uffered. The so-called hurricane of March
16th made thus a marking epoch in world-history; directly, and at once,
it brought about the congress and treaty of Berlin; indirectly, and by a
process still continuing, it founded the modern navy of the States.
Coming years and other historians will declare the influence of that.

CHAPTER XI--LAUPEPA AND MATAAFA

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 retrogr