Jens Booysen

Jens Booysen , also Boysen , (born August 22, 1765 in Wenningstedt , † March 9, 1833 in Keitum ) was a German captain, authorized representative and chronicler of Sylt .

Live and act

Jens Booysen was a son of the captain and Sylter Ratmanns Nickels Bundes (Cornelius Boysen) (born October 2, 1730 in Wenningstedt; † 1798 ibid) and his wife Merrit, née Peters (born February 17, 1744 in Keitum; † between 1791 and 1803 in Wenningstedt). The parents had married on February 17, 1762 in Copenhagen .

Booysen came from a family of seafarers who had lived in the northern villages of Sylt for a long time. He received a nautical training and then worked as a captain on ships of the Hamburg Kauffahrtei. In 1796 he sailed, among other things, the ship “Wilhelmsburg” of the shipowner de Voss from Altona to Surinam , where in 1797 he entered the grand lodge “Concordia”. The French and British repeatedly stopped and held the ship. Booysen led a lawsuit for the shipowner about the ship and its cargo. For this reason he lived in Paris from 1798 to 1806 without a break .

After seafaring came to a standstill due to the continental blockade, Booysen ended his activities in seafaring and worked on Sylt. Because of his services to the community he received the Dannebrogorden in 1817 . From 1815 he worked for 18 years as a plenipotentiary in the self-administration of the Sylt countryside and was particularly committed to reforming the constitution and taxation of the countryside. He took the view that all civic institutions were based on a good local government.

Booysen promoted the founding of the Sylter Verein in 1817 , which later became civic associations. As an entrepreneur, he and other wealthy citizens leased oyster beds in the Wadden Sea near Sylt in 1819 . In 1822 he and his son-in-law set up a small port on the north beach of Keitum, from which the oyster fleet and herring boatmen sailed. In 1868 the port ceased operations because it was silted up. Booysen and his son-in-law also founded the Sylt herring fishing company . He also had an agency for the London Lloyd Assecuranz-Compagnie .

In 1824/25 Booysen wrote a chronicle of Sylt that was strictly chronological, not thematically structured. He wrote essays that can be found in the Staatsbürgerliche Magazin by Niels Nikolaus Falck, printed in 1827 . His description of the island of Silt dates from 1828 , in which the author described the island and its inhabitants in the first thirty years or so of the 19th century, when there was no tourism yet

family

Booysen married Sarah Petersen on January 26, 1792 (* September 5, 1763 in Keitum; † April 29, 1835 there). The couple had a son named Uwe Jens (1796-1816) and their daughter Maria Engline (1794-1884), who married Jens Bleicken in Keitum.

literature

• Manfred Wedemeyer : Booysen, Jens . in: Schleswig-Holstein biographical lexicon . Volume 5. Wachholtz, Neumünster 1979. ISBN 3-529-02645-X , pages 45-47.

Web links

• Works by Jens Booysen in the Gutenberg-DE project