Samoa and its Story/2
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]
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
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.