29. Aug 1875 - July/August 1920 (Photo kindly borrowed from Steffen Rosendahl Christensen)
Ever since I was I little boy, my brother and I was always told by our parents that we had a bit of royal blood running in our veins. Many yeas ago there was a king in the family.
I never fully believed in it but it was a good story to tell to my friends in school who just laughed and said I was a good storyteller.
The story was, that my grandma Grete’s uncle who came from a small island in Denmark called Læsø, had travelled the world in the end of 1800 beginning of 1900, trading various goods. He then ended up on a small island that was similar to Læsø somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by the name of Wuvulu and begame a king on the island.
I kind of forgot about the story during the teenage years when other interests was taking up time until one day my grandma gave me a bunch of copies of newspaper articles and a book that told the story about the uncle who had been a king.
Especially one photo was printed into my mind where the king stands in a sarong on the small Pacific island. My appetite for adventure was glowing.
Unfortunately the articles disappeared and so did the story from my mind until one day in the Philippines. Two friends and sat and drank a few beers one night on an island called Palawan in the western Phillipines, talking about things when I remembered the story. I had royal blood in my veins. Many years ago a family member had travelled the world and ended up as a king on a small island.
History repeated it self, like ten years I was laughed at and they didn’t believe me and gave me applause for the good story. I put a case of beer at stake I would prove it when we got back to Denmark…
My friends jaw dropped a foot when I showed him the book and articles I had found again and I was a case of beer richer.
The World Wide Web was getting more spread out and I had just got it installed in my apartment. One night I was surfing the net and found Wuvulu.com, couldn’t believe that they had a website. I went into the history section and found my grandma’s uncle’s name….
Edvard Christian Antonius Nielsen Ørtoft.
1913 - The king with his two children. (Photo kindly borrowed from Steffen Rosendahl Christensen)
In this very moment I realised that the story really was for real and he really had been a king on this island. I had to investigate this some more and the great difficulties I found a book written by Børge Mikelsen called “Kongen af Wuvulu” (The King of Wuvulu). The book is written a bit like a fairytale and I bet the story isa getting better with the years passing but the book paints a good picture what my grandma’s uncle was doing in late 1800 early 1900.
After some years as a sailor on ships he ended in America or what we today would call USA. But it was difficult to get a well paid job so he wanted to be a part of the big gold rush in Australia but ended in Chiles doing mining with a friend from Germany. A few years passed with that but finally the two friends arrived in Australia now the gold adventure could start.
A lot of other gold seekers had come up with the same idea so all the gold was dug up or had never existed.
The two friends were hired by a German trading company to sail around the Solomon Islands buying cobra from the palm trees. In the beginning of 1900 cannibals was still raging in that part of the world so it was a dangerous job and they got attacked a few to many times but was always lucky.
Edvard and his German friend had made enough money and had had it with the sailing so they bought a small plantation in the Solomon Islands and quit their jobs with the German trading company. It went really well in a few years but after a week at sea they got back to the plantation or what was left of it, somebody had burned everything down.
They went back to Australia and got their jobs back and started all over again trading cobra around the small islands of the western Pacific Ocean.
At one island the where trading with the locals they were attacked again. Edvard was hit bad in the side of his head and his German friend whose name I couldn’t find, was captured.
Edvard made it back to the ship and sailed away from the hostile island. After a few days of recovery he wanted to save his German friend and in the middle of the night they sneaked close to the locals camp. Edvard would never forget the sight he saw, the locals were eating his German friend. He got back to the ship and sailed into the night.
The following years he avoided the island with the cannibals and tried his luck on other islands in the Bismarck Archipelago and found an island that reminded him of Læsø, the Danish island where he was born.
Every one he talked to told him not to go to this island, the locals was called the Tiger people and were cannibals and extremely violent. A year before this he had hired a boy who came from this island and talked the Tiger People dialect so with the eye and mind on a good trading he anchored by the island. The Tiger People on the island wasn’t violent or cannibals or maybe it helped to have a boy talking the right language. Many times he returned to this island they called Wuvulu and discovered how the people were living.
Wuvulu Island from the air. (Photo kindly borrowed from Francois R. Brenot.)
Somehow he got a letter from Denmark who told him that his parents didn’t have much longer time to live in, they were getting old but Edvard couldn’t go back to Denmark to say goodbye to them. A visit to a doctor in Japan had told him it was not good to go to a cold climate, the hard hit he got on the side of his head was still bothering him.
He had to write back with a sorry. Nobody knows if that letter he received did it but he decided to settle on Wuvulu with another plantation.
The king on the island was not a good king. Several times he tried to burn Edvards plantation and he robbed people. More and more on the island were tired of King Nalipei and joined Edvard who was against Nalipei.
One day a bunch of men went over to King Nalipei and gave him a ultimatum, he could leave the island within 48 hours or get killed in battle. It never came to a battle between Nalipei and the men with Edvard in front and Nalipei left the island. The locals were so happy with the big Dane that they wanted him as king of the island. Edvard had a business trip going to Port Moresby and would return to Wuvulu with an answer.
He said yes and the locals called him Kong Faiu. He lived in the plantation house for a number of years and got three children, Dorthea, born June 1907, Margrete born October 1908 and Karl born October 1909.
Like so many other Europeans he got malaria. It got worse and worse and he had to go to Port Moresby to see a doctor by boat. He never returned to Wuvulu and died around 1920.
The plantation house he lived in was still standing until 1980’s but has now disappeared.
