Scandinavian migration to the Hawaiian Kingdom occurred in the late 19th century when poor economic conditions in Northern Europe led to successive waves of Nordic immigration to North America. Hundreds of thousands of people left their home countries for better opportunities in the United States. At the same time, in 1875, the governments of the United States and the Kingdom of Hawai'i negotiated and ratified a reciprocity treaty, leading to major investment in the sugar plantations in Hawaii, which required an increase in the labor supply to grow. Planters continued bringing in large numbers of foreign laborers from Asian countries, but now also began to bring in smaller numbers of workers from Europe.
In 1880, acting on behalf of the Kingdom and the planters, Christian L'Orange recruited workers in Drammen, Norway. Newspaper ads promised three-year contracts on sugar plantations for those willing to make the journey. More than 600 signed up for the trip to Hawaii, including single men and entire families with children. The group traveled on board two main ships, with a third ship carrying a smaller number of the group along with mostly German passengers. The ships—the Beta, the Musca, and the Cedar—encountered a rough and dangerous voyage lasting four to six months. Some passengers and crew died during the voyage, mostly children, due to malnourishment along the way. Upon arrival in Hawaii, which was then known as the Sandwich Islands in Europe, the authorities determined that some of the migrants were suffering from starvation.
After an initially difficult voyage, things did not seem to improve for many of them after landfall on Maui and the island of Hawai'i, although some fared better on O'ahu and elsewhere. Some of the migrants believed they were treated unfairly and that their original contract had been changed. Multiple investigations into their alleged mistreatment were made by local authorities, but it was not until the San Francisco Chronicle published their stories of slave-like conditions to the wider world, that an international investigation occurred. The Scandinavian immigrants participated in three of the most significant labor strikes on sugar plantations in Hawaii before annexation, with most, but not all, leaving the islands for California or returning to Europe.
Background
In the 19th century, the Hawaiian islands began to be seen as an ideal location for the sugar cane industry. Its soil fertility, precipitation, and climate were all conducive to cultivating sugar and sugar plantations in Hawaii could produce enormous yields (at the expense of a longer growing season) that dwarfed their competitors elsewhere in the world. The unique nature of the harvesting process required a large and ready labor pool to cut the cane and haul it from the fields to the mill when the cane was still ripe, otherwise the crop would sour, costing the plantations money. By the 1830s, sugar plantations in Hawaii began to rapidly grow as an industry, with at least 22 mills refining sugar in the Hawaiian Kingdom by 1838.Coman 1903, pp. 5–8.
From the beginning, the sugar industry faced a labor scarcity problem, with Native Hawaiians, a then-shrinking labor source since first contact,MacLennan 2014, p. 22; Coman 1903, pp. 6-11. going on general strike for better pay in 1841 at the Ladd & Company sugar plantation in Kōloa, Kauai, the first commercial sugar plantation in Hawaii. The strike was broken after two weeks. By 1850 the labor problem had become intractable and changes were needed. In June, the Hawaii legislature passed An Act for the Government of Masters and Servants (1850), legalizing apprenticeships, indentured service, and allowing for foreign workers to be brought in from outside the Kingdom. The law also allowed for child labor, with children as young as 10 working on the plantations.Valentine 2014, p. 98.
The new law made it difficult for workers to strike, and was said to resemble a kind of slavery.Davis 1962, pp. 3–4. Kamehameha III promoted the first treaty of friendship, commerce, and navigation between the Hawaiian Kingdom and the Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway in 1852. It was ratified under Kamehameha IV in 1855.Hawai'i State Archives 2025. The American Civil War (1861–1865) disrupted the sugarcane industry in Louisiana, which was produced with slave labor and supplied 50% of all U.S. sugar at the time. Sugar prices rose 525% in a few years. With demand for sugar in Hawaii growing, in 1864, the Bureau of Immigration was created to regulate and recruit immigrants to address the labor shortage. The signing of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 gave Hawaiian unrefined sugar tariff-free status in the mainland American marketplace and strengthened the standing of the then small Hawaiian sugar industry for stable investment and future growth.Davis 1962, pp. 2–3; Menton 1989, p. 34-35.
Following the passage of these laws, sugar plantations in Hawaii began importing labor from Asian countries, including workers from China (1852), Japan (1868), Korea (1903), and the Philippines (1904). The difficulty of retaining labor of any ethnicity, the perceived threat of Asian labor to white supremacy, and entrenched racism by elites, led to failed attempts to "Europeanize" the agricultural workforce.Beechert 1985, pp. 85-87. European immigrants came to work on the sugar plantations in lesser numbers, with workers from Portugal, Spain, Germany, Russia, and Italy. The dire problem of labor shortages in Hawaii appeared to have been solved. In just eight years, from 1882 to 1890, sugar plantations increased their labor supply from 8,000 to 18,000 workers, with sugar production more than doubling during that same time from 57,000 to 130,000 tons.Williams 1919, p. 576.
Recruitment
Scandinavians played an important role in the Hawaii sugar industry before their mass migration in 1880s. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century upwards of 800,000 people left Norway, many of them coming to the United States due to economic hardships. By 1853, there were only eight Norwegians living in Hawaii.Davis 1963, p. 28. In 1856, Nordic immigrant and Hawaii sugarcane plantation pioneer Valdemar Emil Knudsen (1820–1898) arrived in Kauai, where he ran the Grove Farm plantation for Hermann A. Widemann along with his partner, ship captain Henrik Christian L'Orange (1843–1916), who was originally from Halden, Norway.Takaki 1985, pp. 32-42.
With the sugar plantation labor shortage looming large, in 1878, L'Orange proposed bringing more workers to the islands from Northern Europe. King Kalākaua authorized the project and commissioned L'Orange as the recruiter. The Bureau of Immigration made his role official in 1880, with Castle & Cooke extending him a letter of credit for $20,000.Satrum 2011, p. 8. L'Orange, as it turns out, had a somewhat checkered past. According to anthropologist Knut M. Rio, "L'Orange at this point already had experience with the 'purchase and sale' of workers and had even been banished from the British African colonies for mistreating workers during transportation. He was also to a certain extent disreputable in the Pacific."Rio 2015, p. 253.
To recruit sugarcane workers, L'Orange took out newspaper advertisements in Drammen on September 15. The ads were followed by an article in the Drammens Tidende which promoted the recruitment drive to potential applicants, making fanciful promises of free pasture for a cow and a horse, and the potential to cultivate land upon arrival in Hawaii. At the time of recruitment, Norway was undergoing a depression and the people were facing unemployment.Davis 1962, p. 1. Labor historian Edward D. Beechert (1920–2014) notes that the recruits "were almost all unemployed craftsmen and artisans and townspeople", who signed up due to poverty and were taken in by stories about Hawaii. With all of these factors at play, the ads were successful, and initially attracted about 630 people who signed up as willing contract laborers.Davis 1963, p. 29. The terms were for a three-year contract, involving either fieldwork (10 hours per day) or mill work (12 hours a day), with four days off per month. The contract included wages of $9 per month , board and lodging, and healthcare. Violations of the contract could lead to fines and even imprisonment.
Voyage
In late 1880, two barques left Drammen carrying more than 600 Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes. A third barque, the Cedar, left Bremen, Germany, in early 1881, carrying mostly Germans, but also ten Norwegians and four Swedes.Satrum 2011, pp. 9-10; Bark Cedar. Bremen, Germany to Honolulu, Hawaii 18 June 1881. Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild (ISTG). Retrieved May 4, 2025. The Cedar was part of a larger effort to bring German workers to the sugar plantations on the island of Kauai, and was joined by the Ioloni (1882) and the Ehrenfels (1883), which transported an additional 1000 Germans to Kauai over the next several years.Joesting 1984, pp. 223-227. Approximately 648 contract laborers eventually arrived in the Kingdom of Hawai'i between February and July 1881, composed of 613 Norwegians, 31 Swedes, and four Danes.
Beta The Norwegian barque left Drammen on October 27, 1880, under the command of Captain C. Rist-Christensen. The Beta carried 396 passengers, composed of 327 adults and 69 children. After leaving Drammen, the Beta sailed for 15,000 nautical miles through the North Sea, encountering poor conditions, including rough water and storms. Another ship carrying passengers had overturned with no survivors along their route. They later discovered that it had been falsely reported as their own, and their friends and relatives thought they had all died.Satrum 2011, p. 11. They next headed out to the Atlantic Ocean. They were going to sail around South America and Cape Horn using the Drake Passage, but they sailed through the Strait of Magellan instead. Using the strait allowed them to reduce the overall length of their journey by a month.Davis 1962, pp. 8-9.
After successfully navigating through the strait on Christmas Eve, the Captain celebrated by distributing hot toddies to all adults on board. Amidst these good tidings, things took a turn for the worse on New Year's Eve when a fire broke out before it was eventually suppressed. The ship then headed up the coast of Chile and stopped in Valparaíso for provisions before traversing the Pacific Ocean towards the Hawaiian Islands, then known as the Sandwich Islands. Access to fresh food and water was a problem. The limited diet consisted of hard bread, salt dried fish, barley, peas, flour, and rarely, meat. The journey took them four months.
The Beta arrived first in the Hawaiian Islands on February 18, 1881.San Francisco Chronicle 1881, "The Beta, Sandwich Islands", p. 3. After traveling for four months, they set anchor at McGregor Point and disembarked at Mā'alaea Landing. Because the passengers arrived on the dry, leeward side of the island, which sits in the rain shadow of Haleakalā, it is thought that the barren and desolate sight might have contributed to the anxiety of the migrants. Whale boat tenders transferred them to the shore, where according to one Swedish eyewitness, they were given numbers and a lottery was held, dividing up the workers who would be split up and taken to plantations on different islands. The lottery divided up some families, where "brother was separated from brother, father from son and brother from sister". Married couples were kept together. The migrants believed they were treated harshly by the plantation managers, later comparing it to that of a slave market in a complaint that made its way to the Consul General for Sweden and Norway.Davis 1962, p. 11.
Musca