Soli’s Children Come Home
In September 2024, the village of Nataleira welcomed Soli’s children home.
Generations had passed since Losana Nataleira, known as Soli, formed a family with a German named Leonard Boehm. Their descendants had spread across countries, married into other families and acquired other surnames. Yet in Nataleira, on the coast of Viti Levu, the relationship endured.
At the carasala ceremony, descendants returning from overseas met family whose lives had remained rooted in Fiji. The welcome brought distant branches together through the woman they shared.
Nataleira knew who Soli was. Her parentage and her place among its people had been preserved by those responsible for remembering. Through their knowledge, her descendants could place themselves within a history that reached back beyond her lifetime.
To understand how that family began requires following two journeys: Leonard’s across oceans, and the longer journey of the people into whose world he came.
Losana was born around 1840, a daughter of Ratu Joseva Rokomatu. She grew up with her sisters Mereani, Miriama and Vika, among the Navunisea people of Nataleira.
Her ancestors had once lived inland, in the highlands of Tokaimalo. Their movements took them through Nagaralase and Navesi before service to the Ratu o Dawasamu brought them the land that became Nataleira. Their history lived in the names of places, in relationships between families, and in the knowledge passed from one generation to the next.
The village faced the sea, but its identity reached inland. Fishing, cultivation, ceremony and obligations to kin connected its people to both landscapes. A household belonged within a larger network of relatives, neighbours and chiefly relationships. Children inherited a place in that network along with the responsibilities it carried.
This was Losana’s first world.
It was already changing. Ships brought traders and foreign goods into Fijian waters. Missionaries brought Christianity. In Nataleira, Vanisi Racule of the Delai clan helped establish the new faith, which became part of village life alongside enduring relationships with ancestors, land and community.
Losana grew up within that meeting of continuity and change. She belonged to a people with their own history, leadership and understanding of the world, long before a Bavarian sailor entered her story.
Leonard Boehm had begun life far from the Pacific, in Weissenhorn, Bavaria, in 1826.
His early adulthood fell in an unsettled European age. Agricultural hardship and political upheaval sent many people abroad, and the Atlantic carried a growing movement of emigrants towards America. Leonard joined that movement. His journey took him through the French port of Le Havre to New Orleans, where the family’s account identifies him as a young farmer.
From Bavaria to Louisiana, and eventually to the islands of the Pacific, his life followed the shipping routes that were drawing distant places into closer contact. Those routes carried migrants and merchants, missionaries and sailors, crops and manufactured goods. They also carried people into circumstances profoundly different from anything they had known at home.
Leonard reached Fiji on 21 March 1859. His arrival is remembered through an extraordinary episode: a shipwreck near Makogai and an eighteen-mile swim to safety.
He survived, and Fiji became his home.
The islands he entered were governed through powerful Fijian leaders and shifting alliances. Cakobau, Tui Cakau and Ma‘afu were shaping events, while foreign settlers sought land, trade and influence. European newcomers had to negotiate their way into a world whose relationships and authority already existed.
At Levuka, on Ovalau, those encounters were becoming part of everyday life. Ships called at a growing port where merchants, sailors, missionaries and Fijian communities lived in close proximity. Stores, churches, houses and warehouses developed along the waterfront, with steep hills rising behind them. The town would become Fiji’s first colonial capital. 1
For Leonard, acquaintance and opportunity travelled together. Through his maritime connections he came to know a man belonging to Nataleira’s chiefly family. That relationship brought him to the village, where he was introduced to its chief and received favour.
There he met Losana.
Their union, dated in the family history to around 1860, connected Leonard to Nataleira through relationships much deeper than a trading acquaintance. Losana brought her parentage, her sisters, her people and their history into the family they formed.
She became known as Soli, meaning “gift”, a name remembered in connection with her marriage. Across the generations, it would become the name by which an enormous family recognised its common mother.
Their children began arriving soon afterwards. William, also known as Wilhelm, was born in 1860, followed by Louisa in 1861 and Mathilda in 1863. Rosalinda came in 1866, Caroline in 1868, Mary in 1871 and Harry in 1874.
Seven children, born across fourteen years, made a household that belonged to both its parents’ worlds.
The children carried a German surname and Fijian ancestry. Through their father they were connected to a distant European town and the restless movement of people across oceans. Through their mother they belonged to Nataleira and to relatives whose history was held within the village.
Their family life developed alongside Leonard’s work on Kanacea.
In 1865, he purchased half the island from Charles Rebman for forty pounds. The transaction followed an earlier acquisition from Tui Cakau and the removal of Kanacea’s inhabitants to Taveuni. The land on which Leonard established his plantation already had a human history, shaped by the rivalries and decisions of Fiji’s leaders.
Cotton gave the enterprise its opportunity. The American Civil War had disrupted supplies to the world’s textile industry, encouraging growers elsewhere to enter the market. Events in America and demand in Europe reached into the Pacific, changing the value of land and the prospects of men like Leonard.
On Kanacea he grew cotton, built a business and became remembered as the island’s “cotton king”.
The plantation required workers. Leonard recruited people from other Pacific islands, participating in a labour trade that connected Fiji with neighbouring island communities and Queensland. It was a trade marked by unequal power, broken agreements and, in many cases, coercion. The prosperity of plantation households existed alongside the difficult lives of the people whose work sustained them.
For Soli and Leonard, the plantation was also the setting in which their family grew. Mary was born on Kanacea, and the island became one of the places carried forward in the children’s histories.
The rhythm of those years included successive births, the needs of younger children and the growing independence of older ones. While Leonard’s dealings connected the household to ships and markets, Soli connected it to the kinship into which she had been born. Her children’s relationship with Nataleira began with her.
Around them, Fiji continued to change.
Cotton’s promise proved vulnerable to falling prices and destructive weather. Cyclones could undo years of cultivation. Political arrangements shifted as Fijian leaders and settlers confronted mounting pressures. In 1874, Fiji became a British colony; the following year brought the devastating measles epidemic.
These were the conditions through which the Boehm children grew: a world of expanding commerce and uncertain fortunes, of new institutions and old loyalties, where the sea brought both opportunity and danger.
As the older children reached adulthood, the family began extending beyond the original household. Louisa married Emile Stuhlmann in 1877. Mathilda and Rosalinda married in 1883. The arrival of grandchildren began another stage in Soli and Leonard’s lives.
Then, on 23 January 1884, Soli died at Levuka.
She was only about forty-four. Her eldest children were adults, some with families of their own. Harry, the youngest, was still a boy.
She was buried at Draiba, on Ovalau. Her children erected a memorial to her, placing their initials beneath words of filial affection. The inscription remembered her in English and Fijian:
Sa Ra Nanumi Koya Tiko E Na Loloma Na Luvena.
She is remembered with love by her children.
Those words give the family’s story one of its clearest and most intimate expressions. Soli’s children named their relationship to her and made their remembrance lasting. The woman whose name would eventually gather descendants from across the world was first mourned by the sons and daughters who had known her as their mother.
Leonard lived for another thirty-one years.
During that time, children and grandchildren formed households of their own. The family spread through marriages into the Stuhlmann, McLaren, Kirste, Mitchell and Macdonald families, among others. Some descendants travelled abroad; others continued their lives in Fiji.
Mary married Norman Macdonald, whose own journey had brought him from Jamaica through India to Fiji. He and Bunnee, an Indian woman, had already had two children, Agnes and Alexander. With Mary, he raised a large family, adding another set of connections to the descendants of Soli and Leonard.
Among Mary and Norman’s children was Ronald. In the next century, his family’s association with the land at Navesau and its Adventist school would become another chapter in this history of belonging. By then, the story had moved well beyond Leonard’s cotton plantation, continuing through children and grandchildren whose lives were rooted in different parts of Fiji.
Leonard died at Levuka on 9 February 1915, aged eighty-eight.
The young emigrant from Bavaria had spent more than half a century in Fiji. He had survived his arrival, established a plantation, formed a family with Soli, buried her, and lived to see further generations grow.
His death came during a war that placed his country of birth and the British Empire on opposing sides. His family, meanwhile, already crossed the boundaries by which nations divided people. Its relationships extended through Germany, Fiji and the wider world.
Over the decades that followed, distance widened between branches. Names changed through marriage. Children grew up in households whose daily lives could be very different from those of cousins elsewhere. Knowledge travelled unevenly: a remembered name, a photograph, an account told by an older relative, a visit to a grave.
In Nataleira, Soli’s place remained part of the village’s history.
That knowledge made the welcome of 2024 possible. The carasala brought descendants into relationship with the people and place from which their mother’s line had come. Those arriving met other descendants of Losana Nataleira and were received within a family whose history extended beyond the names they had previously known.
For Leonard, the great journey had led away from Bavaria and towards a new life in Fiji. For generations of his and Soli’s descendants, the journey eventually led back.
One hundred and forty years after her death, the remembrance expressed on Soli’s memorial found another form: a village welcome, relatives meeting, and the spoken histories that placed them together.
Soli’s children had come home.