ea-officer. A tiny schooner, the _Equator_, Captain Edwin Reid,
dear to myself from the memories of a six months' cruise, lived out upon
the high seas the fury of that tempest which had piled with wrecks the
harbour of Apia, found a refuge in Pango-Pango, and arrived at last in
the desolated port with a welcome and lucrative cargo of pigs. The
admiral was glad to have the pigs; but what most delighted the man's
noble and childish soul, was to see once more afloat the colours of his
country.

Thus, in what seemed the very article of war, and within the duration of
a single day, the sword-arm of each of the two angry Powers was broken;
their formidable ships reduced to junk; their disciplined hundreds to a
horde of castaways, fed with difficulty, and the fear of whose
misconduct marred the sleep of their commanders. Both paused aghast;
both had time to recognise that not the whole Samoan Archipelago was
worth the loss in men and costly ships already suffered. 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 pub