Samoa and its Story/4
THE AMERICAN ISLANDS
The eastern portion of the Samoan group, comprising all the islands of the archipelago east of 171 degrees west longitude, are under the United States flag by virtue of the Anglo-American-German Convention proclaimed on February 16, 1900. The principal island is Tutuila, with its fine harbour, Pango-pango (the local miss onary-made practice of spelling the name “Pago-pago,” and of dropping the “n” from “ng” in all words in which it occurs is misleading, since Samoan is pronounced like Maori). Here the United States Government has established a naval station. The other islands under the Stars and Stripes are those of the Manua sub-group, consisting of Manua (or Manuatele), Olosenga, and Ofua. Manua is sixteen miles in circumference and roughly dome-shaped, rising steeply from the water to the height of 300 or 400 feet, and then swelling evenly up to a summit of 2,500 feet. The principal settlement, Tau, is in a bay on the N.W. side. Olosenga is a narrow island three miles long. Tutuila is a beautiful island, covered from water-edge to cloudy summit with the richest of tropic vegetation. It is seventeen miles in length with a width of five miles. Matafoa, its topmost peak, is 2,300 feet high, with great precipitous ridges of basalt dropping to the sea, separated by deep valleys filled with forests and fruit-groves. On the north side there are numerous beautiful bays, but the safest, Pango-pango, is on the south side, with a safe entrance above a third of a mile wide, opening into a splendid mountain-palisaded bay of lake-like calm. Another good bay is Leone, on the south-west side of the island, twelve miles from Pango-pango. Off the east end of Tutuila is the islet of Aunuu, five or six miles in circumference, where a warlike little tribe has for generations held its own against invaders. Rose Island, the easternmost of the Samoas, is dangerous to navigators because of its low elevation, only thirty feet, in contrast to the high volcanic peaks of the rest of the group. It is a small coconut-covered atoll, with a lagoon entered from the north-west side, and its reef extends more than two miles to the W.S.W.
A word-vignette from Robert Louis Stevenson’s diary of a cruise to Tutuila, quoted by Mr. Graham Balfour in his life of the man of Vailima, is a satisfying description of Pango-pango harbour. “The island at its highest point,” wrote Stevenson, ”is nearly severed in two by the long-elbowed harbour, about half a mile in width, eased everywhere in abrupt mountain-sides. The tongue of water sleeps in perfect quiet, and laps round its continent with the flapping wavelets of a lake. The wind passes overhead; day and night overhead the scroll of trade-wind clouds is unrolled across the sky, now in vast sculptured masses, now in a thin drift of débris, singular shapes of things, protracted and deformed beasts and trees and heads and torsos of old marbles, changing, fainting, and vanishing even as they flee. Below, meanwhile, the harbour lies unshaken and laps idly on its margin; its colour is green like a forest pool, bright in the shallows, dark in the midst with the reflected sides of woody mountains. Right in the wind’s eye, and right athwart the dawn, a conspicuous mountain stands, designed like an old fort or castle, with naked cliffy sides and a green head. In the peep of the day the mass is outlined dimly; as the east fires, the sharpness of the silhouette grows definite, and through all the chinks of the high wood the red looks through, like coals through a grate. From the other end of the harbour, at the extreme end of the bay, when the sun is down and night beginning, and colours and shapes at the sea-level are
Josiah Martin, photo
Basket making, Samoa
already confounded in the greyness of the dusk, the same peak retains for some time a tinge of phantom rose.”