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They made a most discursive survey of that ocean, from Kamtschatka southwards, and at the end of 1787 were at the Samoan Isles, then unconverted, and where their two boats' crews were massacred, and the boats lost. The ships came to Port Jackson, in Australia, to build fresh boats, left it in February 1788, and were never heard of more.
During a Samoan marriage-ceremony the friends of the bride "took up stones and beat themselves until their heads were bruised and bleeding." In Australia a novitiate at the ceremony of manhood drank a mouthful of blood from the veins of the warrior who was to be his sponsor.
The vessel had run into Mulifanua Harbour owing to her having struck on a reef a few days previously whilst beating up against the south-east trades from Wallis Island to Leone Bay, a port on the island of Tutuila, one of the Samoan Group, and as she was leaking rather seriously her captain decided to run into Mulifanua, put her on the beach, and get at the leak or leaks.
Arriving at a chefferie, the stage halted, the district mutoi, or native policeman-postman, appeared leisurely, opened the locked box on the diligence, looked at ease over the contents, took out what he liked, and put back the remainder, with the postings of the chefferie. A glance at the map of Tahiti shows it shaped like a Samoan fan, or, roughly, like a lady's hand mirror.
He looked at me anxiously for a moment with that worried expression that so often crossed his face in conversation with me, and, patting the floor, scraped up an imaginary hole, "They sit down in the dusty," he said in baby Samoan. "Where?" I asked. "In front of Tumau." And then I understood that he had planted them in the ground before his mother's house.
Connected with Samoan warfare several other things may be noted, such as consulting the gods, taking a priest to battle to pray for his people and curse the enemy, filling up wells, destroying fruit-trees, going to battle decked off in their most valuable clothing and trinkets, haranguing each other previous to a fight, the very counterpart of Abijah the king of Judah, and even word for word, with the filthy-tongued Rabshakeh.
The administration of justice was the colour, and I am willing to believe the purpose, of the new paper; but its effect was to depose the existing government. A council of two Germans and two Samoans were to be invested with the right to make laws and impose taxes as might be "desirable for the common interest of the Samoan government and the German residents."
It needed only a glance at the chart to tell them that these were the Samoan group, and a little searching also told them that the nearest large one was Upolu. In less than another hour they were circling above the beautiful island of their choice, directly over the little town of Apia, which nestled in the center of a luxuriant forest of palms and other tropical trees.
No one is more swift to smell trickery than a Samoan; and the thought, that, under the long, bland, benevolent sentences of the Berlin Act, some trickery lay lurking, filled him with the breath of opposition. Laupepa seems never to have been a popular king.
"Never more will he butt alike the just and the unjust, the fat and bloated German merchant nor the herring-gutted Yankee skipper, nor the bare ah um legged Samoan, nor the gorgeous consul in the solar topee. Gone is the glory of Samoa with Billy MacLaggan.
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