第59章 LAUPEPA AND MATAAFA(1)

1889-1892

WITH the hurricane,the broken war-ships,and the stranded sailors,I am at an end of violence,and my tale flows henceforth among carpet incidents.The blue-jackets on Apia beach were still jealously held apart by sentries,when the powers at home were already seeking a peaceable solution.It was agreed,so far as might be,to obliterate two years of blundering;and to resume in 1889,and at Berlin,those negotiations which had been so unhappily broken off at Washington in 1887.The example thus offered by Germany is rare in history;in the career of Prince Bismarck,so far as I am instructed,it should stand unique.On a review of these two years of blundering,bullying,and failure in a little isle of the Pacific,he seems magnanimously to have owned his policy was in the wrong.He left Fangalii unexpiated;suffered that house of cards,the Tamasese government,to fall by its own frailty and without remark or lamentation;left the Samoan question openly and fairly to the conference:and in the meanwhile,to allay the local heats engendered by Becker and Knappe,he sent to Apia that invaluable public servant,Dr.Stuebel.I should be a dishonest man if I did not bear testimony to the loyalty since shown by Germans in Samoa.Their position was painful;they had talked big in the old days,now they had to sing small.Even Stuebel returned to the islands under the prejudice of an unfortunate record.To the minds of the Samoans his name represented the beginning of their sorrows;and in his first term of office he had unquestionably driven hard.The greater his merit in the surprising success of the second.So long as he stayed,the current of affairs moved smoothly;he left behind him on his departure all men at peace;and whether by fortune,or for the want of that wise hand of guidance,he was scarce gone before the clouds began to gather once more on our horizon.

Before the first convention,Germany and the States hauled down their flags.It was so done again before the second;and Germany,by a still more emphatic step of retrogression,returned the exile Laupepa to his native shores.For two years the unfortunate man had trembled and suffered in the Cameroons,in Germany,in the rainy Marshalls.When he left (September 1887)Tamasese was king,served by five iron war-ships;his right to rule (like a dogma of the Church)was placed outside dispute;the Germans were still,as they were called at that last tearful interview in the house by the river,"the invincible strangers";the thought of resistance,far less the hope of success,had not yet dawned on the Samoan mind.

He returned (November 1889)to a changed world.The Tupua party was reduced to sue for peace,Brandeis was withdrawn,Tamasese was dying obscurely of a broken heart;the German flag no longer waved over the capital;and over all the islands one figure stood supreme.During Laupepa's absence this man had succeeded him in all his honours and titles,in tenfold more than all his power and popularity.He was the idol of the whole nation but the rump of the Tamaseses,and of these he was already the secret admiration.

In his position there was but one weak point,-that he had even been tacitly excluded by the Germans.Becker,indeed,once coquetted with the thought of patronising him;but the project had no sequel,and it stands alone.In every other juncture of history the German attitude has been the same.Choose whom you will to be king;when he has failed,choose whom you please to succeed him;when the second fails also,replace the first:upon the one condition,that Mataafa be excluded."POURVU QU'IL SACHE SIGNER!"-an official is said to have thus summed up the qualifications necessary in a Samoan king.And it was perhaps feared that Mataafa could do no more and might not always do so much.But this original diffidence was heightened by late events to something verging upon animosity.Fangalii was unavenged:the arms of Mataafa were NONDUM INEXPIATIS UNCTA CRUORIBUS,Still soiled with the unexpiated blood of German sailors;and though the chief was not present in the field,nor could have heard of the affair till it was over,he had reaped from it credit with his countrymen and dislike from the Germans.