PRIOR to 1830. in which year agents of the London Missionary Society established a mission, very little of Samoa was known to the civilised world. The posts which mark that olden time have nearly all gone; the modem ones that have been reared in their place are not always of undoubted authority. It has been said that the present Polynesian inhabitants are the successors of an ancient fair-skinned megalithic people. More writers than one have recorded that the island of UpoIu, probably though by no means certainly the oldest formation of the group, contains a relic of megalithic man in the Fale-o-le-fe'e, or House of the Cuttlefish, which one learned ethnologist has described as "an ellipse of giant stone columns, no mean rival of our Stonehenge." At the risk of a diversion the truth concerning this travellers' tale must he set down. The interesting relic is situate some eight miles inland of Apia, on a little flat in the upper waters of one of the larger streams of the island. There is, at the upper end of the flat, a basaltic cliff, thirty feet or so high, from which has dropped a number of small stone columns. And of these some have been, very imperfectly, set round in an ellipse - the shape of the ordinary native house - a few yards below. None of the stones bear any evidence of dressing. None are deep set in the ground. None are too large or too heavy for one man to lift. The writer has sacrilegiously tried them all, after lunch be it said, and dropped them back into place again. A few stones have been laid horizontally to form a square---the chair of the fe'e. There are pretty native stories concerning the stones, in age anything from eighty years up, but these must be gathered elsewhere. The point is that there is nothing to indicate any pre-Polynesian antiquity, and that there was required no colossal effort in the building. The relic (if a theory is worth anything) may be the posts of a fale tele or large house built in a spot chosen for defence or a. a retreat in war. There are native stories to support this view. It may have been originally roofed with wood and thatch which long ago have rotted into the warm damp bush. Or, as not seldom happens to many undertakings of these carefree people, it may have been always incomplete. With the relation of one further truth this digression is ended. As the writer smoked. the two sweet-natured Samoan giants who had accompanied him on his pilgrimage slashed away with their long knives the undergrowth from the site of the relic, and then - they deliberately grunted into place another two stones for the house of their romantic fish! Had reincarnation brought auld Edie Ochiltree and Bill Stumps together in this outer Eden?

There is, it may be conceded, nothing known in Samoa to indicate a race prior to its present native Polynesians. That they however have long resided in the group is clear. They have no suggestion in their legends, as the Maoris have, of migration from other lands. To them Samoa is the earth. The god Tagaloa, who dwelt in space and made the Heavens, and of whom it is not known how or whence he came, had a grandson called Lu. On one occasion Tagaloa, being annoyed with the boy, seized and beat him with the handle of the great god's fly-switch. Lu escaped, ran down to Earth, and named it Samoa.

From their appearance, from their undoubted relationship to other Polynesian peoples, it is probable that the Samoans are of an original Caucasian stock with which through the ages many strains, almost certainly including the malayoid and not entirely excluding the negrito, have combined to produce a distinctive people. The question of the origin of the Polynesian has been much discussed by ethnologists, and where they differ and local evidence is, and apparently has long been, non-existent, the modern historian may with justification plead a great uncertainty. Probably several migrations from Southern Asia found their way to Polynesia. Professor Macmillan Brown traces, following Mr. S. Percy Smith, a last great migration, possibly two or three centuries before the christian era, from the coast south of the Punjaub, through part of the Present Dutch East ladies, south of Celebes along the north-east coast of New Guinea, and through the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides and the Fiji group, to Tonga or Samoa. This, says Professor Brown, was "undoubtedly their route"; their final centre of dispersion in Polynesia was probably Samoa. It should be noted, per contra, that Dr. A. K. Newman is often very much of a different opinion.

A most interesting, practical, and experienced paper on this subject - the ethnology of the Pacific - was presented by the Revd. S. J. Whitmee, F.R.G.S. to the Philosophical Society of Great Britain in 1879.

That Samoa was the cradle of much Polynesian settlement seems highly probable. It is quite likely that many hundreds of years ago Samoa produced masterful seafarers who scoured the wide Pacific and established the people of many islands. The Rev. J. B. Stair has collected interesting native records of such voyages. Ease of living, a softening climate, abundance in their own fair lands seem gradually to have changed the race to a domestic people. From being raiders they became the raided. Fijian conquerors are said to have established themselves in Manu’a in the dawn of known Samoan history, and to have received tribute from all Samoa. There are many Samoan legends which have as heroes and heroines princes and princesses of Fiji - legends which show ancient knowledge of the Fijian people and customs and indicate intercourse between Samoa and Fiji. Later the Tongans, probably after many raids, established themselves on Savaiii, crossed to Upolu, and were eventually beaten from the group by the first Malietoa who arranged between Tonga and Samoa a treaty of peace which has been continuously observed by over twenty generations of the Malietoa family. Traces of these occupations are doubtless seen in the curling hair and darker skins of some of the people today.

Such tradition as has yet been preserved to the Samoans groups itself naturally under the three heads of war, national custom and legend, and family descent. Matters of family descent were carefully transmitted from father to son through many generations - the favoured place being the village green on the white nights of the increscent moon - and pedigrees are still given in the establishment of family names with definite assurance and with the agreement of opponents; national customs have greatly survived, but with modification; their legends, quietly slipping from the memory of the people, have been extensively recorded by many earlier settlers, and especially by missionaries. All these matters are exceedingly interesting, but are somewhat uncertain and can have place in this history only where it is necessary in individual cases to make reference to them. Of war more must be said. Warfare has ever been a recognised occupation of the younger men. The island of Upolu, from the earliest times of which we have information until quite recently, seems rarely to have been free from hostilities more or less extensive. It is certain that within the past two centuries Upolu has carried a population much in excess of its present numbers, for the traces of wider habitation are yet in many of its forests.

In 1830, and for years before, war made hideous ravages. The causes were often trivial, the methods a curious admixture of childish regard for ceremony and of craft, of careless generosity and of cruelty. Clubs and spears of various patterns and slings were the usual weapons. Both land and sea forces were employed, either separately or in conjunction, and sea-fights seem to have been at times as destructive of life as were battlefield, ashore. It is not possible to give chronological order to the traditions of these internecine wars. The pioneer missionary John Williams, in 1832, found that the people of Manono had a record kept by means of collected stones of one hundred and ninety seven battles. And it was but two years before, in August of 1830, that Williams, landing on Savaii from his schooner Messenger of Peace, saw across the strait in Upolu "the mountains enveloped in flames and smoke” and on enquiring the cause was informed "that a battle had been fought that very morning and that the flames which we saw were consuming the houses, the plantations and the bodies of women and children and infirm people" who had fallen into the hands of the conquerors.

There is no record of cannibalism ever having ailing custom in Samoa as was so pronouncedly the case in Fiji. but as a "refinement of revenge," in punishment of evil acts on the part of a tyrant or other hated person, or even, it may be, in that spirit of noisy braggadocio with which the Samoan male still rejoices in the success of his prowess, the body of a conquered man was cooked and eaten. To this day “I will cook you in my oven" is an insult which may result in serious consequences. Of the slain the heads were taken by the victors and carried as trophies to their leaders.

The earliest recorded notices we have of Samoa are those of the Dutch "Three Ship Expedition," Jacob Roggeveen commanding, in its voyage round the world to Java via Cape Horn in 1721-1722. Roggeveen, according to his recorders, placed the group somewhat inexactly, called several of its islands by names now unused, and sailed away without landing. The honour of discovery may fairly be said to lie with France. In 1768 de Bougainville visited the group, in the course of his famous voyage round the world, and in 1787 de la Perouse. The former seeing many canoes moving along the shores of the islands named them the Navigators' Archipelago, a name much in vogue until recent years - probably until German occupation. La Perouse fixed the position of the whole group. During his stay a shore party for water from both of his ships was attacked near Asu on Tutuila and Commandant Vicomte de Langle and ten of the ships' companies were killed. Forty-nine escaping mostly with injuries. The cause of the quarrel and the share the visitors played in it are uncertain, but it is stated on good authority that a native was thought to have attempted to take something from aboard one of the ships (no crime in the eyes of a communistic Samoan) and was punished with the result that he died; the natives, keenly feeling the outrage, returned to the shore and attacked the boats' crews there. La Perouse's account of the affair most undeservedly gave Samoans for long after a name for treachery and bloodthirstiness. I willingly," he entered in his journal, "willingly abandon to others the task of writing the uninteresting history of these barbarous people; a stay of twenty-four hours and the relation of our misfortunes has sufficed to show their atrocious manners.” A memorial was in 1883 placed upon the graves on Tutuila of the murdered men, "morts pour la Science et la Patrie."

In 1790 His Britannic Majesty's Ship Pandora, Captain Edwards, paid a visit to the group.

It is about this time that the arrival of white men may first be noted. The American, or the dweller in the King's fair-flung dominions, scarce exists who has not from a schoolboy seen in fancy the landing upon his shores of the first white men - strong, wise pioneers preparing the way of a nation. The comings of Columbus and of the Pilgrim Fathers haw been well depictured in the States; the pioneer is much honoured in the Dominions. No such sentiment, alas, can be called up for the case of Samoa. The wise men were to fellow, with a lasting and beneficent result to the islands. But those first whites, mostly British, occasionally American, who in all sorts of ways drifted to the shores of Samoa from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the late 'thirties, had no particular mission and even the lapse of time scarce finds them picturesque. "They were," says Pritchard, "with but few exceptions, convicts who had escaped from the penal settlements of Australia, and steeped in the deepest of crimes, caring nothing for their own lives, feared neither God nor man." They found a land sufficiently remote and not unpleasant, where food was plentiful, the people friendly to the point of kindness, the women comely, and work, as they knew it, unnecessary. But they were active men and had lived in a rough world. Generally they attached themselves to particular districts and chiefs, assisted in warfare, lived the merry life of the cock who fought just when he might he so inclined, met it is said upon occasion and got drunk together on banana or pineapple rum, quarrelled and fought, died or lived as the case might be. They were wont to fill the natives with tales of their royal descent in England and elsewhere. A few attained ease and luxury by engrafting a new religion upon the priestly customs and zoolatry of the Samoans - a religion wherein the novel tenets received from the Great Spirit supported polygamy and dancing and above all the "competent maintenance of his priests by good feeding, unlimited supplies of ava, and free selection in women.” And the hymns were rollicking seamen's songs!

Food for romance is here, but the truth is there was little of the romantic about these callosities of humanity. By 1850 they had practically all gone - died off or reformed with age.

Such was the first acquaintance of the islanders with the white man - he who "breaking through the sky" brought to them his wonderful clothing, his wonderful knowledge, his astounding energy. Certainly he impressed them with a sense of his prowess - more, they then gleaned what they have never forgotten, that the white man is an incomprehensible being, a leader but bad to cross, of enormous reserve in will power and executive force, but full of devilment and perverse command. The missionary stands apart, but all other white men are at heart the same, and are to be deceived accordingly. Well, in the whole round hundred years of the nineteenth century they had small cause to believe otherwise.