The Invasions from Outside
As far back as 1872 the enterprising New Zealanders had advocated a British annexation of Samoa, and had offered to equip a ship for that purpose. At the same time the United States had obtained, on February 17, 1872, the concession of the harbour Pango-Pango on Tutuila, the best of the group. The annexation of all Tutuila, proclaimed by a sea captain on his own responsibility, was not sanctioned in Washington. About the middle of 1873, the American "Colonel" Steinberger, a German Jew by descent, appeared as a commissioner in Samoa, in order to study the resources of the island group. This cunning and ambitious man soon raised himself to the most influential position, and induced the natives to ask for a protectorate of the United States.
Steinberger himself conveyed the petition to Washington; he returned on April 1, 1875, to Samoa, but only with presents and a letter of introduction from the President, Ulysses S. Grant. Steinberger gave the country a simple constitution, appointed Malietoa Laupepa king (nominally), while he himself modestly assumed the title of " Prime Minister;" he settled the succession, arranged the system of jurisdiction, and established order and peace throughout the land. But in December, 1875, at the instance of the jealous missionaries and the English population, he was carried off by an English man-of-war, after a bloodly battle, and taken to New Zealand. He died in New York toward the end of the century.
The intentions of the Union on Samoa were now more apparent; in 1887, the American consul hoisted his flag, and only the energetic remonstrances of Germany and England hindered the Americans from firmly establishing themselves. In June of that year the German government concluded a treaty with the Samoans, by which they were prevented from giving any foreign government special privileges to the prejudice of Germany. On January 17,1878, the Americans, for their part, entered into a treaty, to secure friendly relations and promote trade, with Malietoa Laupepa; at the same time the harbour of Pango-Pango was definitely given over to them.
On January 24, 1879, Germany was assigned the harbor of Saluafata, on Upolu, as a naval station; England also, by a treaty of August 28, 1879, secured for herself the use of all these waters, and the right to choose a coaling station. On September 2, by a treaty between Germany, England, the Union, and Malietoa, the district of Apia was declared neutral territory, and placed under a municipal council to be appointed by the three powers in turn. Finally, on December 23, on board the German ship "Bismarck," Malietoa Talavou" (Pe'a) was elected, by numerous chiefs, to the dignity of king for life, with Laupepa as regent.
Since the middle of the 1850s the Hamburg merchant house of Johann Cesar Godeffroy and Son had made the South Sea the chief sphere of its enterprises, and, a decade and a half later, had monopolised the trade with the central and eastern group of islands; it had also acquired largo estates on the Carolines and the three large Samoau islands, Savaii, Upolu, and Tutuila. Misfortunes on the stock exchange placed the firm, toward the end of the 1870s in a precarious position.
In view of the Anglo-Australian movement to occupy all the unappropriated South Sea Islands, Prince Bismarck abandoned his colonial policy of inaction, and, at the beginning of 1880, introduced the "Samoau proposition," by which the empire was to interfere and undertake to guarantee the small tribute due from the Godeffroys. But the German Eeichstag rejected the proposition on the third reading on April 29,1880; "where difficult duties can only be discharged by the resources of a nation, there our German history shows merely a list of wasted opportunities" (Oskar Peschel).
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