | interesting story with some scientific/technical elements that I
       | otherwise would not have seen.
        
       | neaden wrote:
       | It's a very interesting article, and maybe I'm missing something
       | but I am confused at where they get some of the details in
       | Iceland. At the beginning they say there is just the census
       | record and nothing else, then later they specify that Hans
       | arrived in June 1802 which seems to show better records, but what
       | are those records? It's unclear to me if some of Hans' writing
       | survived or what exactly they are using as their source.
        
         | throwup238 wrote:
         | The Nature paper cites the book _The Man Who Stole Himself: The
         | Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan_ by Gisli Palsson [1] as its
         | main source.
         | 
         | The sources for the book seem to be the census of the hamlet of
         | Djupivogur from 1802 onwards and some "memoranda of
         | transactions with customers, stock taking, and other aspects of
         | his work" that survive. The memoranda I think is the complete
         | books of the general store that are archived in the National
         | Archives, Reykjavik. The book has some photos [2] - his very
         | fancy signature is quite legible.
         | 
         | It says he is mentioned many times in the census: as a mate on
         | a sailboat (possible owned by the store) in 1804, a donation to
         | the poor he made in 1808, registered as an assistant and
         | workman, in a district council meeting in 1810 his assets were
         | recorded as "a ewe, three yearling lambs, and a horse", then no
         | records until 1815, and by 1817 he owned two boats. The census
         | listed him as a freed slave from Kantitusjanhill, St. Croyx
         | since he was honest about his background.
         | 
         | That's about as far as I read. My impression is that it's more
         | of a pop-history book than a painstakingly sourced academic
         | tome. Lots of "probably" and "must have" speculation.
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo219363...
         | 
         | [2] https://imgur.com/a/VUmXpq0
        
       | pcrh wrote:
       | Fascinating!
       | 
       | Here is the relevant open-access editorial published in Nature
       | Genetics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0049-4
       | 
       | And the research article "Reconstructing an African haploid
       | genome from the 18th century" (which is unfortunately neither
       | open-access nor available on PubMed Central.... perhaps this
       | article also needs to be "freed") :
       | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-017-0031-6
        
         | willy_k wrote:
         | https://imgur.com/a/7sMeTfj
        
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       (page generated 2024-10-02 23:00 UTC)