The First Scandinavians in New Zealand

The first Scandinavians to set eyes on New Zealand sailed with the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1642. The crew list of one of his two ships has survived and there are Scandinavian names among the sailors.

They reached the west coast of the South Island, couldn’t find a safe place to go ashore and continued northwards until eventually anchoring in Golden Bay at the top end of the island. Unfortunately, the local Maori sent out a war canoe, evidently mistaking a bugle call for a challenge and four of Tasman’s men were killed in rowing from one of his vessels to the other. As a result, he sailed away without landing.

One hundred and twenty-seven years later when, as far as we know, the next Europeans reached New Zealand, there were again Scandinavians on board, this time with Captain Cook, though they were not ordinary members of his crew. Daniel Solander was a distinguished Swedish botanist who had been working at the British Museum when recruited by Joseph Banks, a wealthy young natural scientist, to join the expedition. Banks had his own little team with him, to discover, collect and depict species of plants hitherto unknown in Europe. Also there was Herman Spöring, son of a mathematics professor in Turku, Finland, which was still part of Sweden (until 1809, when it became a Grand Duchy in the Tsarist Empire).

They spent six months in New Zealand waters, first going ashore on the east coast of the North Island, where Gisborne stands today – Cook, Banks and Solander plus a party of marines. Solander, known as the father of New Zealand botany, has a street named after him in the town as well as some uninhabited islands to the south-west of the South Island. And there is a Solander trail in the Botanical Gardens in Wellington.

In 1772 Anders Sparrman, like Solander a former student of Sweden’s most renowned botanist, Linneaus, the man behind the binomial system of classification, was persuaded to join Cook’s second expedition, which included further exploration of New Zealand. Sparrman was then at the Cape, employed as a tutor to the children of a Dutch official.

After the first penal colony had been set up in New South Wales in 1788, ships began calling in to the Bay of Islands in the north of the North Island, to replenish supplies, replace masts and so on. They included sealers, then whalers, traders and adventurers, among them several Scandinavians. In the Bay, Kororareko (whose name was changed to Russell by the British) soon developed a reputation for lawlessness, becoming known as ‘the Hell-Hole of the Pacific’. It was here that the first Christian sermon was preached, on Christmas Day 1814.

The preacher was the Rev. Samuel Marsden, chief chaplain at the penal colony and well known as the flogging parson. The Church of England vessel that brought him to the Bay of Islands was captained by an old Danish sea dog, Tomas Hansen. On board were three lay missionaries who were to be left behind. One of them was married to Hansen’s daughter, who was seven months pregnant at the time. So the first European child born in New Zealand was of at least part Scandinavian descent. Unfortunately, he was also the first to die, in infancy, but Hansen’s daughter went on to have ten more children, while her brother, who was also with them, was sent back to NSW to find a wife, returned, and was the father of twelve offspring.