The DNA of Iceland's First Known Black Man, Recreated from His Living Descendants
Hans Jonatan, who escaped slavery in 1802, now has hundreds of relatives in the country.
Hans Jonatan was born into slavery on a Caribbean sugar plantation, and he died in a small Icelandic fishing village. In those intervening 43 years, he fought for the Danish Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, lost a landmark case for his freedom in The General’s Widow v. the Mulatto, then somehow escaped to become a peasant farmer on the Nordic island.
No one knows how he got there. No one knows where in Iceland he is
