shed blood at Fangalii; it was only in 1876 that we British had our own
misconceived little massacre at Mulinuu. I shall have to tell how the
Germans bludgeoned Malietoa with a sudden call for money; it was
something of the suddenest that Sir Arthur Gordon himself, smarting
under a sensible public affront, made and enforced a somewhat similar
demand.

CHAPTER III

THE SORROWS OF LAUPEPA, 1883 TO 1887

You ride in a German plantation and see no bush, no soul stirring; only
acres of empty sward, miles of cocoa-nut alley: a desert of food. In the
eyes of the Samoan the place has the attraction of a park for the
holiday schoolboy, of a granary for mice. We must add the yet more
lively allurement of a haunted house, for over these empty and silent
miles there broods the fear of the negrito cannibal. For the Samoan
besides, there is something barbaric, unhandsome, and absurd in the idea
of thus growing food only to send it from the land and sell it. A man at
home who should turn all Yorkshire into one wheatfield, and annually
burn his harvest on the altar of Mumbo-Jumbo, might impress ourselves
not much otherwise. And the firm which does these things is quite
extraneous, a wen that might be excised to-morrow without loss but to
itself; few natives drawing from it so much as day's wages; and the rest
beholding in it only the occupier of their acres. The nearest villages
have suffered most; they see over the hedge the lands of their ancestors
waving with useless cocoa-palms; and the sales were often questionable,
and must still more often appear so to regretful natives, spinning and
improving yarns about the evening lamp. At the worst, then, to help
oneself from the plantation will seem to a Samoan very like
orchard-breaking to the British schoolboy; at the best, it will be
thought a gallant Robin-Hoodish readjustment of a public wrong.

And there is more behind. Not only is theft from the plantations
regarded rather as a lark and peccadillo, the idea of theft in itself is
not very clearly present to these communists; and as to the punishment
of crime in general, a great gulf of opinion divides the natives from
ourselves. Indigenous punishments were short and sharp. Death,
deportation by the primitive method of setting the criminal to sea in a
canoe, fines, and in Samoa itself the penalty of publicly biting a hot,
ill-smelling root, comparable to a rough forfeit in a children's
game--these are approved. The offender