POPULATION-GALAPAGOS: Norwegian Dreams Made Potatoes Grow

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jan Skjelbek

PUERTO AYORA (Galapagos), Ecuador, Oct 19 1999 (IPS) - Thorvaldo Kastdalen, grandson of Thorvald ‘Potato King’ Kastdalen, who emigrated to Galapagos in 1935 and made a fortune from selling potatoes, is today playing an important role in the farming and tourist industry on these Ecuadorian archipelago.

Sixty-four years ago, Thorvaldo’s grandfather started up with 60 hectares on the wild and uncultivated island of Santa Cruz, on the Galapagos archipelago off the Ecuadorian coast, when the islands were not yet a tourist destination.

He came ashore with his wife Marie and their ten year-old son Alf, Thorvaldo’s father. He soon became known on the islands as El Rey de las Patatas (Potato King), because of his impressive achievements in farming.

Now, at the age of 29, his grandchild Thorvaldo owns 219 hectares and a hotel. And the islands are popular among hundreds of thousands of tourists and researchers for its rich wildlife, which includes ancient animal species who survived here glacier ages and cataclysms.

“I guess I have inherited the hard working mentality of my father and grandfather, but what my family and I have today would not have been a reality if the generations before me were not dedicated to work a large number of hours each day,” he says.

The settlement in Puerto Ayora, now the main town on Santa Cruz, was initially started by a group of Norwegians in 1926. They were 45 immigrants, much like those coming now from the South to European shores in search of a better life.

Thorvaldo recalls his grandfather telling him about his first encounter with Santa Cruz and the settlers from the Ulva-expedition. “The passage from my grandpa’s small hometown Rjukan in snowy Norway to the tropical landscape in Puerto Ayora must have been quite an experience.”

“The Norwegians who were already on the island could help them out at the initial stages, but it soon became clear that it was quite an enterprise to set up a wooden house in the thick forest,” he says.

“He was aware of the fact that starting a new life in sunny Galapagos would be quite trying for him and his family, but he never imagined it to be this hot. After only a day or two he had to quite unwillingly introduce the siesta, even though he had sworn on that he would be capable of working day in and day out,” Kastdalen says.

Out of around 200 Norwegian men and women who left their country in exchange for a new life on the islands of the giant turtles off the coast of Ecuador, there is only Thorvaldo who can pass the Norwegian family name onto the next generation.

The majority of those emigrants returned to their homeland only a few years or even just months after arriving, disappointed by the lack of possibilities to make a confortable living out of fishing and farming on the tropical islands.

The island of Santa Cruz, where the Kastdalens embarked, turned out to be a better choice than the smaller island of Floreana, where the majority of the first Norwegian colonists dropped anchor nine years earlier.

Unlike Floreana, Santa Cruz could offer plenty of fresh water and more fertile land for the settlers. But even though Santa Cruz could offer better opportunities for the settlers, the conditions were still harsh and uncertain.

Tomás de Berlanga, the Spanish Bishop of Panama, the first European known to have set foot on the island, was not too impressed on his visit in 1535. In his memoirs he wrote; “it looked as if God had caused a rainstorm of stones”, describing the hardship that laid ahead future generations when settling down on the archipelago.

Rumours of endless beaches and cheap land for sale, were what drew the Norwegian pioneers to the Galapagos Islands.

Rumours had it that on these islands just about every plant or root known to mankind would grow out of the ground effortless, just like magic – a dream for a Norwegian farmer accustomed to ground frost and rocky soil. Set on finding a better place for their families, they decided to leave snowmen and glaciers behind and try their luck on the faraway islands.

The first three Norwegian expeditions that set sail for the Ecuadorian islands in the year 1926 did not find the paradise they were expecting. The low-priced soil turned out to be quite barren rather than fertile, and it soon became evident that there was quite a problem transporting fish and agricultural products to the market on the mainland in Ecuador.

They found themselves in a social environment where there were no churches, social institutions or taverns, and practically no communication at all with the outside world, except two or three boats a-year coming from the mainland.

The population on the islands, which totalled around 500 in the 1930s, was scattered in small communities around the islands.

Nonetheless, what one could easily find on Santa Cruz and many of the other 13 large islands that make up the archipelago, were introduced domestic mammals such as pigs and goats.

They were there for anybody to capture and breed. The problem was that, unlike the European settlers, these animals had adapted so well to their newfound conditions that they soon became a threat to the valuable native creatures. But to the Kastdalens they were only regarded as a blessing.

Thorvaldo and his wife Luisa Mendoza (36) can, unlike many of the other Norwegian settlers on the islands, look back on a history of success almost ever since the first Kastdalen set foot on the island in 1935.

Starting with his grandfather’s achievement in the potato trade and followed up by production of meat and milk by his descendants, the family boasts today that the Kastdalen hacienda houses more than 300 cattle, plus the 1996-built hotel La Estrella del Mar in Puerto Ayora.

In the 1920’s many Norwegians were leaving their country in search of opportunities overseas to escape poverty at home. Avid to grab a hope strong enough to make them leave, people were prey of success stories frequently inflated by local newspapers, which gave birth to the ‘Galapagos- mania.’

On Saturday, 28 February 1925, three months before the ship ‘Floreana’ – named after its planned destination – sailed off on the first Norwegian voyage to Galapagos, a daily newspaper from Oslo, Tidens Tegn, reported about the enthusiastic emigrants.

“Dressed up in carnival-outfits the expedition members are dancing to the latest tunes from Paris in Hotel Atlantic, one of the finest hotels in our capital. The Sandefjord painter Trygve Fleischer have devoted his talent to the jolly assembly by decorating the walls with motives from tropical islands,” the newspaper reported.

“La Noruega”, the Norwegian, is today a diary brand name in the Galapagos. Nobody from Norway is responsible for it, but the name is a trademark signifying quality.

Thorvaldo Kastdalen and his family are one of few examples of Norwegian settlers who can say they have found the paradise that they were looking for on Galapagos, but the modern Viking settlers as a group made a lasting impression on the islands’ modern history.