THE NORWEGIANS
After their permanent move to Appledore Island in 1848, the Laightons all but abandoned Smuttynose, renting out buildings to various friends and to Gosport fishermen. Formerly the hosts of the weather-beaten Mid-Ocean House, the Laightons moved on to become the royal family of Appledore. Thomas Laighton, a Portsmouth poet wrote, was now “King of the Shoals.” Their famous hotel, publicized in newspapers throughout the East, eventually could support up to four hundred guests attended by one hundred staff members. Smuttynose continued to decline. So when Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, a prominent Boston doctor and son of the great navigator Nathaniel Bowditch, rowed from Appledore to Smuttynose in the summer of 1858, he had little good to say. Bowditch wrote to his wife about his trip into the cove:
“A beautiful, smooth beach (very rare in the islands) would make this a most desirable bathing spot, but now through the transparent water from 5 to 25 feet deep we see horrid jaws, shark bones & occasionally huge dead bodies of immense sharks that have been killed & thrown as useless by the fishermen [ . . . ] It was certainly one of the most curious of spectacles, to lean over the gunwale & to watch the various heads and glazed eyes & bits of vertebral columns that met our vision, as the boat glided slowly over them into very deep blue ocean.”
Bowditch had this to say about the old Mid-Ocean House: “One large whitewashed house with rags in the windows has a sign of ‘hotel’ boldly printed on it—but suggestive eminently of bed-bugs, and ominous from the odors that surround it.”
The arrival of the Hontvets and other Norwegians after the Civil War brought balance and purpose back to the former fishing outpost. Maren and John Hontvet were, after all, a fishing family from Norway, a country of hardy maritime families, rocky fiords, lighthouses, and long cold winters. Although the Isles of Shoals can appear “stern, bleak, and unpromising,” Celia Thaxter wrote in her island history, the Hontvets considered themselves blessed to find it. They were mere immigrants who had arrived separately in America speaking a foreign tongue, and yet they were quickly married and settled on what amounted to their own private island with expansive fishing grounds and a sheltered cove. John’s independent fishing venture brought in a living wage and their house, with two small but comfortable apartments, gave them room to expand.
The Hontvets had relatives back in Larvik, a village on Norway’s south coast not far from the capital city of Oslo and the border with Sweden. Larvik is best known today for its Viking archaeology sites and as the hometown of Thor Heyerdahl, the twentieth-century adventurer who sailed five thousand miles of the Pacific Ocean in the Kon-Tiki, a raft that he built himself from reeds and balsa wood. The Norwegians who came to the Isles of Shoals were part of a major migration to America. As many as 250,000 of their countrymen and women, a quarter of the population, left their homeland in this era to find work, buy farmland, avoid taxes, and escape an unpopular political regime. They were, after all, a nation of adventurers and explorers with a centuries-old seafaring tradition. It was the ancient fishermen of Norway who had perfected the process of drying protein-rich codfish on rocks and wooden racks. And it was this portable, long-lasting food source that historians believe fueled the seemingly impossible Viking journeys across the North Sea to colonize the Americas more than five hundred years before Columbus.
John Christian Hontvet was born in 1842 near Larvik in a place called Tønsberg, considered the oldest city in Norway. An archaeological site there shows evidence of a fortified trading post dating to 870 AD. John’s medieval ancestors may have fished from a sturdy, easy-to-build, wooden boat with overlapping planks called “faering.” Broad of beam and highly seaworthy, the faering functioned then, and now, like the Scandinavian version of the sturdy Piscataqua dory, familiar to Shoals’ fishermen. John appears to have arrived in the port of New York as early as 1862, four years before Maren. Whether they knew each other back in Norway is unknown. It is possible that theirs was an arranged marriage or began as one of convenience through correspondence after John had successfully established himself in America and could afford a spouse and helpmate.
Maren Sebeille Christensen, born in 1835, was seven years older than her husband. She grew up in the little village of Kvelde along a riverbank in the municipality of Larvik. She arrived with fellow Norwegians aboard a steamer from Oslo, then called Christiana. Maren first docked at Quebec and found her way to Boston. Arranged marriages were the norm in Norway in the Victorian era, often among cousins or distant relatives. Romance was not usually a factor in such cases. Unless revealing documents turn up, it is fair to assume that the Hontvet match followed the traditional pattern. John was a successful breadwinner and Maren was an excellent housekeeper well over the average marriage age.
Many Norwegian farming families ended up in Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Wisconsin, but New England was attractive to fishermen like John. Maren and John were married on August 17, 1866 in Boston, about two months after Maren’s arrival. We have no photograph of them together. In the rare undated photos that survive, John is fair-haired with close-set eyes, a high forehead, and a thick mustache. With her hair pulled tightly back, in her high Victorian collar, and with her large jaw firmly set, Maren looks inescapably stern. There are no known images of John’s brother, Matthew, who soon followed, or of Maren’s “spinster” sister, Karen, or her attractive sister-in-law, Anethe. A faded group photograph taken in Boston decades after the murder reportedly includes Maren’s brother, Ivan Christensen, by then gray and bearded and remarried. It is likely that John, as the successful patriarch, paid their passage, or more likely that he loaned his relatives the funds that they were obliged to pay back in cash or labor.
John and Maren initially stayed in Boston at 295 North Street in the city’s North End melting pot. Katherine Brown, born in Ireland, and her husband, Edward, born in Germany, took in “boarders of all nations” in Boston. John met Louis Wagner here briefly as the Hontvets were leaving Boston two years later and heading to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Katherine Brown, who also knew Wagner, would later become a key witness for the prosecution in the murder trial. Their connection to the Isles of Shoals appears to have been a fisherman named Christian Johnson, a transitional figure in this saga, who lived with his family at Gosport. Records show Johnson was living on the second floor of a small house on Star Island facing Smuttynose as early as 1860. That winter, Cedric Laighton, writing from Appledore to his married sister, Celia Thaxter, noted that Mr. Johnson of Star Island was traveling in to Portsmouth once or twice every week and keeping the Laighton family well connected with the news on the mainland. Soon afterward, Johnson became a tenant of the Laightons and rented the Red House on Smuttynose, soon to be home to the Hontvets.
A scorecard may be necessary to distinguish the many Johnsons in this story. It is likely that Christian Johnson, while in Boston, met the Hontvets and another Norwegian family, the Ingebretsens, and convinced them to join his fishing operation on the Laighton-owned islands at the Isles of Shoals. Arriving on the Portsmouth waterfront, the Hontvets stayed briefly with Matthew Johnson, whose boarding house would become a prominent scene in the Wagner murder investigation. Matthew Johnson’s wife, Ann, his son, Charles, and his daughter, Mary, would become key witnesses at the trial. And it was Marshal Frank Johnson, head of the Portsmouth police force, who arrested Louis Wagner the day of the murders.
Christian Johnson makes a final appearance here in a strange incident. With prizefighting illegal in the 1860s, big city promoters had been known to stage secret bouts at the isolated Isles of Shoals, far from the prying eyes of the law. On October 2, 1867, two 145-pound contenders, one from New York and the other from Rhode Island, faced off at Smuttynose. The sloping lawn in front of Johnson’s house was roped off to form a twenty-five-foot square outdoor boxing ring. Spectators arrived by steamers and sailboats to see the two pugilists hammer away at each other. The twenty-five-round slugfest lasted roughly an hour and a half. Cedric Laighton, who with his brother Oscar was Johnson’s landlord, opposed the “accursed prizefight” as a “beastly and disgraceful exhibition.” The following year, another boxing match fell apart when some of the visiting ships got lost in a dense fog and the fighters were too seasick for combat after their journey. That same year, the mild-mannered Hontvets apparently set up housekeeping at Smuttynose. Christian Johnson’s lease on Smuttynose ran out in 1871 and he soon disappeared, reportedly drowned at sea.
Celia Thaxter, as her writing proves, was enchanted by the Norwegians who found their way to the Shoals. In her history of the islands, published in the Atlantic Monthly before the murders, Celia told the story of two brave Norwegians caught in a blinding snow squall off Portsmouth. One, possibly Christian Johnson himself, died of exposure while the other was carried helplessly by the sea for two days until he was rescued off Cape Cod. She makes light of a fisherman named Jorges (or “George”) Ingebretsen, whose family was living on the south side of Appledore facing Smuttynose Island. It was Jorges and his son, Waldemar, who would rescue Maren Hontvet on the morning after the murders. His name was so hard to pronounce, Celia wrote, that the Shoalers called him “Carpenter” for no particular reason. In an 1869 letter to his sister, Celia, brother Cedric took the joke one step further, referring to the immigrant with the funny name from Norway as “Carpenter Vultimer Orroarer Inglebrizen.” The Ingebretsens had so many children in their small cottage, Cedric joked, that he could not count them all, and he theorized that the family kept their kids stacked up behind the door like sandwiches. But it was all affectionate fun. Everyone in the Laighton circle had a pet name. In his letters, Cedric referred to himself as “Cedy,” his brother Oscar as “Bocky,” and his sister Celia as “Gwammie.” Smuttynose Island was sometimes called “Smyrna.”
Danes, Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians were all the rage among Victorians. Singer Jenny Lind, “the Swedish Nightingale,” had taken America by storm during her 1851 concert tour under promoter P. T. Barnum. A fascination with the ancient Vikings was sweeping across New England. Influential poets, including James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, all composed romantic verses based on Nordic sagas, and all three men were mentors and island guests of Celia Thaxter. The theory that “Northmen” may have discovered America five hundred years before Christopher Columbus was the topic of serious scholarly lectures and the source of considerable Yankee pride. Despite a paucity of evidence, citizens along the seacoast wondered if the bold blonde explorer Leif Ericson himself had stepped foot within the borders of their town.
“The more I see of the natives of this far-off land,” Celia later wrote in the Atlantic about the Norwegians, “the more I admire the fine qualities which seem to characterize them as a race. Gentle, faithful, intelligent, God-fearing human beings, they daily use such courtesy toward each other and all who come in contact with them, as puts our ruder Yankee manners to shame.” Brother Oscar recalled hiring an immigrant named Mr. Bernsten who was an excellent boat builder. When Mr. Bernsten begin pining for his wife and children in Norway, the Laighton brothers loaned him the money to bring them over and let them live in the Haley Cottage on Smuttynose for free.
But Celia’s rose-colored impression of domestic life among Scandinavians may have been wishful thinking. Her husband, Levi, had not been a good provider and her own marriage was on the rocks. Her view of the Hontvets was formed less by observation than from the idealized “simple folk” depicted in English translations of popular Norwegian novels like those of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. What Celia saw, on the surface, was an orderly but strictly patriarchal society in which men managed the money while the wife, or “keeper of the keys,” managed the household. The married couple worked with great efficiency, but often with repressed, unspoken tensions. Arguments between married Norwegian couples were rare and divorce was almost unheard of.
The smattering of clean, hard-working, humble, and literate Norwegians who found their way to the Shoals stand in contrast, for Celia, to the decaying race of Gosport fishing families in the mid-1800s. Celia praised the few hardy fishermen still living on Star Island, men she described as “Saxon-bearded, broad-shouldered, deep-chested.” But for the most part, she pitied and parodied the bickering crone-like women and the lazy men who lived on Star Island in tiny huts stinking of coal and tobacco smoke. The natives spoke in a unique Shoaler dialect that was barely intelligible to citizens on the mainland just a few miles away.
In Among the Isles of Shoals Celia described coming upon a chubby baby on Star Island. He was tied to a highchair in a fishing family’s hut. The two-year-old was happily eating beans swimming in chunks of fat while drinking hot black coffee. “Aren’t you afraid such strong coffee will kill your baby?” Celia asked the mother. “Oh, no,” the fishwife replied and, pouring the boiling black liquid into the infant, said, “That’ll make you hold your head up.” The child and the entire family soon died of consumption.
Celia’s father, Thomas Laighton, who had purchased four of the Isles of Shoals in 1839 with grand plans to revive the once-profitable fishing industry, died in 1866, leaving his two young sons and his widow, Eliza, in charge of the sprawling Appledore Hotel. This was the same year that Jorges Ingebretsen, the first of the kindly Norwegian patriarchs and his expanding family, settled at Appledore. One branch of the same family, calling themselves the Brentsens, lived for a time in the old Haley Cottage, next door to the Hontvets at Smuttynose.
For Celia and her brothers, following the loss of their powerfully important father, the Norwegians were a godsend. They made great neighbors and they brought renewed hope and centuries of maritime experience to the dying fishing village at the Isles of Shoals. The Scandinavians appeared to be the perfect law-abiding, family-friendly, industrious alternative to the ragtag fishers of Gosport.
And the feeling was mutual. On the arrival of Maren and John Hontvet, Celia wrote, “They rejoiced to find a home just such as they desired in this peaceful place.” Maren was the perfect housewife, Celia noted, keeping the rustic duplex as neat as a pin, putting up curtains and shelves for houseplants, hanging colorful pictures, tending their few chickens, and frolicking with their little dog, Ringe, who reportedly immigrated from Norway with Maren. John was the dutiful husband, earning a decent living fishing aboard the Clara Bella with his brother, Matthew, who also arrived from Norway. The Hontvets also took on extra help when needed from among the unemployed fishermen at Gosport. One wonders, while they were digging privy holes or planting a garden, whether the new residents of Smuttynose turned up chards of pottery, rusted hooks, and the bones of the extinct giant cod left by the bustling fishing operation two centuries before.
Celia’s hope that the people arriving from Norway might establish a permanent “colony” at the Shoals was not a new idea. “The Norwegians are industrious, frugal, intelligent, and moral, and are a very desirable class of emigrants,” the Milwaukee Free Democrat reported a decade before the Civil War. Some Norwegians, mostly Lutherans and Quakers, came seeking religious freedom, but most were seeking jobs in the expanding American labor market. Here, laborers could earn five times the average pay offered in Norway. While some hoped to settle down in the “Land of the Free,” many were simply planning to strike it rich and return to the homeland with their spoils. The great surge of Scandinavians crossed the Atlantic with the Hontvets and the Ingebretsens soon after the Civil War. But the most famous resettlement experiment was the work of one charismatic and wildly popular musician named Ole Bull.
A native of the Norwegian capital of Christiania, the same home region as the Hontvets, Ole Bull and his violin arrived in the United States in 1842 for a two-hundred-site whirlwind concert tour that covered one hundred thousand miles. Ole Bull fell in love with America and with the people who flocked to his performances where he mixed classical standards with Norwegian folk tunes. Powerfully built and “as beautiful as Apollo” with long flowing hair, the young Bull played his violin with a “seraphic rapture” that American audiences had never seen. His athletic movements produced music that was “beyond words,” a newspaper critic reported, and one might as well “imprison the gorgeous colors of the rainbow” than to describe his performance.
A decade later, Ole Bull was wealthy and famous and disenchanted with the politics in his native land. Bull returned to America amid great publicity to found a “New Norway” for the people of his homeland. Bull spent a fortune to establish a utopian settlement on one hundred thousand acres in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. The first one hundred colorfully-clad immigrants arrived from Norway in 1852 and named their colony Oleana in his honor. But Ole Bull, for all his compassion and desire for human rights, was not a successful leader and the experimental colony soon failed.
Undaunted, Ole Bull continued to perform and to tour the world. His journey eventually led him to the Isles of Shoals, very likely in 1869. According to Oscar Laighton, the virtuoso enraptured audiences with a benefit concert in the music room of the Appledore Hotel. The master musician, his flowing mane of hair now gone white, played “divinely,” Oscar reported. Bull raised $365 for the Norwegian families then settling in at the Isles of Shoals. The historical record does not reveal whether John and Maren Hontvet attended the concert, but it is more than possible that they did and were its beneficiaries. Sitting proudly, surrounded by the cultural elite of Boston, the Hontvets were serenaded by the most famous Norwegian of their era. America, it seemed, was truly a place where dreams come true.