When you could disappear: Can Danes on the run in the past give us a greater understanding of our own reality?

In the late summer of 1773, a man in his mid-twenties was working on a farm in Slagslunde in North Zealand. He had just arrived in the area, and he found it easy to find work, for he was good with his scythe.

The man's name was Henrik Eilers, he was born in Sweden and ran away from the Swedish army. At least that's what he told the inhabitants of Slagslunde.

Johan Heinsen, professor at the Department of Politics and Society at Aalborg University, knows the story of Henrik Eilers very well. With the help of technology, Johan Heinsen uses completely new methods to create a picture of how the runaways of the time fled and tried to create a new life for themselves. Specifically, in the period 1750 to 1850.

The research is awarded as Original Idea of the Year 2024 by Independent Research Fund Denmark.

»As modern people, we know that we can't just disappear. If people break out of a prison today, for example, they are almost always found again. But at the beginning of the period that I am investigating, it is actually possible to disappear on Danish soil and become someone else. And when the period ends in 1850, it has become almost impossible,« explains Johan Heinsen, adding:

»So it is during this period that the modern state that we live in today is created. And by that I mean the state where our legal identity kind of binds us, so we can't just wander off. The idea of trying to see what people do when they run away is to try to find out how that development takes place.«

With thousands of newspaper advertisements, court documents and other material about the runaways of the time, research will try to map escapes. Where do you fail? What can you succeed with depending on who you are? What difference does it make whether you have money on hand or something to sell?

Escaped servants and apprentices were wanted in the newspaper

In 1773 in Slagslunde, the locals saw no reason to report Henrik Eilers. The weight of his crime was not really transferred across the border. More importantly, he had offered to work, and his labor was needed.

The farmer Jens Nielsen was quick to hire Henrik Eilers. He worked and lived as part of Jens Nielsen's household for a year and a half, before another farmer took over him in a position as kind of an overseer with simple management tasks during the work in the field.

Five selected groups of people are particularly under scrutiny in Johan Heinsen's research. Namely, soldiers, convicts, servants, apprentices and tenant farmers.

Common to all of them is that data has only been created about them when they have been captured or wanted in connection with an escape.

Servants and apprentices, for example, were wanted to a large extent in the newspaper in the latter half of the 1700s. It was a time when there were not yet many police, so the newspaper became an important tool.

»Sometimes we can see that it is the same person who is wanted over and over again. Sometimes the wanted person also responds back. There are examples of wanted people placing an ad where they say something like I had the right to run away because I was beaten by my master. Or that they deny having stolen something that they have been accused of,« says Johan Heinsen.

In total, Johan Heinsen's research group has succeeded in finding approximately 10,000 newspaper ads about runaways from the period.

Digitising images from microfilm using artificial intelligence

In June 1776, Henrik Eiler's master asked him to take a carriage and drive the approximately 30 kilometers to Copenhagen with some firewood. After delivering the goods at the capital's port, he began his journey home, but never reached the city gates.

At a square called Kultorvet, he was discovered by Ole Svendsen, a man from the small coastal village of Rungsted, north of Copenhagen. He knew Eilers, but not like Henrik Eilers. He had probably known him since he was only a child. Henrik Eilers was not Swedish. He was born and raised in Rungsted. His real name was Bertel Henriksen.

Obtaining data for historical research is usually a huge task. One of the things that makes Johan Heinsen's research project original is that it rests on modern techniques.

In collaboration with three colleagues, he has helped develop artificial intelligence that in a very short time is able to re-digitise, for example, the newspapers that the Royal Danish Library has already made easily accessible by photographing them and making them searchable on the internet using the library's Mediestream.

However, the artificial intelligence is much better at recognizing the words on the newspaper pages, with 95 percent accuracy, and so far, more than half a million newspaper pages have been re-digitised. Which makes it much easier to search for specific words or phrases in the large amounts of text.

»The newspapers are fantastic because they are an everyday medium. But they have not been used very much because the material has been so difficult to access for several reasons. For example, because it was originally digitised from older microfilm, which reproduces the text in low-resolution images,« explains Johan Heinsen.

Our own relationship with the state was created around the year 1800

The name Bertel Henriksen brought disgrace with it. He was a former peasant who had been sentenced to life as a convict labourer for the state. On his back were the scars from the public flogging he had received before he was chained and put in the so-called slave garb worn by convicts.

The convicts came from all sectors, but were forced to do manual work in connection with the construction and maintenance of military infrastructure. They wore chains all the time, primarily as a way to identify them if they ran. Now, in 1776, Bertel Henriksen was put in a new set of chains.

When Johan Heinsen looks at an account of an escape, he breaks it down into actions as part of his research. For example, it is an action if he can read in an interrogation that a soldier has left his uniform in a ditch during his escape. Or if he meets a stranger and asks for bread.

In this way, it becomes possible to form an impression of what actually made an escape possible in the period between 1750 and 1850.

In this way, Johan Heinsen hopes that the three-year research project, which is scheduled to run until the end of 2027, can create a new image of the state of Denmark.

»I would like to gain a new understanding of what it is that shapes the Danish state. When you have looked at the Danish state during this period, you have usually looked a lot at the legislation. This is understandable, because it has been easily accessible. But we can see that the legislation does not bind equally everywhere. The way you should act is valid if you are close enough to the state power. That is, out to Roskilde in the west and down to Køge in the south,« he says and continues:

»But outside the state power, we can see, for example, that even though it is illegal to help a beggar, people do it anyway, especially in the countryside. And if you are a fisherman, you are not allowed to ferry a stranger across. But there are some contexts where people do it anyway, and we can see that there is an economy in it. So we want to find out how this reality arises.«

The third set of chains

Back in Copenhagen Slavery, Bertel Henriksen waited two years. He saw fellow inmates come and go while keeping a low profile. Because flight was so common and because he had committed no further crimes during the flight, it was eventually forgotten.

He succeeded in obtaining a forged passport, and on 9 August 1778 Bertel Henriksen again managed to escape. With the passport, he looked at his chances and returned to Slagslunde. Here he engaged his former employer Jens Nielsen, who hired him again, just as he had done when he was still Henrik Eilers. But at the end of August, perhaps when the workload after the harvest began to lighten, Jens Nielsen and another man apprehended Bertel Henriksen and handed him over. Perhaps Nielsen had known all along that Henriksen had not escaped legally, and that the passport was fake.

Bertel Henriksen was put in a third set of chains. They were his last. Ten years later, he died of illness in prison, about 40 years old.

In the present, Johan Lund Heinsen looks forward to uncovering as many aspects as possible of the runaways of the time.

Denmark's geography, for example, also left its own mark on the state in the latter half of the 1700s and the first half of the 1800s. Not least Little Belt, Great Belt and the Sound presented special challenges for runners. In addition, there were a number of upheavals during the period, such as population growth, urbanisation and deforestation, which among other things could make it more difficult to hide in the landscape.

»The period stands for the creation of the state in which we live today. We cannot disappear and we cannot become someone else. That reality has become completely natural to us, but it hasn't always been. The relationship we have with the state today is created here,« Johan Heinsen emphasises.