Samoa and its Story

Front matter

SAMOA AND ITS STORY

The town of Apia, from Matautu

Josiah Martin, photo

In Apia Bay

SAMOA AND ITS STORY

IN APIA BAY

Our first sight of the islands of Samoa one warm May afternoon of long ago was not a forest of coconut palms apparently growing out of the waters, as is often the way in making a South Sea landfall, but a high and cloudy mountain range purple with the distance of nearly forty miles, not unlike the first glimpse of the New Zealand coast-line. This was the lofty land of Savaii, the largest island of the Samoan group, with its central volcanic peaks, from which great ridges run ribwise to the ocean, rising four thousand feet above the sea-level. We had sailed through the volcano-ridden western seas of the Friendly Archipelago where the ever-altering shoals and reefs give the island navigator anxious nights and days, but now we were out in the deep, deep blue sea again, the real dark blue of the Somerscales pictures, with no coral perils to consider until we closed with the long fringing reef of the Samoas. The beautiful brave South-east trades drummed in our stout trysail, set to steady the little steamer, and sent the reef-points pattering and went piping through the taut rigging like a gale of wind through a maze of telegraph wires. The porpoises leaped about our bows, like friendly seagods convoying the strange ship to her haven. The flying-fish came flashing up in aerial shoals, their little wet wings shining in the sun, glancing from wave to wave in terror of their enemy the albacore; and overhead sailed the graceful amokura the tropic bird or bo’s’n bird—his two long brilliant tail-feathers floating astern like miniature man’-o’-war paying-off pennants. Not a sail had we seen all the voyage from Auckland but a distant glimpse between the little rain squalls of a big American schooner, her deck piled high with lumber, from Puget Sound, no doubt, running swiftly to the south-west Sydneywards. Now Savaii’s cloudy mountains loomed large, and soon the top if Upolu’s blue, forested longitudinal range, more than two thousand feet high, came up above the waters on our starboard bow.

By sunset we had passed through the storied strait of Manono, separating the rounded island of that name and the curiously shaped volcanic crater-isle of Apolima from massive Savaii, and were coasting Apia-wards along Upolu’s shores with the fringing reef gleaming white with surf on the starboard side. Apolima was a place to fascinate; even a fleeting view made one long to land and explore it. It is a small place, not much more than a mile in diameter, but it is a natural fortress, a long-dead volcano, submerged until only its upper part remains above the ocean; one side of the great crater—now filled with luxuriant vegetation—slashed down so that the sea flows in by a narrow passage, and fills the hollow with a calm lagoon. There is no entrance but this one narrow sea-passage, for elsewhere the island presents precipitous, dark, rocky ramparts, quite unscalable. Apolima may be likened to an immense cup, with one side broken out: the Samoans compared it to the upturned hollow palm of the hand and this is how it received its name, Apolima, which means “The Hollowed Hand,” or “Spear-poising Hand.” A small, but unconquerable, tribe lives on the lakelike lagoon-side, under its sheltering palms. These men have held Apolima, and can still hold it, against a host. Nothing but artillery would shift them from this cupped retreat, a “hollow lotos land” if ever there was one, standing like a sentry-crag at the gateway to the much-coveted islands of Samoa.

Then, skirting the Upolu coast, as night came down, “we saw the land-lights burning” on this strange new tropic world. Later we came to know that the lights we saw, as if those of fairy Venices, were the fishermen’s torches. Flying-fish catching at night is the Samoan Islander’s favourite sport. When the cool evening time comes, the canoes are launched, and with blazing torches the crews paddle to and fro, with their hand-nets capturing the foolish flying-fish as they come leaping towards the light. In fine weather all round the coasts of these isles of Polynesia, as you sail along outside the fringing reefs, you will see inshore the torchlights of the fishing canoes, dancing like so many fireflies in the gloom of the splendid tropic night.

When we had coasted Upolu for about twenty miles the captain burned a blue light. A long bar of light, a huge finger of white fire, shot up from a point on our starboard bow under the black shadow of the Upolu mountains, and on a moment we were dazzled by the beams of the man-of-war searchlight, the powerful night-eyes of the fleet. Then the lights considerately played on the reef entrance, and presently we steered safely in, between the two curving horns of a coral breakwater where the rollers smashed themselves in foam and a line of white showed the run of the reefs. “Let go!” and our anchor plunged down in the middle of a sheltered bay, with the dim shapes of fighting ships around us and ahead. Two boats put off from the ships, and two smart young navy lieutenants, one British and one American, ran up the accommodation ladder, asked some questions, inspected our papers, and were off again. Our mysterious cable despatches from Auckland were handed over to Captain Stuart, of H.M.S. Tauranga, senior officer on the Samoan station. The lights-out bugle sounded sweet and clear from one ship after another: sundry officials from the shore came and went in their native-manned whaleboats. and presently we were left to go to rest, rolling gently on the little heave and fall of the sea in the famous harbour of Apia.

The daylight view of Apia showed a curving bay, with white bungalow houses gleaming from amongst the groves of coconut palms, here and there a two-storey building, with its wide balconies, looking out over the light blue of the harbour; a little fleet of schooners and cutters at anchor, well inshore of the five grim warships of three nations, and in the background wave upon wave of wooded hill slopes, those near at hand the rich, soft moist green of the tropics, in the distances magnificently purple, with here and there a wisp of mist rising from the deep, gloomy gullies, mounting up and up into a lofty skyline, the main range of Upolu Island. This is the mountain range that the Samoans call the Tua-sivi, literally the back-bone, or the ridgepole of a house—the Maori equivalent is Tua-hiwi, the ridgepole—running from end to end of the island, quite forty miles in length. Right ahead is green Vaea Mountain, where Robert Louis Stevenson’s tomb stands high above the bay; the tomb of an immortal on a South Sea Olympus. All is clothed in forest, the lush forest of “the Islands.” Outside the reef the sea is intensely blue, and the long rollers break in a smother of white on the sharp reef walls that curve round about the harbour mouth.

Inside there is not a great deal of room for a fleet, for moorings have to be taken up with care: there are big knobs of coral here and there, and inner reefs and it is well to anchor stem and stern, for fear of swinging on to some awkward mushroom of a submerged rock with the turn of the tide. It is an unrestful harbour at most times, even though a hurricane comes but rarely, and only in the months from November to the end of March. The memory of the great cyclone of 1889 is ever present. There is a tragic reminder of that terrible day right before us, for between us and the shore, in the shallows lie the bones of the German corvette Adler. On the left hand the white beach sweeps round into a low point feathered with very tall coconuts,

Burton Bros., photo

A Village Group, Upolu

leaning in all sorts of picture-like postures and tossing their heads before the breeze that comes pouring in from the ocean. This point is Matautu, and the cool-looking white building, standing well by itself in the shady compound, is the British Consulate. It was a place of some danger in the Samoan war of 1899, and Consul Maxse and his staff had to stand to their arms with a guard from one of the warships, and reply to the rebel bullets that came from the inland side, when Mataafa’s men made their night attack on the outskirts of Apia town. Between Matautu and the middle of the beach, where the principal business quarter is, the Vai-singano, a deep and clear mountain stream, comes out of the bush and flows into the harbour; this is the great bathing-place and laundry-place for the Samoan townspeople. It was a lively scene the morning we landed and explored this curious beach town for the first time; gay with the langhter of girls and bright with the gorgeously patterned lavalava kilts, and briskly noisy with the beaters of the brown washerwomen. Near by we passed some good stores, very much like those in any up-country township in the North Island where a large native trade is done; there is a large stone church, the Roman Catholic Cathedral, a hotel called the Tivoli and another called the International, and further along, as the right-hand horn of the bay is approached, the large German warehouses, the headquarters of the famous South Sea firm with the big name, Der Deutschen Handels und Plantagen Gesellschaft der Sudsee Inseln, zu Hamburg. This huge trading concern, with its stores and plantations, its copra-collecting and labour recruiting vessels, for full forty years was the power behind the throne in Samoa. The headquarters is a great, roomy, two-storeyed building, lofty and cool, and one will see its staff of fair-haired German clerks, some lately out from Hamburg, working in their shirt-sleeves or in pyjama suits, in the upper floor, and down below gangs of “black boys,” native labour from the Solomon Islands, and Chinamen in the loose garments of their native land, working in the copra stores, wheeling trucks, getting a dozen different kinds of tropic produce ready for shipment. This busy quarter of the town from the Vai-singano to about the German compounds, is Matafele; then round to the extreme right—as one looks from the ship landward—is Mulinuu Point. This is a place of some history. It has been the Malietoa headquarters for many years, and in those war-days of 1899 it was the largest native town in the South Sea Islands, with a population of quite four thousand. Thatched brown houses of the picturesque and healthful Samoan type—no ugly iron-roofed weatherboard shanties here—are scattered about under the lofty palms. It is a breezy spot when the wind comes in from the sea, and it is the coolest and most comfortable place in Apia, the central part of which is so hemmed in and confined by grove and mountain that the heat is often insufferable for visitors and there is no gale of wind to free the house of mosquitoes. Mulinuu Point was regarded as a good defensive position in the war-days; the rear is defended by a shallow lagoon, and the neck of land by which it is approached from the Apia side was protected in 1899 by a six-inch gun which was rafted ashore from one of the British warships and mounted on a concrete foundation at the gate to Malietoa’s domain, and by two or three field guns manned by blue-jackets from one or other of the three Royal Navy vessels in Apia.

The Story of the Beach

THE STORY OF THE BEACH

What days this long, straggling beachside trading town has seen! No similar stretch of coral sand in all the South Seas brings up such tales of romance and adventure, of love and war, of intrigue and plot and counterplot, of gun-running and piracy, of battle, murder, and sudden death. I doubt whether any other part of the many-islanded Pacific has seen so much gun-play as Apia and its environs. There are bullet-holes and the marks of shell explosions in more than one building, and in a big store the owner showed me the curious track of a Mataafa bullet that had ploughed its way a few weeks before through his office walls. What “yarns” the old hands tell as they gather in that big shipchandlery place, where they sell pretty well everything from a boat compass and an anchor to a cask of beef and an accordion, where strings of jib-hanks dangle from the walls, and huge coils of tarry rope, beautiful to the nostril of a seafarer, are piled in the corner! This is the place, about the time the sun is over the foreyard, as the sailors say, to hear the tales of old Samoa. But in truth one does not need to go back very far for thrilling history on this water-front. Those war-weeks of ’99 I watched the tattooed, nearly naked, “happy warriors” of Mulinuu march out on their daily fighting expeditions, doing patrol duty under their active young white officers from the warships. A very gallant naval lieutenant, one Angel Hope Freeman, of the Tauranga, lay in a new-made grave on Mulinuu beach: he lost his head, in a very literal sense—to a black-painted Samoan rebel’s terrible slash-hook knife in a skirmish

Josiah Martin, photo

Coral Reef, Apia, at low tide [German cruiser Falke and a British warship at anchor]

back yonder in the bush. Every man, young and old, had arms, and knew how to use them; as for the Samoan native, from his earliest years he had lived in the midst of alarms and battle, and he was as skilful as any Texan borderer with his Winchester or his less modern, but very useful Martini-Henry.

This is the beach of Louis Beeke and “Bully” Hayes, the beach of Stevenson and Malietoa, the coral strand of many a picturesque and chivalrous figure in South Sea history, and of many a picturesque swashbuckler also, the beach of the old whalemen’s revels and the gun-runners’ midnight cargo-boatings. The white brigs and schooners made rendezvous here of old-time from many a far-off atoll and island, and rough crews from all the seas “made hay” when the sun went down on Matafele sea-front. Over yonder, near the Matautu end of the beach, is where “Black Tom’s Hell” stood, as Louis Becke tells in his story “At the Ebbing of the Tide.” In 1870 Mr. Becke was gaining some of his first experience of island life by running a cutter with Alan, the Manihiki half-caste, between Upolu and the other Samoan islands, and also gaining a good working knowledge of guns and their use. About this time, too, the burly, long-hearded Captain W. H. Hayes, whom he turned to such account in his books, was cruising round these parts in his armed brig Leonora, and it was in this bay of Apia that the truculent yet diplomatic “Bully” was arrested by the captain of the United States corvette Narrangansett and tried on board that ship on charges of victimising German traders. Hayes, as usual, came out of the ordeal with flying colours, for the Germans’ evidence broke down, and then he “dressed ship” and gave his crew liberty, which they interpreted in the most liberal sense. “They went into Matafele,” Mr. Becke narrated, “and painted the town vermilion; the Narrangansett sailors joined in, and only for some of their officers being present, the German traders would have had a bad time of it. Hayes’s crew were all drunk; so were the Narrangansett men, and a lot of flash Samoans lent a hand in the proceedings.” They say, too, that the German Consul’s flagstaff was chopped down that evening. Many vessels with curious semi-piratical stories went in and out of Apia those days, with their crews of Kanakas singing away at the halliards as they made sail for other palm-fringed lands.

From a water-colour drawing

H.M.S. Calliope, under sail in the South Seas

A fleet of Auckland sailing vessels traded to the Samoans in the eighties, and about the finest of these was the three-masted schooner Maile, a fast and shapely craft, sailed by Captain M. T. Lane, who at last went down in her with all his crew. The Maile, the steamer Richmond, and other New Zealand vessels, were regarded with suspicion by the Germans in the war-days of 1888 and 1889. Early in March, 1889 the Maile had an English and a German naval officer constantly on board as she lay to her anchors in squall-swept Apia; the foreigner was on the look-out for contraband of war—the British being considered active sympathisers with Mataafa—and the British officer was there presumably to keep an eye on the Teuton and see that no breach of international law was committed. The Maile just escaped the great hurricane which tore down on Apia’s fleet; it came on March 16th, and it left six warships wrecked on the beach and the coral reefs with a loss of one hundred and forty lives. The war fleet that lay in Apia that day numbered seven—H.M.S. Calliope, the United States ships Trenton, Vandalia, and Nipsic, and the German corvettes Adler (flagship), Olga, and Eber. Next morning saw all but the Calliope either stranded on the beach or capsized and sunken, four of them total wrecks; most of the merchant craft also ashore; and all the world soon heard the story (we were the first to hear in Auckland, when the mail steamer came in from Samoa bringing Admiral Kimberley’s flag lieutenant, with a cablegram to his Government) of how the Calliope fought her way out, topgallant masts and topmasts housed and yards on deck, out between the reefs, taking two hours to clear the outer reefs in the face of a terrible blinding hurricane, and how the doomed American cheered the dauntless Britishers in the great moment when “Last of the scattered legions, under a shrinking sky,” the English flag went by to the open sea. The world heard also, or that portion of it which uses steam fuel, that it was New Zealand’s good Westport coal that took the Calliope safely through the storm; indeed much cash, as well as reflected glory, has come to New Zealand through that deed of engine-room and stoke-hold heroism.

It was on this beach in the height of the gale that the brave Samoans, friends and foes alike, burying the hatchet, rushed into the surf to rescue the perishing Germans and Americans, and it was the chief of Apia, Seumanutafa, who especially distinguished himself by his chivalrous humanity and courage. The United States Government sent Seumanutafa a fine whaleboat and a letter of thanks for his conduct that day of peril. He was one of the two Samoan

Andrew, Apia, photo

Mataafa, the celebrated fighting Chief

high chiefs who came to New Zealand thirty years ago seeking annexation to this country and the protecting “mana” of the British flag. Robert Louis Stevenson knew him, and described him in his “Vailima Letters” as “a rather big gun in this place, looking like a large, fatted, military Englishman bar the colour.” In the nineties again there were big doings on this beach and in the early part of 1899, a few weeks before our visit, shells from British guns went screaming over the landing-place, bursting amongst the Mataafa rebels, who were in possession of part of the town; and there was one hot bit of work in a night attack, when three British sailors and an American were killed.

Such are some of the thrilling doings that have heaped up history on this two-mile long beach of Apia. In about the centre of the half-moon there flew, when last the writer saw the place the palladium and ægis of the land, the German Consul’s flag, fluttering from its tall white flagstaff with the bayonets of the German naval guard glinting at its foot where the Kaiser’s blne-jacketed sentry marched to and fro. It was indeed a lively spot in ’99 around the Consul’s flag, the centre and focus of all the intrigues and wars that afflicted Samoa. Mataafa and his men lurked back in the bush under Vaea Mountain and feasted on tinned meats in storied Vailima, the place of the Five Streams. Malietoa’s tattooed “fitafitas” stood to their rifles side by side with British and American bluejackets in the trenches about the town, and there were field guns poking out from the earthworks at every street corner. Every day the combined forces went patrolling the outskirts and occasionally skirmishing with the elusive rebels, and nightly the naval searchlights played over the town and lit up the slopes of Vaea Mountain. The little harbour was full of ships. Abreast of us lay H.M.S. Royalist, a square-rigged serew corvette, her top-gallant masts housed, everything about her grim and business-like, just in from a shelling expedition along the Upolu coast. Near were her consorts, the cruiser Tauranga and the gunboat Porpoise, and not far away the big white flagship Philadelphia flying the Stars and

Burton bros., photo

A Samoan girl

Stripes. By herself lay the German Falke, eyed with suspicion by British and American. The feeling was intense between the English-speaking forces and the Teutons. Not a German uniform was to be seen in the streets, except the sentries at the consulate. Had not the Germans been strictly confined to their ship, Apia’s beach thoroughfare would have seen a battle between the sailors of three nations that might before long have found an echo in Europe.

There was much that was picturesque in that little war, the war that was the prelude to German sovereignty. You should have seen a Malietoa war-party on the march! It was a brave sight, with not a little humour in it. First came the Taupo, a high-borne “May-Queen” or village maid, stepping out like an Amazonian queen at the head of her troops; her print lavalava girt high, her open blouse flying loose in the breeze—she wore nothing underneath it but her well-oiled beautiful brown skin—a wreath of crimson hibiscus flowers round her head, a couple of coconut water-bottles slung on her back; a fly-whisk in her hand. She went with an air and a swimming gait, the very poetry of motion. I have never seen a woman, white or brown, walk like these straight-backed proud vivandières of Samoa. Then two boys with kettledrums, tapping away like any papalangi army drummer, and the column of bare-footed armed men, four deep, rifle in hand. Each man proud and self-confident, an indescribable swagger in his mien, a merry arrogance in the careless handling of his gun, and the jaunty girding of his airy lavalava looped up on one side to show the close, black and elaborate thigh-tattooing, which is the Samoan’s pet vanity, and without which he would incur the scorn of the women. Well-filled cartridge belts fore and aft, a good Lee-Enfield or Martini-Henry or Winchester rifle in one hand, and, as often as not, a fan or fly-whisk in the other) and a long, murderous head-knife (nifo-oti) in his belt, dabs of war-paint, blue or black, on cheeks and chest—and the fighting man is before you in full uniform, fa,-a-Samoa. A merry crowd of big fellows, as lively as schoolboys, proud as Punch of their brightly polished rifles and their slash-hook head-knives, Off they go, soft-

Josiah Martin, photo

Apia from Mulinuu

footed into the bush, hunting for Mataafa, then back to tea after a pleasant little battle in which much powder is burnt, and a head or two taken. Wars like this were the principal recreation of Samoa, far more exciting than cricket, even when that game was played with a hundred men a-side, as was the local fashion. Things are different in Samoa nowadays.

If ever it should come about—a most unlikely thing—that the New Zealanders are required to fight for Samoa against the Germans, it is certain that they will have ninety-nine out of every hundred Samoans at their backs. The younger generation have had little opportunity for trying their skill at human targets, but every Samoan of over thirty or thirty-five is a practised fighter, even if he is, as a rule, a poor shot. There is a place a few miles out of Apia where the Samoans gave the Germans, and later the British and Americans, a tragic lesson in bush skirmishing. In the war of 1888-89 Mataafa’s men ambuscaded a German naval column marching up through the Vailele plantation and gave it a fearful cutting up with rifle and head-knife. The sailors lost about forty men that day, and the Germans never forgot it. Ten years later, in the same plantation, old Mataafa once more fought and out-manœuvred a white force, this time a column of English and American bluejackets and marines from the warships Tauranga, Porpoise, Royalist, and Philadelphia, in a thickly-wooded valley close to the spot where he had ambuscaded the Germans. In this skirmish the whites’ machine-gun jammed and had to be abandoned, and several officers and men were killed. Amongst them was that fine sailor Lieutenant Freeman, gunnery lieutenant of H.M.S. Tauranga, whose remains were afterwards brought reverently in to lie in the little gravevard by Apia’s lagoon. Old Mataafa had an uncommon record; it is not many men who can claim to have successfully fought the world’s three greatest nations. But he really never bore the British or American ill-will although he died a German pensioner, and he would have rejoiced had he lived to see the Union Jack run up in Apia.

The Islands and the People

THE ISLANDS AND THE PEOPLE

The Samoan group includes ten inhabited islands, of which Savaii and Upolu are the largest, and stretches east and west for two hundred miles. The islands lie between the parallels of 13° and 15° South latitude and 168° and 173° West longitude. Apia is about 1650 miles N.N.E. from Auckland, and a little over 2400 miles N.E. from Sydney. San Francisco is 4200 miles away. The group forms a slightly curved chain, with Tutuila, the American island, forming the most southerly part of the curve. Being within about 850 miles of the Equator the climate is hot, and the mountains make it moist; a land of blazing sunshine, but a land of frequent downpours and tropic squalls. Often oppressive in the summer, it is almost as hot in the season that is winter in New Zealand. The fine, dry season is from April to September; the wet season is from October to March, and hurricanes are liable to occur any time between the beginning of December and the end of March. The temperature does not vary much; Apia’s mean annual temperature is 78 degrees Fahrenheit. It is hotter than either Fiji or Tonga; but like those groups it is an extremely healthy place, and newcomers from colder climes need not fear the heat so long as they observe the ordinary rules of hygienic living, and restrict their consumption of animal food. Malaria and other perils of the western Pacific Islands do not affect Samoan residents. Mosquitoes are a pest, except on breezy points where the trade winds have free passage. As in the New Zealand bush, there are no snakes, and one may rest securely in the heart of the forest, but he will do wisely not to forget his mosquito net. Flies are a nuisance, and the papalangi soon falls into the habit of carrying a fan, or one of the fibre fly-whisks which every native uses.

Josiah Martin, photo

Mat making, Samoa

The islands are really huge, forested mountain ranges, with areas of level land of the richest quality lying at the bases of the hills. Everywhere the bush and the fruit-plantation; the coconut palm groves along the coast and inland furring the ranges, the wild timber, large and small, all twisted and twined with shrubs and lianes, in a true tropical profusion of jungly intricacy. Every kind of fruit grows here,—coconuts, bananas, breadfruit, grenadillas, “mummy-apples,” oranges, mangoes, custard apples, limes, pineapples; the sweet potato, the taro and the yam are raised in great quantities, and vegetables from temperate climes are successfully cultivated. Horses and cattle thrive, and the pig is as familiar a creature here as he is in a Maori village.

In the dense moist bush there are some great trees, such as the huge spreading banyan. Robert Louis Stevenson thus describes one:—“We came but a little further, and found in the borders of the bush a banyan. It must have been 150 feet in height; the trunk and its acolytes occupied a great space; above that, in the peaks of the branches, quite a forest of ferns and orchids were set; and over all again the huge spread of the boughs rose against the bright west and sent their shadow miles to the eastward. I have not often seen anything more satisfying than this vast vegetable.”

Upolu Island is about forty miles in length, with a width of ten or twelve miles; it runs east and west, and the harbour of Apia is on its northern side. All round the island runs a coral reef, interrupted every few miles by channels, some of them large enough to admit ships: and inside this barrier reef most of the boat-voyaging is done from bay to bay. Off the eastern end is a small woody islet Nuulua, which La Pérouse called Isle de Pécheurs (Fisherman’s Isle) from seeing natives fishing from their canoes when he passed in 1787. It was De Bougainville who, in 1768, gave the islands the name of the Navigators, in allusion to the great fleets of canoes, large and small, which he saw throughout the group. Upolu’s central ridge is about two thousand feet in height, wooded to the skyline, with but few roads, mostly the old war trails, connecting the northern and southern sides, winding down through the dense, cool forests that fill the valleys between the steep ridges running like ribs from the island backbone. There are good roads about Apia, and motor-cars are seen these days on the beautiful road that winds up to Vailima. But comparatively little travel is done by land except