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Updated: June 22, 2025
The election, according to the laws and customs of Samoa, of a successor to the late King, Malietoa Laupepa, developed a contest as to the validity of the result, which issue, by the terms of the General Act, was to be decided by the Chief justice. Upon his rendering a judgment in favor of Malietoa Tanu, the rival chief, Mataafa, took up arms.
Laupepa and Tamasese still figured as king and vice-king in the eyes of Dr. Stuebel; in their own, they had secretly abdicated, were become private persons, and might do what they pleased without binding or dishonouring their country. On the morrow, accordingly, they did public humiliation in the dust before the consulate, and five days later signed the convention.
I have not been able to draw Laupepa as a hero; but he is a man of certain virtues, which the Germans had now given him an occasion to display. Without hesitation he sacrificed himself, penned his touching farewell to Samoa, and making more expedition than the messengers, passed early behind Apia to the banks of the Vaisingano.
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.
It was so, that I first saw them; so, in a house set about with sentries for there was still a haunting fear of Germany, that I heard them relate their various experience in the past; heard Laupepa tell with touching candour of the sorrows of his exile, and Mataafa with mirthful simplicity of his resources and anxieties in the war.
It is such a house as a commoner might use in a bush village; none could dream that it gave shelter even to a family chief; yet this is the palace of Malietoa-Natoaitele-Tamasoalii Laupepa, king of Samoa. As you sit in his company under this humble shelter, you shall see, between the posts, the new house of the president.
As a first chapter in the history of Polynesian Confederation, it was hardly cheering, and Laupepa remarked to one of the embassy, with equal dignity and sense: "If you have come here to teach my people to drink, I wish you had stayed away."
The right to elect their king had been granted them; or if that were denied or suspended, then the right to elect "his successor." They were dissatisfied with Laupepa, and claimed, "according to the laws and customs of Samoa," duly to appoint another.
Here he was transhipped, "in a boat with a screen," which he supposed was to conceal him from the British ship; and on board the Albatross was sent below and told he must stay there till they had sailed. From Australia, they sailed some time, and reached an anchorage where a consul-general came on board, and where Laupepa was only allowed on deck at night.
Laupepa had fallen in ill-blood with one of them; his only idea of defence had been to throw himself in the arms of another; his name, his rank, and his great following had not been able to preserve him; and he had vanished from the eyes of men as the Samoan thinks of it, beyond the sky. Asi, Maunga, Tuiletu-funga, had followed him in that new path of doom. And now it was the rival's turn.
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