The Vikings of the South Seas
An Excerpt from My Autobiography (Richard Bolstad)
How does someone with a name like Richard Bolstad end up being born in the South Pacific in 1955? The answer is the colonial system. On December 22nd, 1842, my grandmother Elsie’s grandparents arrived in New Zealand as children on a ship called the “Prince of Wales”. In 110 days sailing, the ship (one of 19 to arrive in the same port that year) brought 203 immigrants from Gravesend (on the Thames in England) to one of New Zealand’s new settlements, named “Nelson” after a famous English admiral who fought successfully against Napoleon in the great European wars of the early 19th century. George Chapman and Ann Hughes were both twelve years old when they arrived, and their parents gained employment as agricultural labourers in the rich farmland of the new colony.
The colony was organized by the New Zealand Company, by a kind of pyramid marketing scheme which extracted money from wealthy migrants, funded poorer workers like my ancestors to be their servants and employees, and purchased the promised land to build their colonies only once their ships had already set sail (using some of the money collected from the wealthy emigrants). The idea, as Edward Gibbon Wakefield of the New Zealand Company explained, was to purchase land cheap from its Maori guardians and sell it expensively to the immigrants, so that ordinary labourers like my ancestors would be forced to seek employment rather than immediately set up farms on their own. In this way, Wakefield said, the British class system could be successfully replicated in the new colonies.
Of course, the next challenge the company faced was that the land of Nelson was already occupied. Under the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 by the British crown, by the independent Māori tribes and by the previously recognized sovereign nation called the Confederation of United Tribes of Nu Tireni, all land sales had to be approved by a governor, who acted by authority of that treaty. The New Zealand Company paid local Māori tribe Ngāti Toa £800 for a poorly defined 810 sq.km of land, but the governor prevented them immediately occupying the best farmland adjacent to their new city. By June 1983, the company was desperate for more land, and an attempt to seize land from Ngāti Toa at Wairau near Nelson resulted in a gunfight where 22 settlers and 4 Māori were killed. Sadly, it was to be the first of many such battles. The next year a British land claims commission agreed with the Māori that the land had not been sold, and the settlers were ordered to pay compensation. However history (in the form of hundreds of thousands of European settlers) overrode the application of the original treaty in this and so many other cases. It was actually 100 years later, in 1944, that the government of a now independent New Zealand agreed to pay $2,000,000 in compensation to Rangitāne tribe, who were ruled to be the correct owners. And it was 2010 before the dispute finally ended in the signing of the Rangitāne o Wairau Deed of Settlement. It took, then, 170 years of continuous court cases to tidy up the legal mess created by the men who brought out my ancestors.
In my family when I was growing up, none of this history was remembered. Instead, what was remembered was the story of Great Britain, which was called “home” by my parents although they had never been there. Meanwhile, of course, hundreds of colony ships had brought out settlers, not just from Britain but also from several European sources. By 1852, there were more settlers than Māori.
The British settlers were willing to work, but they had no experience coping with ancient forest like most of New Zealand was covered in. The New Zealand Government hit on a solution. They would purchase land themselves from “friendly” Māori iwi (tribes) and bring over forestry workers from Scandinavia. On December 1st, 1873, my grandfather Roy’s great grandparents Hans Hansen and Kristiana Peddersdatter arrived on the “Høvding” after a 115 day voyage from Kristiania (Oslo) in Norway. The Høvding carried 270 Norwegian passengers, and each settler family was to get a 40 acre rectangular block of land in the new colony of Norsewood, south of the Manawatū river. This time the crown agent who organized the deal with the Ngāti Kahungunu tribe made what was originally an honourable deal, and the settlers all received a welcome and a handshake from Ngāti Kahungunu chiefs Pāora Rerepo and Tāreha Te Moananui. Tāreha Te Moananui was one of the first Maori Members of Parliament, and supported the government militarily in the New Zealand wars, but he ended his life with his people in relative poverty due to the government failure to honour the land deals made with him. Long court cases ensued. I am here in New Zealand thanks to the years of sacrifice made by my ancestors, and also thanks to the goodwill and dreams of a shared future from these people. Both were betrayed by history.
Working on the Norsewood Road, Hans Hansen was paid 50 pence a day, at which rate it took twelve days wages to buy a 100lb bag of flour (45 kilograms – maybe 80 loaves of bread). Men had government work for 3-4 days a week, and on the other days they had to clear the trees on their “farm”, which was of course thick Totara forest. That means it probably took 3 weeks for Hans to earn enough for two months of bread for the family. Hans and Kristiana (Christiana) bought a cow for milking, and adopted the family name of Bolstad. Kristiana had to plant the garden while Hans was working on the roads, and they were left to build their own primitive shelter and furniture from the wood they cut. The work required was at the limit of endurance, and like most Norsewood families, they gradually wound their way into debt. Within a generation, their children had abandoned the original “farm” and were working in forestry and carpentry. They went from being poor labourers on someone else’s forest near Arundel, Norway to being poor labourers on farms and forests here in New Zealand, and felt tricked by the New Zealand immigration process.
One of Hans and Kristiana’s sons was Christopher – my father’s paternal grandfather. Another of Hans and Kristiana’s sons was Johan, and his grandson was “Sonny” Bolstad, described as “The greatest axeman New Zealand has ever seen”, and a world champion competitive woodcutter. Though he died in 1988 (in a logging accident of course, in Kaingaroa forest) and his son David and grandson Morgan both went on to become champions in this sport, it is “Sonny” whose name is most easily recognizable when I mention my surname in rural New Zealand. People tend to remember him as a giant with huge hands and broad shoulders. I’ve seen a photo of Hans Hansen, cutting down a two metre diameter native rimu tree, and he was also a big guy. Of course, famous as these Bolstads are in the history of New Zealand sport, they were also part of the process by which New Zealand lost most of its native forest. Settlers were actually paid incentives for “clearing” trees to convert forest into farmland. It was 2002 before the government ordered a halt to the cutting of native timber.
In 1997, I visited Norway for the first time and went out into the forest near Arundel, to a little railway stop in the forest called Bøylestad. It may or may not have been the place that my ancestors came from (There is a Bolstad Loppis Antique Furniture Store at Bolstad Prästgård 5, 464 66, Mellerud, Norway that may be our origin place too), but it sure was cool to phone my father up from Kristiansand, just south of there, and tell him I had visited the ancestral homeland. Following the genealogy of my Norwegian ancestors, I can track all the way back to a Jon Gliddi, born in 1460, almost six hundred years ago. Like my cousins here today, he was a forester, and he lived in a land that had been farmed and forested sustainably for millennia. We just need to remember how to do that.
Living in the heart of New Zealand forestry, of course Bolstads were working side by side with Maori foresters, and now inevitably, while all Bolstads in New Zealand trace their ancestry to Hans and Kristiana, many of the Bolstad family are also descendants of the original people of the land. In my generation, there is a vast movement of decolonization across the world, and in New Zealand that has involved reparations (through the Waitangi Tribunal), educational initiatives, and reassessments of sovereignty as it becomes clearer that the original intention of the treaty of Waitangi was to create a shared power situation in Aotearoa – New Zealand. As part of that process, I run a one day training each year on Treaty Issues and Decolonisation. I know that my ancestors were coming out here with the dream of being financially independent, breaking with a past of oppression and poverty in their homelands. Unlike the founders of the New Zealand Company, they believed in an equalitarian New Zealand (to quote a saying popular here in my youth) “where Jack is as good as his master”. It seems to me that it also honours their positive intentions to support the recovery of that future for those whose land was stolen in the pretense that, as savages, they did not have a right to it.
New Zealand is not Britain, however much it may sometimes look like a “carbon copy” of the tidy sheep fields I saw around my maternal grandfather’s home village of Trefeglwys in central Wales. To understand our lives in this distant place, we need to know all the stories that weave us together, and that includes the stories of war, deception and outright invasion. Like all colonization, the New Zealand settlement was also an attempted genocide, and not far from where I am writing there is a monument on a hillside saying “To a dying race”, reminding us that the settler government fully expected that they would exterminate the original inhabitants. They saw that as a kind of social Darwinism: European civilization was intrinsically better and ultimately it would replace all others. As we look around at a world almost destroyed by the relentless advance of that civilization, there are few who would now be so confident that one model of civilization, one set of cultural norms, beats all. We need all the sustainable choices we can get!
Below you see a chart of my direct line of ancestry from Jon Gliddi (1460-1520) and even from his (undated) wife Ukjent’s parents born 7 centuries ago. For 4 of those centuries, this lineage is entirely foresters living in small villages in Scandinavia. When Jon was born in 1460, the Eastern Roman Empire (Constantinople-based “Byzantium”) had fallen just seven years ago. The Wars of the Roses were raging in England with armoured medieval knights. Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake just 30 years before. The printing press had just been re-invented in Germany 20 years before his birth, and Leonardo da Vinci was still a child in Italy when he was born. Colombus first sailed to America when Jon was 32 years old, and Vasco da Gama first sailed around Africa when he was 37. The vast Timurid Mongol empire ruled Central Asia, the wealthy Kingdom of Mali dominated Africa and the Ming Dynasty was at its peak in China in their new capital at Beijing. In those days the centre of wealth in the world was the gold reserves of Mali; Beijing and Baghdad were the only cities with a million people; and the technologically backward European states were struggling to regain the lost knowledge of Rome, and to find new trade routes to the real centres of power. And in Aotearoa, completely unknown to all these people, Maori Iwi were already established across the islands, already collecting a vast encyclopedia of native plants as remedies, already developing the complex science of growing South American kumara in these cold climates. It would be centuries before these worlds merged. Now, two hundred years after their meeting, we are understandably still sorting out the confusion.
Colonization involves poor people being herded across the world to meet the objectives of empire builders, by displacing even poorer people. If I can collect these stories just from my ancestry, then spread over the 5 million New Zealanders, there will be many, many such stories. Settlers tricked into debt-slavery, Indigenous peoples tricked into deals that won’t even be honoured, or simply having their land taken by brute force. If we had learned the lessons, there would be no invasion of Iraq, no invasion of Ukraine, no occupation of Palestine. But the world can change. I owe it to my ancestors, and the people they trustingly shook hands with, to be part of the solution.
