The Storm
On the 14th of March 1889, seven warships lay calmly at anchor in Apia harbour, on the Samoan island of Upolu. 48 hours later, after the passing of a tremendous cyclone, six of them, three American and three German, would lie beached or wrecked beyond repair and more than 140 sailors of both nationalities would have drowned. Among these unfortunate ships were the wooden-hulled USS Trenton, flagship of the US Pacific Fleet, and the newly-commissioned imperial German gunboat SMS Eber. The only warship to escape destruction was the British sailing corvette HMS Calliope, which managed to steam clear of the harbour and ride out the storm at sea. Harbours are normally places of refuge from storms but the harbour at Apia is partially exposed. In addition, being a tropical island, the harbour is enclosed by coral reefs with a sandy bottom that affords little hold for a ship’s anchor. Hence, the majority of the ships met their fates by being smashed onto the reefs.
Reporting on the event a few days later, The New York Herald was quick to blame the American losses on the US government, reporting the ships’ coal bunkers as ‘entirely cleaned out’, therefore making it impossible for them to raise sufficient steam to leave harbour. The nearest US naval station of Pago Pago was only 50 kilometres away on the island of Tutuila, but, complained the Herald, ‘our government has not apparently discovered in seventeen years the strategic importance of having an ample supply of coal there.’
Undoubtedly, there were practical reasons for the losses. Calliope was fortunate in being positioned closest to the harbour entrance. The German ships, in contrast, were in an especially vulnerable position deep within the harbour. In fact, the Eber had damaged her screw on a reef during another recent storm, which may have sealed her fate. Moreover, the Calliope was the most modern among the seven warships at anchor. The American vessels were wooden-hulled ‘relics of the post-Civil War era’ (Kriser & Preziosi, 2001), and the flagship was apparently prone to flooding through its poorly sited hawse pipes, which reportedly dowsed her boiler fires. Nevertheless, modern historians of the event tend to put the blame for the ship losses on the asinine and hubristic nationalism of their captains. It is without question that senior officers on all the warships underestimated the weather situation.
The effects of the Apia Cyclone on its ship victims are a well-documented footnote to history, but the drama of the storm has arguably obscured the reasons for the ships’ presence at Apia in the first place. Why should naval units of three great powers be facing off against one another at this date in time at some far-flung islands in the South Pacific? Or to put it in more colourful language; why should three large dogs be snarling over such a very small bone?[i]
In fact, this was but one of many dramatic naval encounters that took place in the Samoan islands between the late 18th and late 19th centuries. The Japanese have a word for the unwelcome ships that were often sighted off their coast during the isolationist ‘Sakoku’ period, which was broken by Commodore Perry’s coercive show of naval strength in 1854. ‘Kurofune’ literally translates as ‘Black Ships’, recalling the pitch-covered hulls of the early wooden vessels. It seems fitting to collectivise the ships that appear in the following loosely chronological summary using the same term, as their effects on Samoan society were equally profound and enduring.
The Explorers
The Samoan islands form part of the Polynesian island group and lie on its eastern boundary with Melanesia. In oceanic terms, they occupy a central position in the Pacific. From Samoa, it is more than 4,000 miles to the ports of Yokohama and San Francisco, and it is more than 2,000 miles to either Sydney or Hawaii. The closest landfall of any size is Auckland at a distance of approximately 1,500 miles. The closest island groups to Samoa are those containing Fiji and Tonga with which it has strong historical and cultural links.
Samoa itself consists of two larger islands; Upolu and Savaii, in the west, and Tutuila along with several other smaller islands, known collectively as Manua, about 60 miles to the east. The two larger islands are separated by the 10-mile wide Apolima Straight. Today, the western islands belong to Samoa (formerly Western Samoa) and the eastern group are collectively known as American Samoa. However, in these pages, the term Samoa will be applied to the islands as a whole.
The Samoan islands were first sighted by Europeans in the early 18th century. In 1768, the French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bourgainville established brief contact with inhabitants of the outlying Manua group, christening them ‘Les Iles des Navigateurs’ after being impressed by the ocean-going canoes he observed there. In 1787, two more French ships made contact, this time with the neighbouring island of Tutuila. La Boussole and La Astrolabe[ii] set the earliest recorded precedent for asymmetric warfare between Samoans and Europeans.
A landing party from the Astrolabe was attacked while collecting water provisions, and the ship’s commander, Langle, and a dozen of his crewmen were killed. The causes of the violence are disputed, but the islanders may have been reacting to the fatal punishment inflicted on a native man for allegedly taking items from one of the French ships. The French expedition commander, Le Perouse, saw the incident as an act of unprovoked hostility; naming the spot where the attack took place ‘Massacre Bay’, and recording the islanders in his journal as ‘barbarous people’ with ‘atrocious manners’. In addition to the 40 or so Samoans who died during the initial skirmish, Le Perouse set about avenging the loss of his esteemed deputy by sinking more than 100 native boats. Within a year, Le Perouse himself and his entire expedition would perish after being shipwrecked in a storm off the New Hebrides (modern Vanuatu).
A similar bloody confrontation took place in 1791. HMS Pandora was combing the South Pacific in search of the Bounty mutineers. This time, the attack occurred off the coast of Upolu, and the superior arms of the British ship led to the deaths of many Samoan warriors, whose only seaborne weapons were pebbles. It seems entirely plausible that stories of the earlier incident with the French ships had spread across the islands in the intervening decade. However, according to Gray (1980), initial relations between the Pandora crew and the islanders on Upolu were warm, with Captain Edwards having to ‘post sentries to keep the women above decks’. Weeks later, the Pandora was wrecked in the Torres Strait.[iii] Edwards and the majority of his crew and captured mutineers eventually returned to Britain, spreading word that the Samoans were a bellicose and savage people best avoided.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 