From Zealand to New Zealand, or How far can opportunism lead?
While an optimist and a pessimist are arguing about a glass filled to the half, an opportunist takes the glass to drink from it.
Whether the approach looks witty, ironic, or impudent, opportunists fulfil their interests by taking advantage from the circumstances and are pretty satisfied with that. Depending on the field, we define economic opportunism, political, intellectual, spiritual and other types of opportunism, while the lifestyle is not warmly welcomed in any of these fields.
A witness of the Age of Revolution, there lived a man who made opportunism his life philosophy. Born in Denmark, Jorgen Jorgensen had a way more impulsive temper and a more inventive mind than majority of Danes (and perhaps, other people).
Where did he as an opportunist end up?
Around the world
"The strict discipline and incessant work on board ship gave me so much to do that I did not have time to be homesick."
Such were Jorgen’s memories from his apprenticeship on board of an English merchant ship. A royal watchmaker’s kid, he greatly admired Captain James Cook who had died a year before the boy’s birth and was seeing his own future on board of ships.
When the apprenticeship period ended, Jorgen landed in southern England with a right to serve on board of any English ship. Britain was then in war with France, while Denmark stayed neutral. And instead of coming to Zealand[=EX1] – that large island where Copenhagen, Jorgen’s birthplace, is located – he decided to look for a possibility to follow the route of Captain Cook and travel to the Southern Hemisphere as an English subject.
Captain James Cook. ©Image by Nahia Blanco Iturbe - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
When captured by a gang recruiting for the British King’s Navy, Jorgen made his Danish passport the main argument – forgetting about his special right, he insisted he was a Danish subject and thus could not be conscripted to the service...
Also in the story
- what closed the doors home and how did Jorgensen use it?
- how did British authorities treat him after the Battle of Copenhagen?
- why the status of a war prisoner could have double meaning for Jorgensen?
- what brought him to Iceland, Australia and Tasmania, prison, governor's office, and police?
Read full story
For more opportunistic adventures of Jorgen Jorgensen:
The viking of Van Diemens Land. The story life of Jorgen Jorgensen by Frank Clune, P.R. Stephensen, 1954
[=EX1] not to be confused with Zeeland, the province in the Netherlands after which New Zealand was named (the spelling differences arise from anglicisation of the originally Dutch name)