Michael Jebsen (27 September 1835 – 30 September 1899) was a ship's captain and ship owner. He is seen by the company as a progenitor of what became the Jebsen Group, a trading and manufacturing company co-founded in Hong Kong on 1 March 1895 by his son Jacob Jebsen (1870–1941). During the early 1870s, with his own business interests increasingly centred on Europe, he returned to the town of his birth which was by now in Germany. In his final years he turned to politics, becoming a local senator in 1883 and a member of the national parliament ("Reichstag") in 1890.
Life
Family provenance and early years
Michael Jebsen was born into a Protestant family in Apenrade, a flourishing bilingual trading port in a sheltered location on the eastern side of Schleswig, still an independent duchy, but increasingly coveted by the rulers of adjacent Denmark and nearby Prussia. Jebsen's father was also called Michael Jebsen (1793–1863) and was also a ship's captain based in Apenrade, where the Jebsens had been prominent members of the shipping community since the early years of the eighteenth century. Michael Jebsen and his twin sister, Thilde Christine, were the youngest of their parents' children.
As an adolescent Jebsen briefly undertook an apprenticeship as a sail maker, but there was never any doubt that he would go to sea. In 1851, when he was 16, he joined the crew of the Hamburg-based full-rigged ship "Georg Heinrich" as a ship's boy. Between 1851 and 1873 he was working at sea: fifteen of those years were spent as a ship's captain on long voyages. His years at sea were not entirely uninterrupted, however. After several trips to South America he disembarked at London and then returned home early in 1853 to attend a navigation school in Loit-Skovby run by a retired ship's captain called Peter Boysen. Jebsen already knew Boysen, who had commanded the "Georg Heinrich" when Jebsen was working his first voyage. It is on record that at the end of the three-month course he passed his exams in July "comfortably".
Seafarer and captain
After a brief further stint as a sailor, in 1854 Jebsen joined the Apenrade barque "Otto" as third mate. In 1856, still aged only 21, he was given his first command. His ship was the Peruvian barque "Joven Emilio", and he was its captain for two years. Between February 1859 and July 1860 he served as first officer on the ocean going steam ship "Antonius Varas". There followed a brief assignment as a captain in Valparaiso in Chile, before he returned to Europe, disembarking in Hamburg. Hamburg was part of the German Confederation whereas Schleswig, despite growing pressure from commercial interests, was not. In his linguistically divided home town of Apenrade the Jebsen family were part of the German-speaking community, and in an age of growing nationalist sentiment the cultural distinctions which might have gone unnoticed a few years earlier were gaining in practical significance. In 1861 Captain Michael Jebsen acquired Hamburg citizenship, one visible sign of which was that ships under his command were no longer required to fly the Dannebrog (Danish flag).
Jebsen made his first visit to Hong Kong in 1864 while captaining the barque "Notos", owned by the Hamburg firm Hastedt & Co. There is a suggestion that around this time, identifying the competitive advantage that might be available from focusing on steam ships rather than on traditional sailing barques, he developed plans to found his own shipping company, which could help to revive the shipping industry in his home town, but these plans had to be postponed, partly because of geo-political developments, and during most of the 1860s he was working out of Hamburg. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 inhibited trade along the route to Hong Kong, since French warships were blockading trade with China.