Samoa and its Story/1
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.