THE BATTLE OF MATAUTU
_September_ 1888
The revolution had all the character of a popular movement. Many of the
high chiefs were detained in Mulinuu; the commons trooped to the bush
under inferior leaders. A camp was chosen near Faleula, threatening
Mulinuu, well placed for the arrival of recruits and close to a German
plantation from which the force could be subsisted. Manono came, all
Tuamasanga, much of Savaii, and part of Aana, Tamasese's own government
and titular seat. Both sides were arming. It was a brave day for the
trader, though not so brave as some that followed, when a single
cartridge is said to have been sold for twelve cents currency--between
nine and ten cents gold. Yet even among the traders a strong party
feeling reigned, and it was the common practice to ask a purchaser upon
which side he meant to fight.
On September 5th, Brandeis published a letter: "To the chiefs of
Tuamasanga, Manono, and Faasaleleanga in the Bush: Chiefs, by authority
of his majesty Tamasese, the king of Samoa, I make known to you all that
the German man-of-war is about to go together with a Samoan fleet for
the purpose of burning Manono. After this island is all burnt, 'tis good
if the people return to Manono and live quiet. To the people of
Faasaleleanga I say, return to your houses and stop there. The same to
those belonging to Tuamasanga. If you obey this instruction, then you
will all be forgiven; if you do not obey, then all your villages will
be burnt like Manono. These instructions are made in truth in the sight
of God in the Heaven." The same morning, accordingly, the _Adler_
steamed out of the bay with a force of Tamasese warriors and some native
boats in tow, the Samoan fleet in question. Manono was shelled; the
Tamasese warriors, under the conduct of a Manono traitor, who paid
before many days the forfeit of his blood, landed and did some damage,
but were driven away by the sight of a force returning from the
mainland; no one was hurt, for the women and children, who alone
remained on the island, found a refuge in the bush; and the _Adler_ and
her acolytes returned the same evening. The letter had been energetic;
the performance fell below the programme. The demonstration annoyed and
yet re-assured the insurgents, and it fully disclosed to the Germans a
new enemy.
Captain von Widersheim had been relieved. His successor, Captain
Fritze, was an officer of a different stamp. I have nothing to say of
him but good; he seems to have obeyed the consul's requisitions with
secret distaste; his despatches were of admirable candour; but his
habits were retired, he spoke little English, and was far indeed from
inheriting von Widersheim's close relations with Commander Leary. It is
believed by Germans that the American officer resented what he took to
be neglect. I mention this, not because I believe it to depict
Commander Leary, but because it is typical of a prevailing infirmity
among Germans in Samoa. Touchy themselves, they read all history in the
light of personal affronts and tiffs; and I find this weakness
indicated by the big thumb of Bismarck, when he places "sensitiveness
to small disrespects--_Empfindlichkeit ueber Mangel an Respect_," among
the causes of the wild career of Knappe. Whatever the cause, at least,
the natives had no sooner taken arms than Leary appeared with violence
upon that side. As early as the 3rd, he had sent an obscure but
menacing despatch to Brandeis. On the 6th, he fell on Fritze in the
matter of the Manono bombardment. "The revolutionists," he wrote, "had
an armed force in the field within a few miles of this harbour, when
the vessels under your command transported the Tamasese troops to a
neighbouring island with the avowed intention of making war on the
isolated homes of the women and children of the enemy. Being the only
other representative of a naval power now present in this harbour, for
the sake of humanity I hereby respectfully and solemnly protest in the
name of the United States of America and of the civilised world in
general against the use of a national war-vessel for such services as
were yesterday rendered by the German corvette _Adler_." Fritze's
reply, to the effect that he is under the orders of the consul and has
no right of choice, reads even humble; perhaps he was not himself vain
of the exploit, perhaps not prepared to see it thus described in words.
From that moment Leary was in the front of the row. His name is
diagnostic, but it was not required; on every step of his subsequent
action in Samoa Irishman is writ large; over all his doings a malign
spirit of humour presided. No malice was too small for him, if it were
only funny. When night signals were made from Mulinuu, he would sit on
his own poop and confound them with gratuitous rockets. He was at the
pains to write a letter and address it to "the High Chief Tamasese"--a
device as old at least as the wars of Robert Bruce--in order to bother
the officials of the German post-office, in whose hands he persisted in
leaving it, although the address was death to them and the distribution
of letters in Samoa formed no part of their profession. His great
masterwork of pleasantry, the Scanlon affair, must be narrated in its
place. And he was no less bold than comical. The _Adams_ was not
supposed to be a match for the _Adler_; there was no glory to be gained
in beating her; and yet I have heard naval officers maintain she might
have proved a dangerous antagonist in narrow waters and at short range.
Doubtless Leary thought so. He was continually daring Fritze to come
on; and already, in a despatch of the 9th, I find Becker complaining
of his language in the hearing of German officials, and how he had
declared that, on the _Adler_ again interfering, he would interfere
himself, "if he went to the bottom for it--_und wenn sein Schiff dabei
zu Grunde ginge_." Here is the style of opposition which has the merit
of being frank, not that of being agreeable. Becker was annoying, Leary
infuriating; there is no doubt that the tempers in the German consulate
were highly ulcerated; and if war between the two countries did not
follow, we must set down the praise to the forbearance of the German
navy. This is not the last time that I shall have to salute the merits
of that service.
The defeat and death of Saifaleupolu and the burning of Manono had thus
passed off without the least advantage to Tamasese. But he still held
the significant position of Mulinuu, and Brandeis was strenuous to make
it good. The whole peninsula was surrounded with a breastwork; across
the isthmus it was six feet high and strengthened with a ditch; and the
beach was staked against landing. Weber's land claim--the same that now
broods over the village in the form of a signboard--then appeared in a
more military guise; the German flag was hoisted, and German sailors
manned the breastwork at the isthmus--"to protect German property" and
its trifling parenthesis, the king of Samoa. Much vigilance reigned and,
in the island fashion, much wild firing. And in spite of all, desertion
was for a long time daily. The detained high chiefs would go to the
beach on the pretext of a natural occasion, plunge in the sea, and
swimming across a broad, shallow bay of the lagoon, join the rebels on
the Faleula side. Whole bodies of warriors, sometimes hundreds strong,
departed with their arms and ammunition. On the 7th of September, for
instance, the day after Leary's letter, Too and Mataia left with their
contingents, and the whole Aana people returned home in a body to hold a
parliament. Ten days later, it is true, a part of them returned to their
duty; but another part branched off by the way and carried their
services, and Tamasese's dear-bought guns, to Faleula.
On the 8th there was a defection of a different kind, but yet sensible.
The High Chief Seumanu had been still detained in Mulinuu under anxious
observation. His people murmured at his absence, threatened to "take
away his name," and had already attempted a rescue. The adventure was
now taken in hand by his wife Faatulia, a woman of much sense and spirit
and a strong partisan; and by her contrivance, Seumanu gave his
guardians the slip and rejoined his clan at Faleula. This process of
winnowing was of course counterbalanced by another of recruitment. But
the harshness of European and military rule had made Brandeis detested
and Tamasese unpopular with many; and the force on Mulinuu is thought to
have done little more than hold its own. Mataafa sympathisers set it
down at about two or three thousand. I have no estimate from the other
side; but Becker admits they were not strong enough to keep the field in
the open.
The political significance of Mulinuu was great, but in a military sense
the position had defects. If it was difficult to carry, it was easy to
blockade: and to be hemmed in on that narrow finger of land were an
inglorious posture for the monarch of Samoa. The peninsula, besides, was
scant of food and destitute of water. Pressed by these considerations,
Brandeis extended his lines till he had occupied the whole foreshore of
Apia bay and the opposite point, Matautu. His men were thus drawn out
along some three nautical miles of irregular beach, everywhere with
their backs to the sea, and without means of communication or mutual
support except by water. The extension led to fresh sorrows. The
Tamasese men quartered themselves in the houses of the absent men of the
Vaimaunga. Disputes arose with English and Americans. Leary interposed
in a loud voice of menace. It was said the firm profited by the
confusion to buttress up imperfect land claims; I am sure the other
whites would not be far behind the firm. Properties were fenced in,
fences and houses were torn down, scuffles ensued. The German example at
Mulinuu was followed with laughable unanimity; wherever an Englishman or
an American conceived himself to have a claim, he set up the emblem of
his country; and the beach twinkled with the flags of nations.
All this, it will be observed, was going forward in that neutral
territory, sanctified by treaty against the presence of armed Samoans.
The insurgents themselves looked on in wonder: on the 4th, trembling to
transgress against the great Powers, they had written for a delimitation
of the _Eleele Sa_; and Becker, in conversation with the British consul,
replied that he recognised none. So long as Tamasese held the ground,
this was expedient. But suppose Tamasese worsted, it might prove awkward
for the stores, mills, and offices of a great German firm, thus bared of
shelter by the act of their own consul.
On the morning of the 9th September, just ten days after the death of
Saifaleupolu, Mataafa, under the name of Malietoa To'oa Mataafa, was
crowned king at Faleula. On the 11th he wrote to the British and
American consuls: "Gentlemen, I write this letter to you two very humbly
and entreatingly, on account of this difficulty that has come before me.
I desire to know from you two gentlemen the truth where the boundaries
of the neutral territory are. You will observe that I am now at Vaimoso
[a step nearer the enemy], and I have stopped here until I knew what you
say regarding the neutral territory. I wish to know where I can go, and
where the forbidden ground is, for I do not wish to go on any neutral
territory, or on any foreigner's property. I do not want to offend any
of the great Powers. Another thing I would like. Would it be possible
for you three consuls to make Tamasese remove from German property? for
I am in awe of going on German land." He must have received a reply
embodying Becker's renunciation of the principle, at once; for he broke
camp the same day, and marched eastward through the bush behind Apia.
Brandeis, expecting attack, sought to improve his indefensible position.
He reformed his centre by the simple expedient of suppressing it. Apia
was evacuated. The two flanks, Mulinuu and Matautu, were still held and
fortified, Mulinuu (as I have said) to the isthmus, Matautu on a line
from the bayside to the little river Fuisa. The centre was represented
by the trajectory of a boat across the bay from one flank to another,
and was held (we may say) by the German war-ship. Mataafa decided (I am
assured) to make a feint on Matautu, induce Brandeis to deplete Mulinuu
in support, and then fall upon and carry that. And there is no doubt in
my mind that such a plan was bruited abroad, for nothing but a belief in
it could explain the behaviour of Brandeis on the 12th. That it was
seriously entertained by Mataafa I stoutly disbelieve; the German flag
and sailors forbidding the enterprise in Mulinuu. So that we may call
this false intelligence the beginning and the end of Mataafa's strategy.
The whites who sympathised with the revolt were uneasy and impatient.
They will still tell you, though the dates are there to show them wrong,
that Mataafa, even after his coronation, delayed extremely: a proof of
how long two days may seem to last when men anticipate events. On the
evening of the 11th, while the new king was already on the march, one of
these walked into Matautu. The moon was bright. By the way he observed
the native houses dark and silent; the men had been about a fortnight in
the bush, but now the women and children were gone also; at which he
wondered. On the sea-beach, in the camp of the Tamaseses, the solitude
was near as great; he saw three or four men smoking before the British
consulate, perhaps a dozen in all; the rest were behind in the bush upon
their line of forts. About the midst he sat down, and here a woman drew
near to him. The moon shone in her face, and he knew her for a
householder near by, and a partisan of Mataafa's. She looked about her
as she came, and asked him, trembling, what he did in the camp of
Tamasese. He was there after news, he told her. She took him by the
hand. "You must not stay here, you will get killed," she said. "The bush
is full of our people, the others are watching them, fighting may begin
at any moment, and we are both here too long." So they set off together;
and she told him by the way that she had came to the hostile camp with a
present of bananas, so that the Tamasese men might spare her house. By
the Vaisingano they met an old man, a woman, and a child; and these also
she warned and turned back. Such is the strange part played by women
among the scenes of Samoan warfare, such were the liberties then
permitted to the whites, that these two could pass the lines, talk
together in Tamasese's camp on the eve of an engagement, and pass forth
again bearing intelligence, like privileged spies. And before a few
hours the white man was in direct communication with the opposing
general. The next morning he was accosted "about breakfast-time" by two
natives who stood leaning against the pickets of a public-house, where
the Siumu road strikes in at right angles to the main street of Apia.
They told him battle was imminent, and begged him to pass a little way
inland and speak with Mataafa. The road is at this point broad and
fairly good, running between thick groves of cocoa-palm and breadfruit.
A few hundred yards along this the white man passed a picket of four
armed warriors, with red handkerchiefs and their faces blackened in the
form of a full beard, the Mataafa rallying signs for the day; a little
farther on, some fifty; farther still, a hundred; and at last a quarter
of a mile of them sitting by the wayside armed and blacked. Near by, in
the verandah of a house on a knoll, he found Mataafa seated in white
clothes, a Winchester across his knees. His men, he said, were still
arriving from behind, and there was a turning movement in operation
beyond the Fuisa, so that the Tamaseses should be assailed at the same
moment from the south and east. And this is another indication that the
attack on Matautu was the true attack; had any design on Mulinuu been in
the wind, not even a Samoan general would have detached these troops
upon the other side. While they still spoke, five Tamasese women were
brought in with their hands bound; they had been stealing "our" bananas.
All morning the town was strangely deserted, the very children gone. A
sense of expectation reigned, and sympathy for the attack was expressed
publicly. Some men with unblacked faces came to Moors's store for
biscuit. A native woman, who was there marketing, inquired after the
news, and, hearing that the battle was now near at hand, "Give them two
more tins," said she; "and don't put them down to my husband--he would
growl; put them down to me." Between twelve and one, two white men
walked toward Matautu, finding as they went no sign of war until they
had passed the Vaisingano and come to the corner of a by-path leading to
the bush. Here were four blackened warriors on guard,--the extreme left
wing of the Mataafa force, where it touched the waters of the bay.
Thence the line (which the white men followed) stretched inland among
bush and marsh, facing the forts of the Tamaseses. The warriors lay as
yet inactive behind trees; but all the young boys and harlots of Apia
toiled in the front upon a trench, digging with knives and cocoa-shells;
and a continuous stream of children brought them water. The young
sappers worked crouching; from the outside only an occasional head, or a
hand emptying a shell of earth, was visible; and their enemies looked on
inert from the line of the opposing forts. The lists were not yet
prepared, the tournament was not yet open; and the attacking force was
suffered to throw up works under the silent guns of the defence. But
there is an end even to the delay of islanders. As the white men stood
and looked, the Tamasese line thundered into a volley; it was answered;
the crowd of silent workers broke forth in laughter and cheers; and the
battle had begun.
Thenceforward, all day and most of the next night, volley followed
volley; and pounds of lead and pounds sterling of money continued to be
blown into the air without cessation and almost without result. Colonel
de Coetlogon, an old soldier, described the noise as deafening. The
harbour was all struck with shots; a man was knocked over on the German
war-ship; half Apia was under fire; and a house was pierced beyond the
Mulivai. All along the two lines of breastwork, the entrenched enemies
exchanged this hail of balls; and away on the east of the battle the
fusillade was maintained, with equal spirit, across the narrow barrier
of the Fuisa. The whole rear of the Tamaseses was enfiladed by this
flank fire; and I have seen a house there, by the river brink, that was
riddled with bullets like a piece of worm-eaten wreck-wood. At this
point of the field befell a trait of Samoan warfare worth recording.
Taiese (brother to Siteoni already mentioned) shot a Tamasese man. He
saw him fall, and, inflamed with the lust of glory, passed the river
single-handed in that storm of missiles to secure the head. On the
farther bank, as was but natural, he fell himself; he who had gone to
take a trophy remained to afford one; and the Mataafas, who had looked
on exulting in the prospect of a triumph, saw themselves exposed instead
to a disgrace. Then rose one Vingi, passed the deadly water, swung the
body of Taiese on his back, and returned unscathed to his own side, the
head saved, the corpse filled with useless bullets.
At this rate of practice, the ammunition soon began to run low, and from
an early hour of the afternoon, the Malietoa stores were visited by
customers in search of more. An elderly man came leaping and cheering,
his gun in one hand, a basket of three heads in the other. A fellow came
shot through the forearm. "It doesn't hurt now," he said, as he bought
his cartridges; "but it will hurt to-morrow, and I want to fight while
I can." A third followed, a mere boy, with the end of his nose shot off:
"Have you any painkiller? give it me quick, so that I can get back to
fight." On either side, there was the same delight in sound and smoke
and schoolboy cheering, the same unsophisticated ardour of battle; and
the misdirected skirmish proceeded with a din, and was illustrated with
traits of bravery that would have fitted a Waterloo or a Sedan.
I have said how little I regard the alleged plan of battle. At least it
was now all gone to water. The whole forces of Mataafa had leaked out,
man by man, village by village, on the so-called false attack. They were
all pounding for their lives on the front and the left flank of Matautu.
About half-past three they enveloped the right flank also. The defenders
were driven back along the beach road as far as the pilot station at the
turn of the land. From this also they were dislodged, stubbornly
fighting. One, it is told, retreated to his middle in the lagoon; stood
there, loading and firing, till he fell; and his body was found on the
morrow pierced with four mortal wounds. The Tamasese force was now
enveloped on three sides; it was besides almost cut off from the sea;
and across its whole rear and only way of retreat a fire of hostile
bullets crossed from east and west, in the midst of which men were
surprised to observe the birds continuing to sing, and a cow grazed all
afternoon unhurt. Doubtless here was the defence in a poor way; but then
the attack was in irons. For the Mataafas about the pilot house could
scarcely advance beyond without coming under the fire of their own men
from the other side of the Fuisa; and there was not enough organisation,
perhaps not enough authority, to divert or to arrest that fire.
The progress of the fight along the beach road was visible from Mulinuu,
and Brandeis despatched ten boats of reinforcements. They crossed the
harbour, paused for a while beside the _Adler_--it is supposed for
ammunition--and drew near the Matautu shore. The Mataafa men lay close
among the shore-side bushes, expecting their arrival; when a silly lad,
in mere lightness of heart, fired a shot in the air. My native friend,
Mrs. Mary Hamilton, ran out of her house and gave the culprit a good
shaking: an episode in the midst of battle as incongruous as the grazing
cow. But his sillier comrades followed his example; a harmless volley
warned the boats what they might expect; and they drew back and passed
outside the reef for the passage of the Fuisa. Here they came under the
fire of the right wing of the Mataafas on the river-bank. The beach,
raked east and west, appeared to them no place to land on. And they hung
off in the deep water of the lagoon inside the barrier reef, feebly
fusillading the pilot house.
Between four and five, the Fabeata regiment (or folk of that village) on
the Mataafa left, which had been under arms all day, fell to be
withdrawn for rest and food; the Siumu regiment, which should have
relieved it, was not ready or not notified in time; and the Tamaseses,
gallantly profiting by the mismanagement, recovered the most of the
ground in their proper right. It was not for long. They lost it again,
yard by yard and from house to house, till the pilot station was once
more in the hands of the Mataafas. This is the last definite incident in
the battle. The vicissitudes along the line of the entrenchments remain
concealed from us under the cover of the forest. Some part of the
Tamasese position there appears to have been carried, but what part, or
at what hour, or whether the advantage was maintained, I have never
learned. Night and rain, but not silence, closed upon the field. The
trenches were deep in mud; but the younger folk wrecked the houses in
the neighbourhood, carried the roofs to the front, and lay under them,
men and women together, through a long night of furious squalls and
furious and useless volleys. Meanwhile the older folk trailed back into
Apia in the rain; they talked as they went of who had fallen and what
heads had been taken upon either side--they seemed to know by name the
losses upon both; and drenched with wet and broken with excitement and
fatigue, they crawled into the verandahs of the town to eat and sleep.
The morrow broke grey and drizzly, but as so often happens in the
islands, cleared up into a glorious day. During the night, the majority
of the defenders had taken advantage of the rain and darkness and stolen
from their forts unobserved. The rallying sign of the Tamaseses had been
a white handkerchief. With the dawn, the de Coetlogons from the English
consulate beheld the ground strewn with these badges discarded; and
close by the house, a belated turncoat was still changing white for red.
Matautu was lost; Tamasese was confined to Mulinuu; and by nine o'clock
two Mataafa villages paraded the streets of Apia, taking possession. The
cost of this respectable success in ammunition must have been enormous;
in life it was but small. Some compute forty killed on either side,
others forty on both, three or four being women and one a white man,
master of a schooner from Fiji. Nor was the number even of the wounded
at all proportionate to the surprising din and fury of the affair while
it lasted.