History of Samoa

Front matter

HISTORY OF SAMOA

By

Robert Mackenzie Watson, LL.B. (N.Z.)

Preface

PREFACE

The occupation of German or Western Samoa by an advance party of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in the memorable August of 1914 has given to these islands such interest for the peoples of the Empire, and especially for Australasians, as can at no time have existed before the Great War. Yet New Zealand’s concern in Samoan affairs is of long standing; and, so far from being destitute of historical interest, Samoa’s record shows prominence altogether beyond her desert. She long was the scene and the subject of repeated strifes, to which many individuals and three great nations, England, America and Germany, were parties, strifes not invariably creditable and involving frequent, at times agitated, changes of control. Of all this, and of Samoa’s earlier as well as her later history, the threads lie in many directions, and some of them are disappearing; they go to form a story the web of which it is believed has never been textured up as a whole. The pursuit of this story has held a constant fascination for the writer during much of his stay in Samoa; it was in the desire of gathering it into a clear, sequent, and above all a faithful and not over-coloured record that the history which follows was entered upon. It is hoped that the brevity of the book, which is the converse of the amount of research involved, will be found consistent with completeness and accuracy.

The thanks of the writer are due to the many who have from time to time supplied him with much of the necessary material, and for a great deal of the information contained in Chapter IX to his friend Alexander Stronach, Judge of the High and District Courts of American Samoa.

Apia, Samoa. 31st December, 1917.

I

Chapter I.

INTRODUCTORY DESCRIPTION.

STRUNG loosely out, west by north along and across the parallel of 14° south latitude, and between 168° and 173° west longitude, there lies in the Western Pacific Ocean a volcanic chain of four main islands and a number of lesser subjacent islets. The chain, or group, is now collectively known by its native name, Samoa.

Westernmost sits Savaii, the largest and most lofty island of the four, fifty miles long and twenty-five across at its broadest, in shape a rough rhomboid humping itself to a great central height. On Savaii has been considerable recent and much remote volcanic activity, so that the greater part of the surface of this island is unsuited for habitation. And though larger it is neither so fertile nor so populous as Upolu, next east of it and the principal island of the group. Upolu is a high ridge forty-five miles long and at its greatest width some thirteen miles, on the northern side of which, about midway of its length, is Apia, the natural capital of all Samoa. These two, Savaii and Upolu, and the smaller islands adjoining, notably the inhabited islets of Manono and Apolima lying between them, comprise the territory of German or Westen Samoa, now in British military occupation.

Nearly forty miles to the eastward of Upolu and a little south lies American Samoa, the first and main island of which is Tutuila, stretching east and west eighteen miles. Here on its southern side is Pago Pago, the sole real harbour of the group which the United States Government has improved by the establishment of a naval station. Further east is the little group known as Manu’a, comprising the islands of Tau, Ofu and Olosega, and, still further east and again a little south, the small uninhabited and unimportant Rose Island.

All the islands are of volcanic origin and formation, with the exception of Rose Island which is a coral atoll, and all the main islands are high. In Upolu mountains rise to three thousand feet, in Savaii to over four thousand feet. Dark forests richly clothe the ridges to their summits, for there is a plentiful rainfall throughout the group; the more lively green of cocoanut cultivation as abundantly covers the lower planes. The slopes of all are thus luxuriantly wooded, except those portions of Savaii where more recent lava flows have scarred long and broad avenues to the sea. Seaward, many parts of the islands, and especially of Upolu, are surrounded by coral reefs enclosing shallow lagoons that form good fishing grounds for the natives and safe and pleasant waterways for their canoes and boats of passage.

Within the group have dwelt, for so long that their foreign origin was one hundred years ago quite unknown to them, a handsome branch of the pleasant peoples of Eastern and Central Polynesia. Of light reddish-brown colour, with straight hair and pleasing features, well-framed and stately, the Samoans have for the main part yet preserved the native beauty and amiability of their race. To those who have dwelt in their midst they appear essentially material, yet fond of extending as of receiving courtesy and even flattery; childlike, but by no means devoid of deceit; hospitable indeed, but supplicatory, for they are polite communists; free, yet rarely viciously immoral. If admiration of them is tinged with a certain disappointment, affection surely remains. The whole of the native population now lives on or near the coast; the mountains, save where plantations mark the lower slopes, are all in their forest vestments. Roads or tracks follow the shore line of the three larger islands. In Upolu, and in parts of Savaii, the wayfarer may pass through village after village, often with but little break between, and there will be unfolded before him brown-thatch, mushroom-shaped houses bowered in banana groves and clumps of breadfruit, screw-pine and towering cocoanut palm, with many a dainty glimpse beyond of reef and sea. Except in the hottest hours of the day the natives are abroad in pleasant, sensible discharge of their daily duties, and from each busy group there is always some gay remark, some kindly invitation or greeting, for the passer-by. Nearly every village now has, close to shore and track, its washing and bathing pools, stone-lined, where cool hill-springs gurgle up—and these are lively centres of gossip and flirtation.

The latitude of the group postulates tropical climes and tropical warmth. Yet the heat of Samoa is not equatorial and the air, while generally relaxing and moisture-laden, is tempered by high lands and by fairly constant breezes from the surrounding seas. Hurricanes, the scourge of much of the Pacific, are here unknown, though severe northerly gales are to be expected, generally without disappointment, in the late months of the wet and boisterous summer season. Few who are of European descent will prefer the climate of Samoa above that of the more temperate zones; there is, it may be said, little natural comfort for the normal European who must take constant precaution against small tropical sickness and inconvenience, particularly during the first half-year of residence and always and more particularly where his women-folk and children are concerned; yet the climate, for low latitudes, is not unhealthy and malaria and severer fevers are unknown. Venemous snakes do not exist; the centipede and the scorpion are there, but one hardly ever hears of their bites; and the chief troubler of mankind is the persistent mosquito with his train of filarial disorders. Agricultural work is impossible for whites, prolonged sedentary employment injurious. Clearly the islands, small, mountainous, tropical, are unsuited for extensive European settlement. And yet it is a noticeable feature that Europeans who have made lengthy stay rarely retire from the group, it is thought from choice as well as from force of circumstances. The islands are said to take hold of a man, softly and so that he does not care. Certain it is that the climate forbids to Europeans for more than a few years the continued exercise and enjoyment of mental and physical vigour. Excessive use of alcohol, mental or physical strain as well as mental or physical neglect, but hasten the process, and, if persisted in, are provocative of neurasthenia and a general weakening of the powers. It becomes in the end easier to talk about things than to do them—to talk lightly and with repeated phrase, even to the extent of deceiving oneself; and the European is then no longer fitted for the life he has come from—but he will have broken himself into the islands.…

The normal population of Western Samoa consists approximately of 500 whites, 1,000 half and other castes, and 36,000 natives; that of Eastern or American Samoa of some 180 whites, 300 half and other castes, and 7,500 natives. The fertile portions of the group are largely under cultivation and are capable in places of extension and of supporting a considerably larger native population. As is the case in many other South Sea groups native cultivations are mostly of cocoanut, but also and extensively of banana, breadfruit, yam and taro; the European plantations consist in the main of cocoanut, cocoa and rubber. The Samoan in his own surroundings makes an indifferent hired man, and in consequence indentured Chinese and Melanesian plantation labour has been introduced into Upolu and to a small extent on Savaii. In August 1914 there were some 2,200 Chinese labourers, mostly on Upolu. The number has been reduced by repatriations to 1520. The Melanesians number 600, mostly Solomon Islanders, and are employed upon the extensive plantations of the Deutsche Handels und Plantagen Gesellschaft of Hamburg and in lighterage work in the roadstead of Apia.

Except for the naval station at Pago Pago the group is easily self-supporting. The total annual trade, imports and exports, of the whole group rarely exceeds in value half a million pounds sterling, and ninety per cent. of this comes from Western Samoa.

The capital, Apia, is a straggling yet busy little port and centre of trade and government, built along the shore road of a wide, reef-bound bay that affords a good anchorage in the steady trade winds, but is a danger spot for ships during northerly summer gales. The future trade of the port appears to be in the hands of the half-castes, among whom are now numbered some of the leading merchants of the town. The name, Apia, is that of a native village forming but a small part of a town which carries a total and varied population of some thousands and embraces many villages. Trading stores—for there is still no specialisation in shops—and government buildings flank the beach; behind are widespread suburbs and native settlements. Minor industries are beginning to make their appearance. Outside Apia the country and its people rest quietly in a golden warmth and sunshine, and the outer trader lazes his days away. “The people of Apia” said an old chief of Upolu once to the writer “are restless and wicked.” That is as may be. The steamer passenger who sees from the deck of his vessel what appears to be a drowsy little South Sea town will on landing behold much activity in motor and horse traffic and no little coming and going of many nationalities.

This then is the present setting of the stage on which the events of the chronicle that follows have taken place. Not so bijou as Tonga, far less important than Fiji, Samoa forms a small entity, self-existing yet having much in common with both, as they have with all the tropical islands of the Pacific. Much that is preposterous has been said and written of Samoa, as of other spots where life may differ somewhat from the usual standards. It can at once be admitted, in truth and without any obloquy, that it is not a great place, that it probably never will be. But the little country and its kindly native people, as easy as any in the world to control, deserve in the future a fuller measure of sympathetic understanding and of quiet equitable government than was, as the diligent reader may discover, for long their portion in the past.

II

Chapter II.

EARLY HISTORY. (Before 1830)

PRIOR to 1830, in which year agents of the London Missionary Society established a mission, very little of Samoa was known to the civilised world. The posts which mark that olden time have nearly all gone; the modern ones that have been reared in their place are not always of undoubted authority. It has been said that the present Polynesian inhabitants are the successors of an ancient fair-skinned megalithic people. More writers than one have recorded that the island of Upolu, probably though by no means certainly the oldest formation of the group, contains a relic of megalithic man in the Fale-o-le-fe’e, or House of the Cuttlefish, which one learned ethnologist has described as “an ellipse of giant stone columns, no mean rival of our Stonehenge.” At the risk of a diversion the truth concerning this travellers’ tale must be set down. The interesting relic is situate some eight miles inland of Apia, on a little flat in the upper waters of one of the larger streams of the island. There is, at the upper end of the flat, a basaltic cliff, thirty feet or so high, from which has dropped a number of small stone columns. And of these some have been, very imperfectly, set round in an ellipse—the shape of the ordinary native house—a few yards below. None of the stones bear any evidence of dressing. None are deep set in the ground. None are too large or too heavy for one man to lift. The writer has sacrilegiously tried them all, after lunch be it said, and dropped them back into place again. A few stones have been laid horizontally to form a square—the chair of the fe’e. There are pretty native stories concerning the stones, in age anything from eighty years up, but these must be gathered elsewhere. The point is that there is nothing to indicate any pre-Polynesian antiquity, and that there was required no colossal effort in the building. The relic (if a theory is worth anything) may be the posts of a fale tele or large house built in a spot chosen for defence or as a retreat in war. There are native stories to support this view. It may have been originally roofed with wood and thatch which long ago have rotted into the warm damp bush. Or, as not seldom happens to many undertakings of these carefree people, it may have been always incom- plete. With the relation of one further truth this digression is ended. As the writer smoked, the two sweet-natured Samoan giants who had accompanied him on his pilgrimage slashed away with their long knives the undergrowth from the site of the relic, and then—they deliberately grunted into place another two stones for the house of their romantic fish! Had reincarnation brought auld Edie Ochiltree and Bill Stumps together in this outer Eden?

There is, it may be conceded, nothing known in Samoa to indicate a race prior to its present native Polynesians. That they however have long resided in the group is clear. They have no suggestion in their legends, as the Maoris have, of migration from other lands. To them Samoa is the earth. The god Tagaloa, who dwelt in space and made the Heavens, and of whom it is not known how or whence he came, had a grandson called Lu. On one occasion Tagaloa, being annoyed with the boy, seized and beat him with the handle of the great god’s fly-switch. Lu escaped, ran down to Earth, and named it Samoa.

From their appearance, from their undoubted relationship to other Polynesian peoples, it is probable that the Samoans are of an original Caucasian stock with which through the ages many strains, almost certainly including the malayoid and not entirely excluding the negrito, have combined to produce a distinctive people. The question of the origin of the Polynesian has been much discussed by ethnologists, and where they differ and local evidence is, and apparently has long been, non-existent, the modern historian may with justification plead a great uncertainty. Probably several migrations from Southern Asia found their way to Polynesia. Professor Macmillan Brown traces, following Mr. S. Percy Smith, a last great migration, possibly two or three centuries before the christian era, from the coast south of the Punjaub, through part of the present Dutch East Indies, south of Celebes, along the north-east coast of New Guinea, and through the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides and the Fiji group, to Tonga or Samoa. This, says Professor Brown, was “undoubtedly their route”; their final centre of dispersion in Polynesia was probably Samoa. It should be noted, per contra, that Dr. A. K. Newman is often very much of a different opinion.

A most interesting, practical, and experienced paper on this subject—the ethnology of the Pacific—was presented by the Revd. S. J. Whitmee F.R.G.S. to the Philosophical Society of Great Britain in 1879.

That Samoa was the cradle of much Polynesian settlement seems highly probable. It is quite likely that many hundreds of years ago Samoa produced masterful seafarers who scoured the wide Pacific and established the people of many islands. The Rev. J. B. Stair has collected interesting native records of such voyages. Ease of living, a softening climate, abundance in their own fair lands seem gradually to have changed the race to a domestic people. From being raiders they became the raided. Fijian conquerors are said to have established themselves in Manu’a in the dawn of known Samoan history, and to have received tribute from all Samoa. There are many Samoan legends which have as heroes and heroines princes and princesses of Fiji—legends which show ancient knowledge of the Fijian people and customs and indicate intercourse between Samoa and Fiji. Later the Tongans, probably after many raids, established themselves on Savaii, crossed to Upolu, and were eventually beaten from the group by the first Malietoa who arranged between Tonga and Samoa a treaty of peace which has been continuously observed by over twenty generations of the Malietoa family. Traces of these occupations are doubtless seen in the curling hair and darker skins of some of the people to-day.

Such tradition as has yet been preserved to the Samoans groups itself naturally under the three heads of war, national custom and legend, and family descent. Matters of family descent were carefully transmitted from father to son through many generations—the favoured place being the village green on the white nights of the increscent moon—and pedigrees are still given in the establishment of family names with definite assurance and with the agreement of opponents; national customs have greatly survived, but with modification; their legends, quietly slipping from the memory of the people, have been extensively recorded by many earlier settlers, and especially by missionaries. All these matters are exceedingly interesting, but are somewhat uncertain and can have place in this history only where it is necessary in individual cases to make reference to them. Of war more must be said. Warfare has ever been a recognised occupation of the younger men. The island of Upolu, from the earliest times of which we have information until quite recently, seems rarely to have been free from hostilities more or less extensive. It is certain that within the past two centuries Upolu has carried a population much in excess of its present numbers, for the traces of wider habitation are yet in many of its forests. In 1830, and for years before, war made hideous ravages. The causes were often trivial, the methods a curious admixture of childish regard for ceremony and of craft, of careless generosity and of cruelty. Clubs and spears of various patterns and slings were the usual weapons. Both land and sea forces were employed, either separately or in conjunction, and sea-fights seem to have been at times as destructive of life as were battlefields ashore. It is not possible to give chronological order to the traditions of these internecine wars. The pioneer missionary John Williams, in 1832, found that the people of Manono had a record kept by means of collected stones of one hundred and ninety seven battles. And it was but two years before, in August of 1830, that Williams, landing on Savaii from his schooner Messenger of Peace, saw across the strait in Upolu “the mountains enveloped in flames and smoke” and on enquiring the cause was informed “that a battle had been fought that very morning and that the flames which we saw were consuming the houses, the plantations and the bodies of women and children and infirm people” who had fallen into the hands of the conquerors.

There is no record of cannibalism ever having been a prevailing custom in Samoa as was so pronouncedly the case in Fiji, but as a “refinement of revenge,” in punishment of evil acts on the part of a tyrant or other hated person, or even, it may be, in that spirit of noisy braggadocio with which the Samoan male still rejoices in the success of his prowess, the body of a conquered man was cooked and eaten. To this day “I will cook you in my oven” is an insult which may result in serious consequences. Of the slain the heads were taken by the victors and carried as trophies to their leaders.

The earliest recorded notices we have of Samoa are those of the Dutch “Three Ship Expedition,” Jacob Roggeveen commanding, in its voyage round the world to Java via Cape Horn in 1721-1722. Roggeveen, according to his recorders, placed the group somewhat inexactly, called several of its islands by names now unused, and sailed away without landing. The honour of discovery may fairly be said to lie with France. In 1768 de Bougainville visited the group, in the course of his famous voyage round the world, and in 1787 de la Perouse. The former seeing many canoes moving along the shores of the islands named them the Navigators’ Archipelago, a name much in vogue until recent years—probably until German occupation. La Perouse fixed the position of the whole group. During his stay a shore party for water from both of his ships was attacked near Asu on Tutuila and Commandant Vicomte de Langle and ten of the ships’ companies were killed, forty-nine escaping mostly with injuries. The cause of the quarrel and the share the visitors played in it are uncertain, but it is stated on good authority that a native was thought to have attempted to take something from aboard one of the ships (no crime in the eyes of a communistic Samoan) and was punished with the result that he died; the natives, keenly feeling the outrage, returned to the shore and attacked the boats’ crews there. La Perouse’s account of the affair most undeservedly gave Samoans for long after a name for treachery and bloodthirstiness. “I willingly,” he entered in his Journal, “willingly abandon to others the task of writing the uninteresting history of these barbarous people; a stay of twenty-four hours and the relation of our misfortunes has sufficed to show their atrocious manners.” A memorial was in 1883 placed upon the graves on Tutuila of the murdered men, “morts pour la Science et Ia Patrie.”

In 1790 His Britannic Majesty’s Ship Pandora, Captain Edwards, paid a visit to the group.

It is about this time that the arrival of white men may first be noted. The American, or the dweller in the King’s far-flung dominions, scarce exists who has not from a schoolboy seen in fancy the landing upon his shores of the first white men—strong, wise pioneers preparing the way of a nation. The comings of Columbus and of the Pilgrim Fathers have been well depictured in the States; the pioneer is much honoured in the Dominions. No such sentiment, alas, can be called up for the case of Samoa. The wise men were to follow, with a lasting and beneficent result to the islands. But those first whites, mostly British, occasionally American, who in all sorts of ways drifted to the shores of Samoa from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the late ’thirties, had no particular mission and even the lapse of time scarce finds them picturesque. “They were,” says Pritchard, “with but few exceptions, convicts who had escaped from the penal settlements of Australia, and steeped in the deepest of crimes, caring nothing for their own lives, feared neither God nor man.” They found a land sufficiently remote and not unpleasant, where food was plentiful, the people friendly to the point of kindness, the women comely, and work, as they knew it, unnecessary. But they were active men and had lived in a rough world. Generally they attached themselves to particular districts and chiefs, assisted in warfare, lived the merry life of the cock who fought just when he might be so inclined, met it is said upon occasion and got drunk together on banana or pineapple rum, quarrelled and fought, died or lived as the case might be. They were wont to fill the natives with tales of their royal descent in England and elsewhere. A few attained ease and luxury by engrafting a new religion upon the priestly customs and zoolatry of the Samoans—a religion wherein the novel tenets received from the Great Spirit supported polygamy and dancing and above all the “competent maintenance of his priests by good feeding, unlimited supplies of ava, and free selection in women.” And the hymns were rollicking seamen’s songs!

Food for romance is here, but the truth is there was little of the romantic about these callosities of humanity. By 1850 they had practically all gone—died off or reformed with age.

Such was the first acquaintance of the islanders with the white man—he who “breaking through the sky” brought to them his wonderful clothing, his wonderful knowledge, his astounding energy. Certainly he impressed them with a sense of his prowess—more, they then gleaned what they have never forgotten, that the white man is an incom- prehensible being, a leader but bad to cross, of enormous reserve in will power and executive force, but full of devilment and perverse command. The missionary stands apart, but all other white men are at heart the same, and are to be deceived accordingly. Well, in the whole round hundred years of the nineteenth century they had small cause to believe otherwise.

III

Chapter III.

THE ADVENT OF THE MISSIONARY. (1830-1839)

BY inherited instinct the Samoans are lovers of religious observance. Now none can be found that is not a professed Christian, but long before the light of Christianity reached them, and its teachings found a ready response in their kindly natures, they possessed an elaborate, if variable, system of religion. Their mythology and methods of worship, which have been ably classified by earlier missionaries, differed widely from those of Tahiti and other Pacific groups, notably in that the custom of human sacrifice, practised with extensive and horrible cruelty in many parts of the Pacific, did not exist among the Samoans. They had various legends, creative of their Samoan world and of themselves as mankind, and they worshipped many high war and village gods and many lesser gods of the household. These they considered became in most cases incarnate in fish and animals or embodied in plants—to which visible object there was then attached a sacred prohibition against user by one under the care (and control) of the particular god. Over all was Tagaloa of the Skies,the Samoan Jove, chief of the gods, creator of the universe, progenitor of other gods and of mankind. The office of priesthood was greatly hereditary and the priests had large powers. They fixed feast days for the gods, received the offerings of the people, and even decided the commencement of war. The people lived in great dread of the wrath of the gods, and the priests of their heathenry were exacting and avaricious.

The first knowledge of Christianity came to Samoa from Tonga, it is believed through Tongan preachers of the Wesleyan Mission there, about the year 1828, but the commencement of all missionary “enterprise” in the Samoan group really dates from August 1830 when John Williams of the London Missionary Society, and Charles Barff of the same, having sailed from Tahiti, landed at Sapapalii on Savaii and were there welcomed by the then Malietoa. This Society requires more than a passing notice, for its operations have profoundly affected the lives of the Samoans and therefore Samoan history. It was formed at London in 1795 by men of several Protestant denominations, under the name of “The Missionary Society,” with a short written constitution which states the sole object of the Society to be “to spread the knowledge of Christ among heathen and other unenlightened nations.” Certainly that object has been achieved, for the field of the Society has been world-wide, and the result of its work the institution in many wild places of peace and civilisation. Its first missionaries went out in 1796, bound for the South Seas, and missions were quickly established at Tahiti, Tonga and the Marquesas. Troubles followed, and the Tongan mission had to be abandoned in 1800. But the Tahitian mission later succeeded, greatly through the conversion of King Pomare in 1812. In 1816 the personnel of the mission was much increased from London and among those who then came to Tahiti were William Ellis, the author of “Polynesian Researches,” and the famous John Williams. Williams in 1827 went to Rarotonga in the Cook group, and there he built a vessel of from seventy to eighty tons for island work which he called Messenger of Peace, and which, being built almost entirely of local products, was a remarkable effort of ingenuity. In this vessel, after some cruising largely to test its capabilities, he sailed to Samoa, landing as has been said on Savaii. Here by the willing aid of a Samoan chief named Fauea whom with his wife they had given a passage from Tongatabu a good first impression was made with the natives; the white envoys were treated with attention and respect, and two missions, each of four Tahitian teachers, were established, one with Malietoa the other with his brother Taimalelagi. Williams then left the group, but about two years later he revisited it from the Manu’a end, some two hundred miles from Savaii, and was greatly, if agreeably, astonished to find the natives claiming the new religion and clamouring for a teacher. The extraordinary conversions on Tutuila, Upolu and Savaii were merely a corollary. Williams after visiting much of the group sailed away with the principal idol of heathendom stowed in his ship, whence he later presented it to the Society’s museum in London. Samoa had found its natural doctrine of love.