IV PREFACE. 



injunction on Malolo to welcome the stranger, and thus the custom 

 arose. 



After an interval of a dozen years I was called to take a part in 

 the administration of the affairs of the kingdom of Samoa in that 

 historic tangle in which the United States was striving to hold a 

 disinterested balance. The most vivacious, and to me the most 

 valuable, of the small group of island sages whom I gathered about 

 me in the windward outskirts of Apia to help in the prosecution of 

 my researches into the past of their people, was a very old chief 

 of Vaiala. It seemed that he must have lived forever, this ancient 

 Lauta who had long since retired from the active duties which fall 

 to the village chief. Like all Samoans he had no sense of the lapse 

 of time and no knowledge of the date of his birth. But he was able 

 to contribute one early landmark : when he was a mere stripling he 

 had gone to Tutuila to undergo his tattooing; when that painful but 

 socially necessary operation had been completed he returned to Apia 

 on the deck of "the first man-of-war." So far as related to that 

 brief voyage from Pagopago to 'Upolu he was a survivor of the 

 Wilkes expedition which had passed through his seas more than 

 half a century before I knew him. 



In these and many other ways my participation in the study of 

 the South Sea has always seemed to me an inheritance from the 

 voyagers who sailed with Wilkes so many years ago. 



Nor should I omit acknowledgment of the obligation under which 

 I lie to Laupepa, the last of a long line of Malietoas who had ruled 

 Samoa from a period which corresponds to the time in our own 

 reckoning when Norman William crossed the Channel and fought 

 down Saxon Harold on Senlac Field. We had made him king. Poor 

 weary soul, we could not make him royal, for we made it impossible 

 for him to reign. Now that he has gone beyond the sufferings of 

 a king, now that the line of the Malietoas has been broken off, now 

 that the puppet kingdom of Samoa is no more, I recall with pleasure 

 that he did enjoy the respite from the cares of his troubled state 

 in the many hours in which he delighted to communicate to me 

 his stores of the wisdom of the past. Few there were who could 

 speak Samoan with his grace of diction ; few indeed had minds so 

 replete with the myth and tradition in which is preserved the ancient 

 history of his race. In regardful memory I must not neglect to 

 include among those who introduced me to these studies the name 

 of Malietoa Laupepa, the last king of Samoa. 



