A forgotten 300th anniversary
White men come and go in Sāmoa
On 14 June 1722 Dutch hobbyist explorer Jacob Roggeveen arrived at Ofu-Olosega islands, part of Manu’a, in Sāmoa.
Western accounts sometimes refer to the event of the discovery of Sāmoa, 300 years ago this month.
In fact, already well travelled Sāmoans had long before found papālagi.
On that June day, crew from Roggeveen’s Thienhoven went near a canoe in which there was a man and a young woman, her ‘neck encircled by a string of oblong blue beads’.
A mate pointed to the beads as if he wanted them, but the man in the canoe ignored him.
The Dutch account says there were a thousand and more people on the beach, armed with spears, bow and arrows.
A matai ‘gave them a directing sign with his hand that they should go away, which was obeyed in a blink of an eye, all retreating into the trees.’
Only later was it realised that the girl’s beads were of European origin and that the men on the beach jumped behind the trees because they knew of the power of cannon and musket.
It’s more than likely the beads came from Tonga where there had been contact already with Europeans, including Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire, over a hundred years earlier and Abel Tasman in 1616.
News of papālagi quickly spread to Sāmoa, along with beads.
There was one other thing about the woman with the beads. The Dutch noted that ‘her body was all white’. Throughout the subsequent colonial period, ethnicity and skin tone was an obsession.
In this case the explanation was likely mundane.
The woman was more than likely tausala (chiefly) and was kept out of the sun. Roggeveen never went ashore and sailed off.
Papālagi contact remained limited until 1830 (James Cook was given explicit sailing directions to reach Sāmoa by the Tahitian navigator Tupaia but Cook never got there in the 1770s) when John Williams, foundry worker and latterly pastor with the LMS, arrived.
©Michael J Field
