Transcribed from the 1912 Swanston edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




A FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY
EIGHT YEARS OF TROUBLE IN SAMOA
by Robert Louis Stevenson




PREFACE


An affair which might be deemed worthy of a note of a few lines in any
general history has been here expanded to the size of a volume or large
pamphlet.  The smallness of the scale, and the singularity of the manners
and events and many of the characters, considered, it is hoped that, in
spite of its outlandish subject, the sketch may find readers.  It has
been a task of difficulty.  Speed was essential, or it might come too
late to be of any service to a distracted country.  Truth, in the midst
of conflicting rumours and in the dearth of printed material, was often
hard to ascertain, and since most of those engaged were of my personal
acquaintance, it was often more than delicate to express.  I must
certainly have erred often and much; it is not for want of trouble taken
nor of an impartial temper.  And if my plain speaking shall cost me any
of the friends that I still count, I shall be sorry, but I need not be
ashamed.

In one particular the spelling of Samoan words has been altered; and the
characteristic nasal _n_ of the language written throughout _ng_ instead
of _g_.  Thus I put Pango-Pango, instead of Pago-Pago; the sound being
that of soft _ng_ in English, as in _singer_, not as in _finger_.

R. L. S.
VAILIMA,
UPOLU,
SAMOA.




CHAPTER I--THE ELEMENTS OF DISCORD: NATIVE


The story I have to tell is still going on as I write; the characters are
alive and active; it is a piece of contemporary history in the most exact
sense.  And yet, for all its actuality and the part played in it by mails
and telegraphs and iron war-ships, the ideas and the manners of the
native actors date back before the Roman Empire.  They are Christians,
church-goers, singers of hymns at family worship, hardy cricketers; their
books are printed in London by Spottiswoode, Trubner, or the Tract
Society; but in most other points they are the contemporaries of our
tattooed ancestors who drove their chariots on the wrong side of the
Roman wall.  We have passed the feudal system; they are not yet clear of
the patriarchal.  We are in the thick of the age of finance; they are in
a period of communism.  And this makes them hard to understand.

To us, with our feudal ideas, Samoa has the first appearance of a land of
despotism.  An elaborate courtliness marks the race alone among
Polynesians; terms of ceremony fly thick as oaths on board a ship;
commoners my-lord each other when they meet--and urchins as they play
marbles.  And for the real noble a whole private dialect is set apart.
The common names for an axe, for blood, for bamboo, a bamboo knife, a
pig, food, entrails, and an oven are taboo in his presence, as the common
names for a bug and for many offices and members of the body are taboo in
the drawing-rooms of English ladies.  Special words are set apart for his
leg, his face, his hair, his belly, his eyelids, his son, his daughter,
his wife, his wife's pregnancy, his wife's adultery, adultery with his
wife, his dwelling, his spear, his comb, his sleep, his dreams, his
anger, the mutual anger of several chiefs, his food, his pleasure in
eating, the food and eating of his pigeons, his ulcers, his cough, his
sickness, his recovery, his death, his being carried on a bier, the
exhumation of his bones, and his skull after death.  To address these
demigods is quite a branch of knowledge, and he who goes to visit a high
chief does well to make sure of the competence of his interpreter.  To
complete the picture, the same word signifies the watching of a virgin
and the warding of a chief; and the same word means to cherish a chief
and to fondle a favourite child.

Men like us, full of memories of feudalism, hear of a man so addressed,
so flattered, and we leap at once to the conclusion that he is hereditary
and absolute.  Hereditary he is; born of a great family, he must always
be a man of mark; but yet his office is elective and (in a weak sense) is
held on good behaviour.  Compare the case of a Highland chief: born one
of the great ones of his clan, he was sometimes appointed its chief
officer and conventional father; was loved, and respected, and served,
and fed, and died for implicitly, if he gave loyalty a chance; and yet if
he sufficiently outraged clan sentiment, was liable to deposition.  As to
authority, the parallel is not so close.  Doubtless the Samoan chief, if
he be popular, wields a great influence; but it is limited.  Important
matters are debated in a fono, or native parliament, with its feasting
and parade, its endless speeches and polite genealogical allusions.
Debated, I say--not decided; for even a small minority will often strike
a clan or a province impotent.  In the midst of these ineffective
councils the chief sits usually silent: a kind of a gagged audience for
village orators.  And the deliverance of the fono seems (for the moment)
to be final.  The absolute chiefs of Tahiti and Hawaii were addressed as
plain John and Thomas; the chiefs of Samoa are surfeited with lip-honour,
but the seat and extent of their actual authority is hard to find.

It is so in the members of the state, and worse in the belly.  The idea
of a sovereign pervades the air; the name we have; the thing we are not
so sure of.  And the process of election to the chief power is a mystery.
Certain provinces have in their gift certain high titles, or _names_, as
they are called.  These can only be attributed to the descendants of
particular lines.  Once granted, each name conveys at once the
principality (whatever that be worth) of the province which bestows it,
and counts as one suffrage towards the general sovereignty of Samoa.  To
be indubitable king, they say, or some of them say,--I find few in
perfect harmony,--a man should resume five of these names in his own
person.  But the case is purely hypothetical; local jealousy forbids its
occurrence.  There are rival provinces, far more concerned in the
prosecution of their rivalry than in the choice of a right man for king.
If one of these shall have bestowed its name on competitor A, it will be
the signal and the sufficient reason for the other to bestow its name on
competitor B or C.  The majority of Savaii and that of Aana are thus in
perennial opposition.  Nor is this all.  In 1881, Laupepa, the present
king, held the three names of Malietoa, Natoaitele, and Tamasoalii;
Tamasese held that of Tuiaana; and Mataafa that of Tuiatua.  Laupepa had
thus a majority of suffrages; he held perhaps as high a proportion as can
be hoped in these distracted islands; and he counted among the number the
preponderant name of Malietoa.  Here, if ever, was an election.  Here, if
a king were at all possible, was the king.  And yet the natives were not
satisfied.  Laupepa was crowned, March 19th; and next month, the
provinces of Aana and Atua met in joint parliament, and elected their own
two princes, Tamasese and Mataafa, to an alternate monarchy, Tamasese
taking the first trick of two years.  War was imminent, when the consuls
interfered, and any war were preferable to the terms of the peace which
they procured.  By the Lackawanna treaty, Laupepa was confirmed king, and
Tamasese set by his side in the nondescript office of vice-king.  The
compromise was not, I am told, without precedent; but it lacked all
appearance of success.  To the constitution of Samoa, which was already
all wheels and no horses, the consuls had added a fifth wheel.  In
addition to the old conundrum, "Who is the king?" they had supplied a new
one, "What is the vice-king?"

Two royal lines; some cloudy idea of alternation between the two; an
electorate in which the vote of each province is immediately effectual,
as regards itself, so that every candidate who attains one name becomes a
perpetual and dangerous competitor for the other four: such are a few of
the more trenchant absurdities.  Many argue that the whole idea of
sovereignty is modern and imported; but it seems impossible that anything
so foolish should have been suddenly devised, and the constitution bears
on its front the marks of dotage.

But the king, once elected and nominated, what does he become?  It may be
said he remains precisely as he was.  Election to one of the five names
is significant; it brings not only dignity but power, and the holder is
secure, from that moment, of a certain following in war.  But I cannot
find that the further step of election to the kingship implies anything
worth mention.  The successful candidate is now the _Tupu o Samoa_--much
good may it do him!  He can so sign himself on proclamations, which it
does not follow that any one will heed.  He can summon parliaments; it
does not follow they will assemble.  If he be too flagrantly disobeyed,
he can go to war.  But so he could before, when he was only the chief of
certain provinces.  His own provinces will support him, the provinces of
his rivals will take the field upon the other part; just as before.  In
so far as he is the holder of any of the five _names_, in short, he is a
man to be reckoned with; in so far as he is king of Samoa, I cannot find
but what the president of a college debating society is a far more
formidable officer.  And unfortunately, although the credit side of the
account proves thus imaginary, the debit side is actual and heavy.  For
he is now set up to be the mark of consuls; he will be badgered to raise
taxes, to make roads, to punish crime, to quell rebellion: and how he is
to do it is not asked.

If I am in the least right in my presentation of this obscure matter, no
one need be surprised to hear that the land is full of war and rumours of
war.  Scarce a year goes by but what some province is in arms, or sits
sulky and menacing, holding parliaments, disregarding the king's
proclamations and planting food in the bush, the first step of military
preparation.  The religious sentiment of the people is indeed for peace
at any price; no pastor can bear arms; and even the layman who does so is
denied the sacraments.  In the last war the college of Malua, where the
picked youth are prepared for the ministry, lost but a single student;
the rest, in the bosom of a bleeding country, and deaf to the voices of
vanity and honour, peacefully pursued their studies.  But if the church
looks askance on war, the warrior in no extremity of need or passion
forgets his consideration for the church.  The houses and gardens of her
ministers stand safe in the midst of armies; a way is reserved for
themselves along the beach, where they may be seen in their white kilts
and jackets openly passing the lines, while not a hundred yards behind
the skirmishers will be exchanging the useless volleys of barbaric
warfare.  Women are also respected; they are not fired upon; and they are
suffered to pass between the hostile camps, exchanging gossip, spreading
rumour, and divulging to either army the secret councils of the other.
This is plainly no savage war; it has all the punctilio of the barbarian,
and all his parade; feasts precede battles, fine dresses and songs
decorate and enliven the field; and the young soldier comes to camp
burning (on the one hand) to distinguish himself by acts of valour, and
(on the other) to display his acquaintance with field etiquette.  Thus
after Mataafa became involved in hostilities against the Germans, and had
another code to observe beside his own, he was always asking his white
advisers if "things were done correctly."  Let us try to be as wise as
Mataafa, and to conceive that etiquette and morals differ in one country
and another.  We shall be the less surprised to find Samoan war defaced
with some unpalatable customs.  The childish destruction of fruit-trees
in an enemy's country cripples the resources of Samoa; and the habit of
head-hunting not only revolts foreigners, but has begun to exercise the
minds of the natives themselves.  Soon after the German heads were taken,
Mr. Carne, Wesleyan missionary, had occasion to visit Mataafa's camp, and
spoke of the practice with abhorrence.  "Misi Kane," said one chief, "we
have just been puzzling ourselves to guess where that custom came from.
But, Misi, is it not so that when David killed Goliath, he cut off his
head and carried it before the king?"

With the civil life of the inhabitants we have far less to do; and yet
even here a word of preparation is inevitable.  They are easy, merry, and
pleasure-loving; the gayest, though by far from either the most capable
or the most beautiful of Polynesians.  Fine dress is a passion, and makes
a Samoan festival a thing of beauty.  Song is almost ceaseless.  The
boatman sings at the oar, the family at evening worship, the girls at
night in the guest-house, sometimes the workman at his toil.  No occasion
is too small for the poets and musicians; a death, a visit, the day's
news, the day's pleasantry, will be set to rhyme and harmony.  Even half-
grown girls, the occasion arising, fashion words and train choruses of
children for its celebration.  Song, as with all Pacific islanders, goes
hand in hand with the dance, and both shade into the drama.  Some of the
performances are indecent and ugly, some only dull; others are pretty,
funny, and attractive.  Games are popular.  Cricket-matches, where a
hundred played upon a side, endured at times for weeks, and ate up the
country like the presence of an army.  Fishing, the daily bath,
flirtation; courtship, which is gone upon by proxy; conversation, which
is largely political; and the delights of public oratory, fill in the
long hours.

But the special delight of the Samoan is the _malanga_.  When people form
a party and go from village to village, junketing and gossiping, they are
said to go on a _malanga_.  Their songs have announced their approach ere
they arrive; the guest-house is prepared for their reception; the virgins
of the village attend to prepare the kava bowl and entertain them with
the dance; time flies in the enjoyment of every pleasure which an
islander conceives; and when the _malanga_ sets forth, the same welcome
and the same joys expect them beyond the next cape, where the nearest
village nestles in its grove of palms.  To the visitors it is all golden;
for the hosts, it has another side.  In one or two words of the language
the fact peeps slyly out.  The same word (_afemoeina_) expresses "a long
call" and "to come as a calamity"; the same word (_lesolosolou_)
signifies "to have no intermission of pain" and "to have no cessation, as
in the arrival of visitors"; and _soua_, used of epidemics, bears the
sense of being overcome as with "fire, flood, or visitors."  But the gem
of the dictionary is the verb _alovao_, which illustrates its pages like
a humorous woodcut.  It is used in the sense of "to avoid visitors," but
it means literally "hide in the wood."  So, by the sure hand of popular
speech, we have the picture of the house deserted, the _malanga_
disappointed, and the host that should have been quaking in the bush.

We are thus brought to the beginning of a series of traits of manners,
highly curious in themselves, and essential to an understanding of the
war.  In Samoa authority sits on the one hand entranced; on the other,
property stands bound in the midst of chartered marauders.  What property
exists is vested in the family, not in the individual; and of the loose
communism in which a family dwells, the dictionary may yet again help us
to some idea.  I find a string of verbs with the following senses: to
deal leniently with, as in helping oneself from a family plantation; to
give away without consulting other members of the family; to go to
strangers for help instead of to relatives; to take from relatives
without permission; to steal from relatives; to have plantations robbed
by relatives.  The ideal of conduct in the family, and some of its
depravations, appear here very plainly.  The man who (in a native word of
praise) is _mata-ainga_, a race-regarder, has his hand always open to his
kindred; the man who is not (in a native term of contempt) _noa_, knows
always where to turn in any pinch of want or extremity of laziness.
Beggary within the family--and by the less self-respecting, without
it--has thus grown into a custom and a scourge, and the dictionary teems
with evidence of its abuse.  Special words signify the begging of food,
of uncooked food, of fish, of pigs, of pigs for travellers, of pigs for
stock, of taro, of taro-tops, of taro-tops for planting, of tools, of
flyhooks, of implements for netting pigeons, and of mats.  It is true the
beggar was supposed in time to make a return, somewhat as by the Roman
contract of _mutuum_.  But the obligation was only moral; it could not
be, or was not, enforced; as a matter of fact, it was disregarded.  The
language had recently to borrow from the Tahitians a word for debt; while
by a significant excidence, it possessed a native expression for the
failure to pay--"to omit to make a return for property begged."  Conceive
now the position of the householder besieged by harpies, and all defence
denied him by the laws of honour.  The sacramental gesture of refusal,
his last and single resource, was supposed to signify "my house is
destitute."  Until that point was reached, in other words, the conduct
prescribed for a Samoan was to give and to continue giving.  But it does
not appear he was at all expected to give with a good grace.  The
dictionary is well stocked with expressions standing ready, like
missiles, to be discharged upon the locusts--"troop of shamefaced ones,"
"you draw in your head like a tern," "you make your voice small like a
whistle-pipe," "you beg like one delirious"; and the verb _pongitai_, "to
look cross," is equipped with the pregnant rider, "as at the sight of
beggars."

This insolence of beggars and the weakness of proprietors can only be
illustrated by examples.  We have a girl in our service to whom we had
given some finery, that she might wait at table, and (at her own request)
some warm clothing against the cold mornings of the bush.  She went on a
visit to her family, and returned in an old tablecloth, her whole
wardrobe having been divided out among relatives in the course of twenty-
four hours.  A pastor in the province of Atua, being a handy, busy man,
bought a boat for a hundred dollars, fifty of which he paid down.
Presently after, relatives came to him upon a visit and took a fancy to
his new possession.  "We have long been wanting a boat," said they.  "Give
us this one."  So, when the visit was done, they departed in the boat.
The pastor, meanwhile, travelled into Savaii the best way he could, sold
a parcel of land, and begged mats among his other relatives, to pay the
remainder of the price of the boat which was no longer his.  You might
think this was enough; but some months later, the harpies, having broken
a thwart, brought back the boat to be repaired and repainted by the
original owner.

Such customs, it might be argued, being double-edged, will ultimately
right themselves.  But it is otherwise in practice.  Such folk as the
pastor's harpy relatives will generally have a boat, and will never have
paid for it; such men as the pastor may have sometimes paid for a boat,
but they will never have one.  It is there as it is with us at home: the
measure of the abuse of either system is the blackness of the individual
heart.  The same man, who would drive his poor relatives from his own
door in England, would besiege in Samoa the doors of the rich; and the
essence of the dishonesty in either case is to pursue one's own advantage
and to be indifferent to the losses of one's neighbour.  But the
particular drawback of the Polynesian system is to depress and stagger
industry.  To work more is there only to be more pillaged; to save is
impossible.  The family has then made a good day of it when all are
filled and nothing remains over for the crew of free-booters; and the
injustice of the system begins to be recognised even in Samoa.  One
native is said to have amassed a certain fortune; two clever lads have
individually expressed to us their discontent with a system which taxes
industry to pamper idleness; and I hear that in one village of Savaii a
law has been passed forbidding gifts under the penalty of a sharp fine.

Under this economic regimen, the unpopularity of taxes, which strike all
at the same time, which expose the industrious to a perfect siege of
mendicancy, and the lazy to be actually condemned to a day's labour, may
be imagined without words.  It is more important to note the concurrent
relaxation of all sense of property.  From applying for help to kinsmen
who are scarce permitted to refuse, it is but a step to taking from them
(in the dictionary phrase) "without permission"; from that to theft at
large is but a hair's-breadth.




CHAPTER II--THE ELEMENTS OF DISCORD: FOREIGN


The huge majority of Samoans, like other God-fearing folk in other
countries, are perfectly content with their own manners.  And upon one
condition, it is plain they might enjoy themselves far beyond the average
of man.  Seated in islands very rich in food, the idleness of the many
idle would scarce matter; and the provinces might continue to bestow
their names among rival pretenders, and fall into war and enjoy that a
while, and drop into peace and enjoy that, in a manner highly to be
envied.  But the condition--that they should be let alone--is now no
longer possible.  More than a hundred years ago, and following closely on
the heels of Cook, an irregular invasion of adventurers began to swarm
about the isles of the Pacific.  The seven sleepers of Polynesia stand,
still but half aroused, in the midst of the century of competition.  And
the island races, comparable to a shopful of crockery launched upon the
stream of time, now fall to make their desperate voyage among pots of
brass and adamant.

Apia, the port and mart, is the seat of the political sickness of Samoa.
At the foot of a peaked, woody mountain, the coast makes a deep indent,
roughly semicircular.  In front the barrier reef is broken by the fresh
water of the streams; if the swell be from the north, it enters almost
without diminution; and the war-ships roll dizzily at their moorings, and
along the fringing coral which follows the configuration of the beach,
the surf breaks with a continuous uproar.  In wild weather, as the world
knows, the roads are untenable.  Along the whole shore, which is
everywhere green and level and overlooked by inland mountain-tops, the
town lies drawn out in strings and clusters.  The western horn is
Mulinuu, the eastern, Matautu; and from one to the other of these
extremes, I ask the reader to walk.  He will find more of the history of
Samoa spread before his eyes in that excursion, than has yet been
collected in the blue-books or the white-books of the world.  Mulinuu
(where the walk is to begin) is a flat, wind-swept promontory, planted
with palms, backed against a swamp of mangroves, and occupied by a rather
miserable village.  The reader is informed that this is the proper
residence of the Samoan kings; he will be the more surprised to observe a
board set up, and to read that this historic village is the property of
the German firm.  But these boards, which are among the commonest
features of the landscape, may be rather taken to imply that the claim
has been disputed.  A little farther east he skirts the stores, offices,
and barracks of the firm itself.  Thence he will pass through Matafele,
the one really town-like portion of this long string of villages, by
German bars and stores and the German consulate; and reach the Catholic
mission and cathedral standing by the mouth of a small river.  The bridge
which crosses here (bridge of Mulivai) is a frontier; behind is Matafele;
beyond, Apia proper; behind, Germans are supreme; beyond, with but few
exceptions, all is Anglo-Saxon.  Here the reader will go forward past the
stores of Mr. Moors (American) and Messrs. MacArthur (English); past the
English mission, the office of the English newspaper, the English church,
and the old American consulate, till he reaches the mouth of a larger
river, the Vaisingano.  Beyond, in Matautu, his way takes him in the
shade of many trees and by scattered dwellings, and presently brings him
beside a great range of offices, the place and the monument of a German
who fought the German firm during his life.  His house (now he is dead)
remains pointed like a discharged cannon at the citadel of his old
enemies.  Fitly enough, it is at present leased and occupied by
Englishmen.  A little farther, and the reader gains the eastern flanking
angle of the bay, where stands the pilot-house and signal-post, and
whence he can see, on the line of the main coast of the island, the
British and the new American consulates.

The course of his walk will have been enlivened by a considerable to and
fro of pleasure and business.  He will have encountered many varieties of
whites,--sailors, merchants, clerks, priests, Protestant missionaries in
their pith helmets, and the nondescript hangers-on of any island beach.
And the sailors are sometimes in considerable force; but not the
residents.  He will think at times there are more signboards than men to
own them.  It may chance it is a full day in the harbour; he will then
have seen all manner of ships, from men-of-war and deep-sea packets to
the labour vessels of the German firm and the cockboat island schooner;
and if he be of an arithmetical turn, he may calculate that there are
more whites afloat in Apia bay than whites ashore in the whole
Archipelago.  On the other hand, he will have encountered all ranks of
natives, chiefs and pastors in their scrupulous white clothes; perhaps
the king himself, attended by guards in uniform; smiling policemen with
their pewter stars; girls, women, crowds of cheerful children.  And he
will have asked himself with some surprise where these reside.  Here and
there, in the back yards of European establishments, he may have had a
glimpse of a native house elbowed in a corner; but since he left Mulinuu,
none on the beach where islanders prefer to live, scarce one on the line
of street.  The handful of whites have everything; the natives walk in a
foreign town.  A year ago, on a knoll behind a bar-room, he might have
observed a native house guarded by sentries and flown over by the
standard of Samoa.  He would then have been told it was the seat of
government, driven (as I have to relate) over the Mulivai and from beyond
the German town into the Anglo-Saxon.  To-day, he will learn it has been
carted back again to its old quarters.  And he will think it significant
that the king of the islands should be thus shuttled to and fro in his
chief city at the nod of aliens.  And then he will observe a feature more
significant still: a house with some concourse of affairs, policemen and
idlers hanging by, a man at a bank-counter overhauling manifests, perhaps
a trial proceeding in the front verandah, or perhaps the council breaking
up in knots after a stormy sitting.  And he will remember that he is in
the _Eleele Sa_, the "Forbidden Soil," or Neutral Territory of the
treaties; that the magistrate whom he has just seen trying native
criminals is no officer of the native king's; and that this, the only
port and place of business in the kingdom, collects and administers its
own revenue for its own behoof by the hands of white councillors and
under the supervision of white consuls.  Let him go further afield.  He
will find the roads almost everywhere to cease or to be made impassable
by native pig-fences, bridges to be quite unknown, and houses of the
whites to become at once a rare exception.  Set aside the German
plantations, and the frontier is sharp.  At the boundary of the _Eleele
Sa_, Europe ends, Samoa begins.  Here, then, is a singular state of
affairs: all the money, luxury, and business of the kingdom centred in
one place; that place excepted from the native government and
administered by whites for whites; and the whites themselves holding it
not in common but in hostile camps, so that it lies between them like a
bone between two dogs, each growling, each clutching his own end.

Should Apia ever choose a coat of arms, I have a motto ready: "Enter
Rumour painted full of tongues."  The majority of the natives do
extremely little; the majority of the whites are merchants with some four
mails in the month, shopkeepers with some ten or twenty customers a day,
and gossip is the common resource of all.  The town hums to the day's
news, and the bars are crowded with amateur politicians.  Some are office-
seekers, and earwig king and consul, and compass the fall of officials,
with an eye to salary.  Some are humorists, delighted with the pleasure
of faction for itself.   "I never saw so good a place as this Apia," said
one of these; "you can be in a new conspiracy every day!"  Many, on the
other hand, are sincerely concerned for the future of the country.  The
quarters are so close and the scale is so small, that perhaps not any one
can be trusted always to preserve his temper.  Every one tells everything
he knows; that is our country sickness.  Nearly every one has been
betrayed at times, and told a trifle more; the way our sickness takes the
predisposed.  And the news flies, and the tongues wag, and fists are
shaken.  Pot boil and caldron bubble!

Within the memory of man, the white people of Apia lay in the worst
squalor of degradation.  They are now unspeakably improved, both men and
women.  To-day they must be called a more than fairly respectable
population, and a much more than fairly intelligent.  The whole would
probably not fill the ranks of even an English half-battalion, yet there
are a surprising number above the average in sense, knowledge, and
manners.  The trouble (for Samoa) is that they are all here after a
livelihood.  Some are sharp practitioners, some are famous (justly or
not) for foul play in business.  Tales fly.  One merchant warns you
against his neighbour; the neighbour on the first occasion is found to
return the compliment: each with a good circumstantial story to the
proof.  There is so much copra in the islands, and no more; a man's share
of it is his share of bread; and commerce, like politics, is here
narrowed to a focus, shows its ugly side, and becomes as personal as
fisticuffs.  Close at their elbows, in all this contention, stands the
native looking on.  Like a child, his true analogue, he observes,
apprehends, misapprehends, and is usually silent.  As in a child, a
considerable intemperance of speech is accompanied by some power of
secrecy.  News he publishes; his thoughts have often to be dug for.  He
looks on at the rude career of the dollar-hunt, and wonders.  He sees
these men rolling in a luxury beyond the ambition of native kings; he
hears them accused by each other of the meanest trickery; he knows some
of them to be guilty; and what is he to think?  He is strongly conscious
of his own position as the common milk-cow; and what is he to do?  "Surely
these white men on the beach are not great chiefs?" is a common question,
perhaps asked with some design of flattering the person questioned.  And
one, stung by the last incident into an unusual flow of English, remarked
to me: "I begin to be weary of white men on the beach."

But the true centre of trouble, the head of the boil of which Samoa
languishes, is the German firm.  From the conditions of business, a great
island house must ever be an inheritance of care; and it chances that the
greatest still afoot has its chief seat in Apia bay, and has sunk the
main part of its capital in the island of Upolu.  When its founder, John
Caesar Godeffroy, went bankrupt over Russian paper and Westphalian iron,
his most considerable asset was found to be the South Sea business.  This
passed (I understand) through the hands of Baring Brothers in London, and
is now run by a company rejoicing in the Gargantuan name of the _Deutsche
Handels und Plantagen Gesellschaft fur Sud-See Inseln zu Hamburg_.  This
piece of literature is (in practice) shortened to the D. H. and P. G.,
the Old Firm, the German Firm, the Firm, and (among humorists) the Long
Handle Firm.  Even from the deck of an approaching ship, the island is
seen to bear its signature--zones of cultivation showing in a more vivid
tint of green on the dark vest of forest.  The total area in use is near
ten thousand acres.  Hedges of fragrant lime enclose, broad avenues
intersect them.  You shall walk for hours in parks of palm-tree alleys,
regular, like soldiers on parade; in the recesses of the hills you may
stumble on a mill-house, toiling and trembling there, fathoms deep in
superincumbent forest.  On the carpet of clean sward, troops of horses
and herds of handsome cattle may be seen to browse; and to one accustomed
to the rough luxuriance of the tropics, the appearance is of fairyland.
The managers, many of them German sea-captains, are enthusiastic in their
new employment.  Experiment is continually afoot: coffee and cacao, both
of excellent quality, are among the more recent outputs; and from one
plantation quantities of pineapples are sent at a particular season to
the Sydney markets.  A hundred and fifty thousand pounds of English
money, perhaps two hundred thousand, lie sunk in these magnificent
estates.  In estimating the expense of maintenance quite a fleet of ships
must be remembered, and a strong staff of captains, supercargoes,
overseers, and clerks.  These last mess together at a liberal board; the
wages are high, and the staff is inspired with a strong and pleasing
sentiment of loyalty to their employers.

Seven or eight hundred imported men and women toil for the company on
contracts of three or of five years, and at a hypothetical wage of a few
dollars in the month.  I am now on a burning question: the labour
traffic; and I shall ask permission in this place only to touch it with
the tongs.  Suffice it to say that in Queensland, Fiji, New Caledonia,
and Hawaii it has been either suppressed or placed under close public
supervision.  In Samoa, where it still flourishes, there is no regulation
of which the public receives any evidence; and the dirty linen of the
firm, if there be any dirty, and if it be ever washed at all, is washed
in private.  This is unfortunate, if Germans would believe it.  But they
have no idea of publicity, keep their business to themselves, rather
affect to "move in a mysterious way," and are naturally incensed by
criticisms, which they consider hypocritical, from men who would import
"labour" for themselves, if they could afford it, and would probably
maltreat them if they dared.  It is said the whip is very busy on some of
the plantations; it is said that punitive extra-labour, by which the
thrall's term of service is extended, has grown to be an abuse; and it is
complained that, even where that term is out, much irregularity occurs in
the repatriation of the discharged.  To all this I can say nothing, good
or bad.  A certain number of the thralls, many of them wild negritos from
the west, have taken to the bush, harbour there in a state partly
bestial, or creep into the back quarters of the town to do a day's
stealthy labour under the nose of their proprietors.  Twelve were
arrested one morning in my own boys' kitchen.  Farther in the bush, huts,
small patches of cultivation, and smoking ovens, have been found by
hunters.  There are still three runaways in the woods of Tutuila, whither
they escaped upon a raft.  And the Samoans regard these dark-skinned
rangers with extreme alarm; the fourth refugee in Tutuila was shot down
(as I was told in that island) while carrying off the virgin of a
village; and tales of cannibalism run round the country, and the natives
shudder about the evening fire.  For the Samoans are not cannibals, do
not seem to remember when they were, and regard the practice with a
disfavour equal to our own.

The firm is Gulliver among the Lilliputs; and it must not be forgotten,
that while the small, independent traders are fighting for their own
hand, and inflamed with the usual jealousy against corporations, the
Germans are inspired with a sense of the greatness of their affairs and
interests.  The thought of the money sunk, the sight of these costly and
beautiful plantations, menaced yearly by the returning forest, and the
responsibility of administering with one hand so many conjunct fortunes,
might well nerve the manager of such a company for desperate and
questionable deeds.  Upon this scale, commercial sharpness has an air of
patriotism; and I can imagine the man, so far from haggling over the
scourge for a few Solomon islanders, prepared to oppress rival firms,
overthrow inconvenient monarchs, and let loose the dogs of war.  Whatever
he may decide, he will not want for backing.  Every clerk will be eager
to be up and strike a blow; and most Germans in the group, whatever they
may babble of the firm over the walnuts and the wine, will rally round
the national concern at the approach of difficulty.  They are so few--I
am ashamed to give their number, it were to challenge contradiction--they
are so few, and the amount of national capital buried at their feet is so
vast, that we must not wonder if they seem oppressed with greatness and
the sense of empire.  Other whites take part in our brabbles, while
temper holds out, with a certain schoolboy entertainment.  In the Germans
alone, no trace of humour is to be observed, and their solemnity is
accompanied by a touchiness often beyond belief.  Patriotism flies in
arms about a hen; and if you comment upon the colour of a Dutch umbrella,
you have cast a stone against the German Emperor.  I give one instance,
typical although extreme.  One who had returned from Tutuila on the mail
cutter complained of the vermin with which she is infested.  He was
suddenly and sharply brought to a stand.  The ship of which he spoke, he
was reminded, was a German ship.

John Caesar Godeffroy himself had never visited the islands; his sons and
nephews came, indeed, but scarcely to reap laurels; and the mainspring
and headpiece of this great concern, until death took him, was a certain
remarkable man of the name of Theodor Weber.  He was of an artful and
commanding character; in the smallest thing or the greatest, without fear
or scruple; equally able to affect, equally ready to adopt, the most
engaging politeness or the most imperious airs of domination.  It was he
who did most damage to rival traders; it was he who most harried the
Samoans; and yet I never met any one, white or native, who did not
respect his memory.  All felt it was a gallant battle, and the man a
great fighter; and now when he is dead, and the war seems to have gone
against him, many can scarce remember, without a kind of regret, how much
devotion and audacity have been spent in vain.  His name still lives in
the songs of Samoa.  One, that I have heard, tells of _Misi Ueba_ and a
biscuit-box--the suggesting incident being long since forgotten.  Another
sings plaintively how all things, land and food and property, pass
progressively, as by a law of nature, into the hands of _Misi Ueba_, and
soon nothing will be left for Samoans.  This is an epitaph the man would
have enjoyed.

At one period of his career, Weber combined the offices of director of
the firm and consul for the City of Hamburg.  No question but he then
drove very hard.  Germans admit that the combination was unfortunate; and
it was a German who procured its overthrow.  Captain Zembsch superseded
him with an imperial appointment, one still remembered in Samoa as "the
gentleman who acted justly."  There was no house to be found, and the new
consul must take up his quarters at first under the same roof with Weber.
On several questions, in which the firm was vitally interested, Zembsch
embraced the contrary opinion.  Riding one day with an Englishman in
Vailele plantation, he was startled by a burst of screaming, leaped from
the saddle, ran round a house, and found an overseer beating one of the
thralls.  He punished the overseer, and, being a kindly and perhaps not a
very diplomatic man, talked high of what he felt and what he might
consider it his duty to forbid or to enforce.  The firm began to look
askance at such a consul; and worse was behind.  A number of deeds being
brought to the consulate for registration, Zembsch detected certain
transfers of land in which the date, the boundaries, the measure, and the
consideration were all blank.  He refused them with an indignation which
he does not seem to have been able to keep to himself; and, whether or
not by his fault, some of these unfortunate documents became public.  It
was plain that the relations between the two flanks of the German
invasion, the diplomatic and the commercial, were strained to bursting.
But Weber was a man ill to conquer.  Zembsch was recalled; and from that
time forth, whether through influence at home, or by the solicitations of
Weber on the spot, the German consulate has shown itself very apt to play
the game of the German firm.  That game, we may say, was twofold,--the
first part even praiseworthy, the second at least natural.  On the one
part, they desired an efficient native administration, to open up the
country and punish crime; they wished, on the other, to extend their own
provinces and to curtail the dealings of their rivals.  In the first,
they had the jealous and diffident sympathy of all whites; in the second,
they had all whites banded together against them for their lives and
livelihoods.  It was thus a game of _Beggar my Neighbour_ between a large
merchant and some small ones.  Had it so remained, it would still have
been a cut-throat quarrel.  But when the consulate appeared to be
concerned, when the war-ships of the German Empire were thought to fetch
and carry for the firm, the rage of the independent traders broke beyond
restraint.  And, largely from the national touchiness and the intemperate
speech of German clerks, this scramble among dollar-hunters assumed the
appearance of an inter-racial war.

The firm, with the indomitable Weber at its head and the consulate at its
back--there has been the chief enemy at Samoa.  No English reader can
fail to be reminded of John Company; and if the Germans appear to have
been not so successful, we can only wonder that our own blunders and
brutalities were less severely punished.  Even on the field of Samoa,
though German faults and aggressors make up the burthen of my story, they
have been nowise alone.  Three nations were engaged in this infinitesimal
affray, and not one appears with credit.  They figure but as the three
ruffians of the elder play-wrights.  The United States have the cleanest
hands, and even theirs are not immaculate.  It was an ambiguous business
when a private American adventurer was landed with his pieces of
artillery from an American war-ship, and became prime minister to the
king.  It is true (even if he were ever really supported) that he was
soon dropped and had soon sold himself for money to the German firm.  I
will leave it to the reader whether this trait dignifies or not the
wretched story.  And the end of it spattered the credit alike of England
and the States, when this man (the premier of a friendly sovereign) was
kidnapped and deported, on the requisition of an American consul, by the
captain of an English war-ship.  I shall have to tell, as I proceed, of
villages shelled on very trifling grounds by Germans; the like has been
done of late years, though in a better quarrel, by ourselves of England.
I shall have to tell how the Germans landed and shed blood at Fangalii;
it was only in 1876 that we British had our own misconceived little
massacre at Mulinuu.  I shall have to tell how the Germans bludgeoned
Malietoa with a sudden call for money; it was something of the suddenest
that Sir Arthur Gordon himself, smarting under a sensible public affront,
made and enforced a somewhat similar demand.




CHAPTER III--THE SORROWS OF LAUPEPA, 1883 TO 1887


You ride in a German plantation and see no bush, no soul stirring; only
acres of empty sward, miles of cocoa-nut alley: a desert of food.  In the
eyes of the Samoan the place has the attraction of a park for the holiday
schoolboy, of a granary for mice.  We must add the yet more lively
allurement of a haunted house, for over these empty and silent miles
there broods the fear of the negrito cannibal.  For the Samoan besides,
there is something barbaric, unhandsome, and absurd in the idea of thus
growing food only to send it from the land and sell it.  A man at home
who should turn all Yorkshire into one wheatfield, and annually burn his
harvest on the altar of Mumbo-Jumbo, might impress ourselves not much
otherwise.  And the firm which does these things is quite extraneous, a
wen that might be excised to-morrow without loss but to itself; few
natives drawing from it so much as day's wages; and the rest beholding in
it only the occupier of their acres.  The nearest villages have suffered
most; they see over the hedge the lands of their ancestors waving with
useless cocoa-palms; and the sales were often questionable, and must
still more often appear so to regretful natives, spinning and improving
yarns about the evening lamp.  At the worst, then, to help oneself from
the plantation will seem to a Samoan very like orchard-breaking to the
British schoolboy; at the best, it will be thought a gallant
Robin-Hoodish readjustment of a public wrong.

And there is more behind.  Not only is theft from the plantations
regarded rather as a lark and peccadillo, the idea of theft in itself is
not very clearly present to these communists; and as to the punishment of
crime in general, a great gulf of opinion divides the natives from
ourselves.  Indigenous punishments were short and sharp.  Death,
deportation by the primitive method of setting the criminal to sea in a
canoe, fines, and in Samoa itself the penalty of publicly biting a hot,
ill-smelling root, comparable to a rough forfeit in a children's
game--these are approved.  The offender is killed, or punished and
forgiven.  We, on the other hand, harbour malice for a period of years:
continuous shame attaches to the criminal; even when he is doing his
best--even when he is submitting to the worst form of torture, regular
work--he is to stand aside from life and from his family in dreadful
isolation.  These ideas most Polynesians have accepted in appearance, as
they accept other ideas of the whites; in practice, they reduce it to a
farce.  I have heard the French resident in the Marquesas in talk with
the French gaoler of Tai-o-hae: "_Eh bien, ou sont vos prisonnieres_?--_Je
crois, mon commandant, qu'elles sont allees quelque part faire une
visite_."  And the ladies would be welcome.  This is to take the most
savage of Polynesians; take some of the most civilised.  In Honolulu,
convicts labour on the highways in piebald clothing, gruesome and
ridiculous; and it is a common sight to see the family of such an one
troop out, about the dinner hour, wreathed with flowers and in their
holiday best, to picnic with their kinsman on the public wayside.  The
application of these outlandish penalties, in fact, transfers the
sympathy to the offender.  Remember, besides, that the clan system, and
that imperfect idea of justice which is its worst feature, are still
lively in Samoa; that it is held the duty of a judge to favour kinsmen,
of a king to protect his vassals; and the difficulty of getting a
plantation thief first caught, then convicted, and last of all punished,
will appear.

During the early 'eighties, the Germans looked upon this system with
growing irritation.  They might see their convict thrust in gaol by the
front door; they could never tell how soon he was enfranchised by the
back; and they need not be the least surprised if they met him, a few
days after, enjoying the delights of a _malanga_.  It was a banded
conspiracy, from the king and the vice-king downward, to evade the law
and deprive the Germans of their profits.  In 1883, accordingly, the
consul, Dr. Stuebel, extorted a convention on the subject, in terms of
which Samoans convicted of offences against German subjects were to be
confined in a private gaol belonging to the German firm.  To Dr. Stuebel
it seemed simple enough: the offenders were to be effectually punished,
the sufferers partially indemnified.  To the Samoans, the thing appeared
no less simple, but quite different: "Malietoa was selling Samoans to
Misi Ueba."  What else could be expected?  Here was a private corporation
engaged in making money; to it was delegated, upon a question of profit
and loss, one of the functions of the Samoan crown; and those who make
anomalies must look for comments.  Public feeling ran unanimous and high.
Prisoners who escaped from the private gaol were not recaptured or not
returned and Malietoa hastened to build a new prison of his own, whither
he conveyed, or pretended to convey, the fugitives.  In October 1885 a
trenchant state paper issued from the German consulate.  Twenty
prisoners, the consul wrote, had now been at large for eight months from
Weber's prison.  It was pretended they had since then completed their
term of punishment elsewhere.  Dr. Stuebel did not seek to conceal his
incredulity; but he took ground beyond; he declared the point irrelevant.
The law was to be enforced.  The men were condemned to a certain period
in Weber's prison; they had run away; they must now be brought back and
(whatever had become of them in the interval) work out the sentence.
Doubtless Dr. Stuebel's demands were substantially just; but doubtless
also they bore from the outside a great appearance of harshness; and when
the king submitted, the murmurs of the people increased.

But Weber was not yet content.  The law had to be enforced; property, or
at least the property of the firm, must be respected.  And during an
absence of the consul's, he seems to have drawn up with his own hand, and
certainly first showed to the king, in his own house, a new convention.
Weber here and Weber there.  As an able man, he was perhaps in the right
to prepare and propose conventions.  As the head of a trading company, he
seems far out of his part to be communicating state papers to a
sovereign.  The administration of justice was the colour, and I am
willing to believe the purpose, of the new paper; but its effect was to
depose the existing government.  A council of two Germans and two Samoans
were to be invested with the right to make laws and impose taxes as might
be "desirable for the common interest of the Samoan government and the
German residents."  The provisions of this council the king and vice-king
were to sign blindfold.  And by a last hardship, the Germans, who
received all the benefit, reserved a right to recede from the agreement
on six months' notice; the Samoans, who suffered all the loss, were bound
by it in perpetuity.  I can never believe that my friend Dr. Stuebel had
a hand in drafting these proposals; I am only surprised he should have
been a party to enforcing them, perhaps the chief error in these islands
of a man who has made few.  And they were enforced with a rigour that
seems injudicious.  The Samoans (according to their own account) were
denied a copy of the document; they were certainly rated and threatened;
their deliberation was treated as contumacy; two German war-ships lay in
port, and it was hinted that these would shortly intervene.