Amongst the mass of commonplace offenders against her laws whom England banished to Botany Bay and Van Diemen's Land during the first half of the nineteenth century, were not a few remarkable characters of a superior type and with singular records; and the most conspicuous member of this class, the “usurping despot of a little reign,” the only monarch who has left London for the Antipodes in a convict-ship, was the extraordinary adventurer whose chequered career is described in detail in the following pages. The name of Jorgen Jorgenson (Jürgensen is the strictly correct spelling) is not wholly unfamiliar to the reading public, for he has his little niche in all the biographical dictionaries; but these standard authorities abruptly dismiss him on his transportation to Van Diemen's Land, “where,” they all agree in saying, “he is supposed to have died shortly afterwards.” But this gratuitous supposition is entirely erroneous. Jorgenson lived another active and adventurous career extending over twenty years at the Antipodes—he pushed himself to the front at both ends of the earth—and wrote his autobiography in the Van Diemen's Land Annual for 1835 and 1838. This unique record of a strange, a kaleidoscopic, a melo-dramatic life in real action I have thought worthy of being rescued from oblivion, and it will substantially be found in the following pages. I say substantially, because I have not made a literal transcript.