Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World: Convicts, Sailors and a Dissonant Empire by Johan Heinsen (review)

This is a wonderful and energetic reading of early Danish colonial projects in the Atlantic. Put briefly, Johan Heinsen argues that a vibrant Atlantic tradition of storytelling and listening among convicts and sailors below deck on the ship Havmanden (“The Merman”) led to a mutiny and the killing of Jørgen Iversen, governor of St. Thomas, the Caribbean colony of the Danish West India and Guinea Company, on January 20, 1683. This violent mutiny, planned and executed by lower class subjects, came to shape the colonial efforts of the Danish company. The mutiny led it to give up plans of peopling its Caribbean possession with Danish-Norwegian subjects. Instead the Danish company turned towards the transatlantic slave trade, relying on the import of enslaved Africans to satisfy labor needs on St. Thomas and enable the development of a plantation regime.

In a rich introductory chapter, Heinsen presents his analytical choices and reading strategies. The result is an effective combination of social history, in which change is conceptualized as a process shaped by social tensions and class struggles, and microhistory with its ability to enlarge the signifying practices of subalterns. Heinsen’s synthesis of these two modes of history is, in a sense, captured in the concept of dissonance, described as the presence of “incommensurable and antagonistic perspectives ... within a shared world” (3). This concept is mobilized throughout the book in two ways. It is used as a substantive term to characterize the disarray marking St. Thomas and the Danish West India and Guinea Company. The concept is also, and perhaps most fruit-fully, employed as an incisive reading tool. It allows Heinsen to unfold the instances in which elite discourses about the mutiny on The Merman collapsed and left fragments of speech, at times only single expressions, that point towards the social worlds established by storytelling below deck. These are the fragments upon which Heinsen builds his story.

The first part of the book explores the mutiny, its prehistory and its end. The mutiny was possible, Heinsen shows, because pre-voyage friendships and stories of how to oppose unjust authority created a social site out of which sailors and convicts acted. Rather than a sign of pent-up instinct or failed captaincy, the mutiny hinged on the resistant community emerging among sailors and convicts (whose presence onboard was particular to the Danish Atlantic experience). Likewise, the murder of Governor Iversen, Heinsen suggests, was linked to stories about his cruelty as a governor of St. Thomas circulating below deck. At some point, however, the coalition that made the mutiny possible broke up. Leaders of the mutiny betrayed their followers, there were more killings, and finally rebel leaders turned against most of the convicts, indentured servants, and some of the free passengers leaving them to fend for themselves in the Azores. The rebel captain decided to return to Copenhagen and try his luck—and narrative skills—with the law. He, and eight other men, were tortured and executed in July 1683, outside the gates of Copenhagen.

The second part of the book anchors The Merman mutiny in traditions of resistance among the two major rebel groups: sailors and convicts. Mining a rich array of sources, including exceptional narratives by common sailors, Heinsen establishes the conflictual nature of shipboard relationships, evidenced in property crimes, murders, desertions, and—again—in stories celebrating friendship and resistance to unjust authority. Likewise, he traces practices of escape out of Copenhagen’s large prison at Bremerholmen, where-from convicts for the colonial venture were taken. Storytelling, Heinsen suggests, was also central to the organization of these flights. By opening up to this larger context, Heinsen convincingly shows that the mutiny on The Merman was embedded in a wider transnational world of lower class, at times escapist, storytelling.

The concepts of class and dissonance serves Heinsen well as he creatively unpacks storytelling on The Merman. Yet there are events and actors that...