The following images and text come from what is most likely an American periodical from the 1880s. It measures 9.4 x 6.1 inches, is of a heavy paper and bears the page number 409 and presumably 410 and a page heading of "POLYNESIANS - TAHITIANS". The text is arranged in two columns split by a vertical line. The picture of Apia is attributed to and signed "Dosso". There is also a signature "F. Meaulle", a French engraver who appears to have been active in the 1880s.

View of Apia and the French Missions

The Samoans have the same fine physical development and essentially the same features which we have described in the general sketch of the Sawaiori races. Everywhere throughout Polynesia men are seen, who in stature and form, in bearing and in symmetry, are equal to the average of Europeans and Americans. The color is almost uniformly that copper-bronze line which distinguishes, by its brightness of finish, the races of Oceanica from the peoples of the continent. The latter are less bright colored, the skin lacking the gloss of the peoples of the sea.

It is claimed, however, that the Samoans are not equal in bodily and mental energies to some of the other Polynesians. Their acceptance of Christianity and their abandonment of paganism have been marked with less enthusiasm and zeal than was shown by the Hawaiians. Meanwhile foreigners have, by their presence, somewhat cowed the native spirit. Foreign estates are laid out in the island, and foreign labourers have been brought in to prosecute industries for which the native have shown no aptitude. That aspect of the native life which presents it most favorably is the skill of the Samoans in the building and management of boats and in fishing. It was this circumstance which led the French mariner, Bougainville, to give the name of Navigator's islands to the group under consideration.

Of the Tahitians, or Society islanders, we have already said something in the general sketch of the Sawaioris. The name Tahiti - or Otaheite, as Cook wrote it - belongs primarily to a single island, but it has been extended in our times to the whole archipelago formerly known as the Society islands. It is, worth our while to mark the central, and therefore isolated, situation of this cluster. Hawaii is two thousand six hundred miles distant. The sea line to, Sydney, Australia, measures three thousand four hundred miles, and the distance from San Francisco is nearly the same.