§ 2. The Samoan Islanders, their character

In spite of the many diseases prevalent among them, the Samoans are commonly reckoned among the finest, as well as the purest, specimens of the Polynesian race. Like the Tongans, whom they closely resemble, they are generally tall and shapely, with full rounded faces and limbs, but without that grossness and laxity of fibre common in the Tahitians. The average height of the men is said to be five feet ten inches, but some of them are over six feet with the thews and sinews of a Hercules. Their features, though not always regular, are commonly pleasing; and in particular the forehead is remarkable for its ample development, which, with the breadth between the eyes, gives to the countenance an expression of nobleness and dignity. Some of the young men especially are models of manly beauty; we read of one who, having decked his hair with the flowers of the scarlet hibiscus, might have sat for an Antinous. The women are comely enough, but strikingly inferior to the men in point of personal beauty. The prevailing colour is a light copper or olive brown, but the shade varies a good deal, deepening somewhat in fishermen and others who are much exposed to the sun; but it never approaches the dark chocolate tint, or Vandyke brown, of the Melanesians. Their hair is usually black and wavy, sometimes curly; but hardly a vestige is to be seen among them of the crisped and woolly hair and dusky complexion of the Melanesians, their neighbours on the west.[17]

The prepossessing appearance of the Samoans on the whole does not belie their character. They are reputed to be the most refined and civilised of all the native races of the Pacific, and this superiority is said to manifest itself in their social and domestic life.[18] The Samoans, we are told, are a nation of gentlemen and contrast most favourably with the generality of the Europeans who come among them.[19] They are said to carry their habits of cleanliness and decency to a higher point than the most fastidious of civilised nations;[20] and the Samoan women appear to be honourably distinguished by their modest behaviour and fidelity in marriage, qualities which contrast with the profligacy of their sex in other branches of the Polynesian race.[21] Equally honourable to the men are the respect and kindness which, according to the testimony of observers, they pay to their women, whom they are said to regard as their equals.[22] The aged were treated with respect and never abandoned; and strangers were always received in the best house and provided with food specially prepared for them.[23] Infanticide, which was carried to an appalling and almost incredible extent among some of the Polynesians,[24] was unknown in Samoa; abortion, indeed, was not uncommon, but once born children were affectionately cared for and never killed or exposed.[25] Wives and slaves were never put to death at a chief's burial, that their souls might attend their dead lord to the spirit land[26], as was the practice in some of the other islands, even in Tonga. Again, human sacrifices were not offered by the Samoans to the gods within the time during which the islands have been under the observation of Europeans; but in some of the more remote traditions mention is made of such sacrifices offered to the sun. Thus it is said that in the mythical island of Papatea, somewhere away in the east, the sun used to call for two victims every day, one at his rising and another at his setting. This lasted for eighty days. At such a rate of consumption the population of the island was rapidly wasting away. To escape the threatened doom, a brother and sister, named Luama and Ui, fled from Papatea to Manua, the most easterly of the Samoan islands, but they found to their consternation that there too, the sun was demanding his daily victims. Every house had to supply a victim in succession, and, when all had yielded the tribute, it came to the first house in turn to renew the sacrifice. The victim was laid out on a pandanus tree, and there the sun devoured him or her. When the lot fell on Luama, his heroic sister Ui insisted on taking his place, and lying down, she cried, "O cruel sun! come and eat your victim, we are all being devoured by you." But the amorous sun fell in love with her and took her to wife, at the same time putting an end to the human sacrifices. Another story affirms that the heroine was a daughter of the King of Manua, and that he yielded her up as an offering to the sun in order to end the sacrifices by making her the saviour of the people.[27]

The Samoans, when they became known to Europe in the nineteenth century, did not habitually indulge in cannibalism; indeed, according to John Williams, one of the earliest missionaries to the islands, they spoke of the practice with great horror and detestation.[28] But we have the testimony of other early missionaries that in their wars they occasionally resorted to it as a climax of hatred and revenge, devouring some portion of an enemy who had rendered himself peculiarly obnoxious by his cruelty or his provocations. Traditions, too, are on record of chiefs who habitually killed and devoured their fellow-creatures. A form of submission which a conquered party used to adopt towards their conquerors has also been interpreted as a relic of an old custom of cannibalism. Representatives of the vanquished party used to bow down before the victors, each holding in his hands a piece of firewood and a bundle of leaves, such as are used in dressing a pig for the oven. This was as much as to say, "Kill us and cook us, if you please." Criminals, too, were sometimes bound hand and foot, slung on a pole, and laid down before the persons they had injured, like pigs about to be killed and cooked. Combining these and other indications we may surmise that cannibalism was formerly not infrequent among the ancestors of the Samoans, though among their descendants in the nineteenth century the practice had almost wholly died out.[29] It is further to the credit of the Samoans that their public administration of justice was on the whole mild and humane. Torture was never employed to wring the truth from witnesses or the accused, and there seems to be only a single case on record of capital punishment inflicted by judicial sentence. At the same time private individuals were free to avenge the adultery of a wife or the murder of a kinsman by killing the culprit, and no blame attached to them for so doing. The penalties imposed by the sentence of a court or judicial assembly (fono) included fines, banishment, and the destruction of houses, fruit-trees, and domestic animals. But a criminal might also be condemned by a court to suffer corporal punishment in one form or another. He might, for example, be obliged to wound himself by beating his head and chest with a stone till the blood flowed freely; if he seemed to spare himself, he would be ordered by the assembled chiefs to strike harder, and if he still faltered, the prompt and unsparing application of a war club to his person effectually assisted the execution of the sentence. Again, he might be condemned to bite a certain acrid and poisonous root (called in the native language tevi) which caused the mouth to swell and the culprit to suffer intense agony for a considerable time afterwards. Or he might have to throw up a spiny and poisonous fish into the air and to catch it in his naked hand as it fell; the sharp-pointed spines entered into the flesh and inflicted acute pain and suffering. Or he might be suspended by hands and feet from a pole and in this attitude exposed to the broiling sun for many hours together; or he might be hung by the feet, head downward, from the top of a tall coco-nut tree and left there to expiate his crime for a long time. For certain offences the culprit was condemned to have his nose tattooed or his ears split. In sentences of banishment the term of exile was never specified, but when the sentence had been pronounced in full assembly, and the offence was great, the culprit might live in exile for years. When the punishment consisted in the destruction of houses, plantations, and live stock, it was immediately inflicted by the whole force of the district, under the direction and superintendence of the leading men, who had taken part in the assembly and passed the sentence. A whole family might suffer in this way for the offence of one of its members, and be driven into exile, after witnessing the burning of their house, the killing of their pigs, and the barking of their breadfruit trees.[30] If such penalties seem to us in some cases needlessly severe, they at least testify to a strong sense of public justice developed among the Samoans, who had thus advanced far enough to transfer, in some measure, the redress of wrongs to judicial assemblies instead of leaving it to the caprice of the injured individuals. Nevertheless the transference was but imperfect: the administration of justice was loose and irregular: for the most part every man was a law to himself, and did what was right in his own eyes. An aggrieved party would become his own judge, jury, and executioner. The thirst for vengeance was slaked only by the blood of a victim.[31]

It is another sign of the intellectual enlightenment of the Samoans that they rose apparently superior to that system of malignant magic, which kept their neighbours the Melanesians in lifelong bondage. The experienced missionary, Dr. George Brown, could not find in Samoa any trace of the practice of that particular form of the black art with which he was familiar in New Britain and other Melanesian islands, the practice of procuring some object which has belonged to an enemy or been touched by him, and taking it to a sorcerer, that he may perform over it a ceremony for the purpose of injuring the person from whom the object has been obtained. The proceeding is one of the commonest forms of sympathetic magic, but the Samoans appear to have ignored or despised it.[32] Again, the silence of our authorities on the subject of amulets and talismans leaves us to infer that the Samoans were equally indifferent to that branch of magic which seeks to ensure the safety and prosperity of the individual by attaching a miscellaneous collection of rubbish to his person, a system of ensurance against evil and misfortune which has attained a prodigious development among some savages, notably in Africa,[33] and is very far from being unknown in Europe at the present day. Again, unlike most savages, the Samoans were close observers of the stars, not only reckoning the time of night by the rising of particular stars, but steering by them when they were out of sight of land.[34]

Against these amiable and enlightened traits in the Samoan character must be set their cruelty in war. If they opened hostilities with a great deal of formal politeness, they conducted them with great ferocity. No quarter was given to men in battle, and captives were ruthlessly slaughtered. Women were sometimes spared for the use of their captors. Nor did death save the conquered from the insults and outrages of the insolent victors. The slain on the battlefield were treated with great indignity. Their heads were cut off and carried in triumph to the village, where they were piled up in a heap in the place of public assembly, the head of the most important chief being given the place of honour on the top of the pile. However, they were not kept as trophies, but after remaining for some hours exposed to public gaze were either claimed by the relatives or buried on the spot. The headless trunks were given to children to drag about the village and to spear, stone, or mutilate at pleasure.[35] The first missionary to Samoa was told in Manua that the victors used to scalp their victims and present the scalps, with kava, either to the king or to the relatives of the slain in battle, by whom these gory trophies were highly prized. He mentions as an example the case of a young woman, whose father had been killed. A scalp of a foe having been brought to her, she burnt it, strewed the ashes on the fire with which she cooked her food, and then devoured the meat with savage satisfaction.[36] But the climax of cruelty and horror was reached in a great war which the people of A‛ana, in Upolu, waged against a powerful combination of enemies. After a brave resistance they were at last defeated, and the surviving warriors, together with the aged and infirm, the women and children, fled to the mountains, where they endeavoured to hide themselves from their pursuers in the caves and the depths of the forest. But they were hunted out and brought down to the seashore; and an immense pit having been dug and filled with firewood, they were all, men, women, and children, thrown into it and burnt alive. The dreadful butchery went on for days. Four hundred victims are said to have perished. The massacre was perpetrated at the moment when the first missionaries were landing in Samoa. From the opposite shore they beheld the mountains enveloped in the flames and smoke of the funeral pile. The decisive battle had been fought that very morning. For many years a great black circle of charcoal marked the scene and preserved the memory of the fatal transaction.[37]