A 200-year-old sweater in a traditional Faroese knit has been found in a parcel among a stash of 19th-century letters at The National Archives (TNA).
The jumper, handknitted in vibrantly coloured fine wool, was intended for a woman in Denmark, but never reached its destination because the vessel on which it was shipped was seized by the Royal Navy during the Second Battle of Copenhagen.
The same shipment contained a sample of fine women’s knee length woollen stockings and fabric samples. The export of men’s stockings was a key part of the Faroese export market at this time when “wool was gold” for these island communities.
Two academics from the Faroe Islands, Erling Isholm, associate professor at the University of the Faroe Islands, and Margretha Nónklett, head of ethnology at the Faroes’ National Museum, flew to TNA to see the packages opened for the first time in 217 years.
The parcel was opened as part of the Prize Papers Project, a project to catalogue and digitise the entire collection of letters, artifacts and more seized from ships by the British Navy between 1652 and 1815.
It is a collaboration between TNA and the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, the German Historical Institute and the Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund library network.
The red sweater was shipped from Tórshavn on the cargo ship Anne Marie on 20 August 1807 by a carpenter called Niels C. Winther, with a letter saying “my wife sends her regards, thank you for the pudding rice. She sends your fiancé this sweater and hopes that it is not displeasing to her”. The package is addressed to a Mr P Ladsen in Copenhagen and its contents are described by the sender as a “sweater for sleeping”, though its style closely resembles Faroese national dress. The note is written in Danish.
Margretha Nónklett said: “This is a tremendously exciting find. There are very few pieces like this and we have none with this particular design. It would have been handmade at home with hand-dyed wool.”
The ship Anne-Marie had sailed for Denmark with its captain Jurgen S Toxsvaerd unaware that the British were waging war on Denmark during the Napoleonic Wars. She was targeted by HMS Defence off the coast of Norway on 2 September 1807, the day the British began bombarding Copenhagen. The British crew boarded the ship, imprisoned Toxsvaerd and his crew and grabbed both the cargo and the ship’s mailbox.
