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Consul in Office - Liability to Insult - Rights of the Britisher - Piratical Visitor - Consuls under Review - Wild Female - British Fetishism - Arrogant Consul - Family Biography - Half-caste Quandary - Consular Mild Deceit - Beauty in Tears - Swimming on Shore - Mr. B. Brown - Wife-retrieving Bureau - A Rara Avis - Marriages in Samoa - Attempted Matrimony at Long Range.

14th August.

TO-DAY was destined to be indeed a typical Consular one, and can be taken as a fair sample of many that the British official in Samoa has to endure. He does his best to put up with the multifarious, absurd, and vexatious domestic squabbles he is for ever being dragged into, whether authorized to interfere or not, and will not shirk the trouble, if he can personally arrange any dispute amicably to avoid litigation.

All this any Consul, who takes a proper interest in his people, would bear with equanimity; but it is very hard to have patiently to endure the gross personal insults occasionally heaped upon him by some wrongheaded ruffian or other, just fresh from a spree, who may choose to thrust his unnecessary presence on the office, for the ventilation of what he invariably proclaims to be his 'blanked' rights as a Britisher.

The first thing after opening the office this morning, I had the pleasure of a visit from a piratical looking individual, rather the worse for wear, who staggered up to the door, as he said, for the purpose of giving me a bit of his mind, which he did in his most flowery vernacular, all about a matter which had happened more than a year before, but which had returned to his half-maddened brain during his morning's finish up. Not wishing to afford the natives the sight of the British Consul having a pugilistic encounter round the flag-pole, a proceeding I felt very much inclined to indulge in, I was forced to suffer the brute's abuse, who for about half an hour, from the outside, poured all sorts of sailor-like bad language through the open door. At last, shouting frantically that he was not afraid of and knew more than any ( qualified' Consul that ever was, and that he would have his 'somethinged' rights if he died for them, he left for the nearest grog-shop, saying that he would return soon and finish the call.

This sort of Consular business, as may well be imagined, is not amongst the most pleasant experiences of the Samoan post, but is - or rather now it would be more correct to say was - not uncommon, and was most particularly hard to bear. Badgering a Consul was considered a legitimate sport in Samoa, in season all the year round.

I had not long got rid of my complimentary friend, and settled down as comfortably as I might to the routine work, and had just handed over the ship's papers to a captain about to leave the port, when in rushed a white woman in a great state of excitement, and so full of something she wanted to say in a hurry, that the words had become jammed and not one would come to her relief. I tried at once to detain the captain, whom I knew to be a family man, and of course acquainted with all this sort of thing; but he most ungallantly bolted and left me to my fate, saying that 'she was one of his passengers, and he imagined that he should have his full share of the sample he saw before him in due time, and that would be enough for him.'

Handing my visitor a chair and a fan, I sympathetically inquired in what way I could oblige her, and whether she was in much pain. The latter compassionate inquiry, I suppose, was the cause of her nearly frightening my life out, for it sent her into a fit of hysterics and copious weeping that I was perfectly powerless to assuage, for want of practice in such things. This interesting state of affairs lasted for about ten minutes, when the patient became a little quieter; so, taking advantage of the lull in the kicks and the weeps, I put on my official manner and formally demanded her business, and out came that shudder-creating, oft-sung note of future trouble to Consuls, generally ten times more significant of coming woe when from the lips of one of the fair sex, ' I'm a British subject;' necessarily followed by the ominous refrain, land I want my rights.'

We had now got as far as the usual way of commencing Consular business in the South Seas, even to the grim scowl at the guiltily shrinking official whose principal employment is popularly supposed to be that of preventing his countrymen from enjoying the privileges they continuously taunt him with their paying for, and yet getting nothing out of him but bloated arrogance.'

Again I inquired what I could do for a lady in such apparent distress, and received as reply her entire and complete family history, not omitting a graphic description of her last baby.

All this, no doubt, would have been most interesting to a family man, but was wasted upon a bachelor; and not being able to bring home to my mind any particular analogy between domestic history and my Consular duties, in my best business tone I insisted upon my valuable time no longer being trifled with, and could plainly see that she scorned me, the hired despiser of a free people's rights, and in her inmost mind thought but little of the specimen before her of an official upon whom a venal Government had lavished its untold gold, wrung from a suffering community.

At last I got her to the point, when I found that I was required, as myrmidon of a paternal Government and guardian of the 'fetish ' of British subjectism - which in the Pacific is, when threatened as a bogey, both to erring nations and individuals, as terrible a menace as writing to the Times is at home-to exercise RIV jurisdiction by insisting upon a young lady whom she called her daughter, and who had fallen in love, and would insist upon stopping behind to get married to return with her in the ship just leaving. Here was a pretty little family affair to settle, without anything to be found in the instructions bearing on the subject.

On receiving further particulars of this sad case, I discovered that the girl was a half-caste, whom I had frequently seen about Apia of late. I did not think it quite safe to venture upon a question as to how this condition of things had come about, or whether her husband was of the proper 'fetish' to justify my interference as a British official. Being convinced that a little mild deception would save me from awkward consequences, should I have the misfortune to thwart the desires of this stalwart lady, and at the same time satisfy all nationalistic requirements, I said that I would go down and expostulate with this unnatural child.

In the meantime, I suggested that my visitor should take a walk until I came back, which I determined should not happen until I had seen the ship well out at sea, even if it took a week to go; so, carefully locking up, I went townwards, whilst my client, cheerfully trusting in the Consular arbitrary powers, strolled in the opposite direction. Halfway down the beach I met the girl in question hurrying up to me to complain that my client of just before was detaining her box, and was about to take it away with her in the departing ship.

With tears and sobs she pleaded her sad case in the centre of a rapidly increasing and sympathetic crowd; so, saying something to the effect that I would see about it, I rushed off and shut myself up in a friend's house down town for protection, from which I never stirred until I saw the departing vessel well outside the reef, when, emerging, I found that affairs had settled themselves without my help, and that the young woman had remained behind, also her box.

My client was very cunning to the last, for, finding how I had failed her, she pretended to give way, and asked the girl to come off to the ship and get her box. When the girl arrived on board, the mother told the captain that the Consul had ordered her to be tied up and taken away, on which the daughter pluckily settled the question by jumping overboard; and the captain throwing her box after her, they both came on shore together, and the happy union came off soon afterwards.

I had not long been back in office after the last occurrence before a real beachcomber, rejoicing in the name of 'Blackguard Brown,' arrived on business, but he, in spite of his uncomplimentary prefix, was not a bad sort of fellow. He was universally admired for his fluency in British expletive, which from long and arduous practice had become as natural and requisite to him in properly explaining himself, as ordinary unadorned language is to the untutored mind. He meant no more when employing terms that would make the hair on some people's heads stand on end with horror, than those same people would if they were talking over the same matter in the best and purest English. Costumed, as is fashionable, in dungaree 'blue pants, shirt-worn tail outside rather grimy, unkempt, and barefooted, he strolled into the room, shook hands, and sat down.

After five minutes' discussion of the leading topics of the day, commented upon in his highest style of sultry verbal fireworks, he came at last to his business, which was that I should find his wife for him, she having run away. This is another sort of special duty expected of the British Consul, and was, in fact, with the earlier ones-when fees were retained-a recognised practice, but one which the natives need not have paid attention to, as it had not the smallest shadow of authority.

I informed Mr. B. Brown that the Consulate was not a wife-retrieving bureau, and declined to meddle with his connubial infelicities in any way, which caused the worthy man to excel his very best performance, not intended offensively, however, in beautifying the too simple inquiry, 'for what he had paid his money to be married in the Consulate if he could not recover his wife on her running away with a nigger;' and off he went grumbling, but none the worse friends with me for not acceding to his request.

Simultaneously with B. Brown's departure was the arrival of quite a different sort of applicant for Consular assistance, whose story is really too refreshingly cool and startlingly ingenuous to be omitted from a record of sultry climes and island guile.

This rara avis was a youth about nineteen or twenty years of age, presenting a plump fresh English country face with a trusting eye, but evidently very bashful - a rare circumstance in the Pacific with anyone out of arms, and the only instance I ever met with in my experience. Neatly dressed, bowing his way awkwardly into the awful presence - not of recent date recipient of so much polite consideration - and blushing violently, he took the seat proffered him. This bright waif, a most remarkable exception to the general run of his congeners, was the son of an old British resident in Savaii, the adjoining island, where he had passed nearly all his life boat-building and carpentering, and must have been very well looked after to have preserved so great a show of honest simplicity.

I could not keep my wondering eyes off this modern phenomenon, so contradictory to all island tradition, not being able for a long time to realize how on earth such an amount of genuine artlessness could ever have reached Samoa in a white skin. He was respectful in manner, and most wonderful of all, unlike all the rest of his class, did not want his `blanked' rights; which, after what I had gone through in the morning, set me to work wildly speculating what more terrible experience he intended to submit me to. Consequently, for the moment, I lost a good deal of my confidence in the impressions I had formed on his first appearance.

He sat still for about ten minutes without saying a word, but evidently trying his best to open a conversation, blushing most violently each time he glanced at me. Taking pity on this solitary specimen of shyness, I opened the ball, and inquired what he wished, for beyond 'rights' I was unacquainted with anything that a British subject wanted in Samoa, and these some certainly did not get. If he had wished, for any of them, he would have been at work abusing me long before, and by this time I should have been compared unfavourably with the Czar, Bulgarian atrocities, Nero, and every bloated tyrant that his knowledge of ancient and modern history would furnish for my regulation; but he answered in lowly modulated tones: 'If you please, sir, may I get married?' Again a fresh experience ! Here was a boy who had done me the honour of adopting me for his father ! What a curious windup to a very variegated day ! I had been told that I was no good, and only fit for the shambles; I had gone through the pantomime of paternal duty in reducing a disobedient child, of the serpent's tooth order, to submission, with no very grand success, after enduring a whole family history; I had been engaged as an expert in the recovery of runaway wives business, and now was requested to answer a question usually asked of the paternal relative interested.

Informing him that I knew of nothing in my regulations - paternal though they might be - that constituted me his family, he explained that what he required was to get married. Now it was all plain sailing; but unfortunately for him I held no warrant for the performance of the ceremony. He then said that he did not care a bit about the warrant, all he required was the ceremony; on the strength of which both he and the girl would be quite contented to live happy, etc., for the conventional ever after. But I had to decline to conduct a bogus performance, and referred him to the missionaries for further advice.

From the time of my first taking office in March, 1882, until the middle of 1885, no British subject could contract a legal marriage in the Navigators group, the authority being a personal one, and none having, been issued to me. During all that time I had many applications from Britishers, desirous of forming bona fide alliances, to be married in the Consulate - the only place where a legal ceremony can be performed-and was obliged to refuse them through possessing, no authority. Both the missionaries and the Consulate had frequently applied for facilities for such performance, but until the latter end of my stay none such arrived. The applicants in consequence were obliged to content themselves with other ceremonies of no legal value to them as British subjects, and their children could not claim the protection of the flag, nor succeed to property except by special mention in will.

There are still living in Samoa respectable families who, during the regime of a former Consul, with all the prescribed Consular ceremony, contracted what they thought marriages recognised by British law; but to their disappointment it turned out that the said Consul had no warrant, consequently these marriages were null, and the children of them illegitimate, and unable to claim British nationality, and this from no want of precaution on the part of the principals. There was some talk a long time ago of passing a short Act for legalizing these marriages, and privately I was desired to inform these people that such would be done; but up to this date nothing further has been heard in the matter.

On leaving me, this youthful innocent went straight off to the missionary - who, although an ordained minister, was no more authorized to perform legal marriages than I - who tried to persuade him to wait until a Consular warrant should arrive; but if he was shy and retiring over everything else, yet he appeared quite determined upon the sacrifice, and doughtily expressed his intention of doing without the ceremony if he could not get one soon. This sort of thing was most repugnant to the missionary's ideas, who at last - without pretending that his ceremony would have any legal significance, although a moral obligation - consented to perform one on condition that he should be re-married in the Consulate when the necessary authority should arrive, a proceeding which, under the circumstances, I could see no objection to, but of course could not sanction officially.

A day was appointed for the ceremony, when at the time named appeared the youthful bridegroom, looking as neat, shy, and guileless as ever; he was asked to take a seat, which he did, and set to work blushing as vigorously as before.

A quarter of an hour elapsed, and no fresh arrivals; yet there sat our friend, without the slightest show of that impatience usually attributed to gentlemen about to take the fatal plunge, and beyond a few monosyllabic answers of 'yes' and 'no' to the various inquiries about the weather, or some such trifle, he had maintained a satisfied silence.

Rather weary of waiting, the missionary observed, 'They are a long time coming,' but only to receive the curt answer of agreement. In a short time he essayed another question - 'How long do you think they will be ?' with the response of inability to estimate from the imperturbable would-be Benedict, who had not moved one iota from the first position he had taken up.

At last the missionary became impatient, and asked him where she was staying.

'Who ?' said the youth.

'Why, the girl you want to marry.'

'Oh ! she's at Safata.'

'What!' cried the parson have you come here for me to marry you to a woman sixteen miles off on the other side of the island ?'

'Yes,' replied the innocent. I didn't think you would want her!'

He was turned out to fetch her, and in the course of a week returned, and went through all the marriage ceremony that, most likely, he will ever undergo.

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