BOS 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Dec. 28, 1901. 
The Tale of Laulu's Hunt. 
To some readers the suspicion may arise that this nar- 
rative lades directness and continuity.- But, bless you, 
this is the most simple, straight and plain sailing, com- 
pared with some of the tangles in which Samoan stories 
involve themselves. You just ought to try to follow out 
the thin and fragile thread of truth in a narrative which 
it is to the interest of a Samoan to make tortuous. This 
tale of Laulu's hunt is really very direct and straight- 
forward. Its action is comprised entirely within one 
night at the full of the moon. It is like a well-written 
piece of music, for it ends on the very note with which 
it began, namely, a shirt. It was really hunting, for I 
was called out by the hunting shout in the early dawn 
to receive a bonito presented on a gleaming paddle. 
That it involves more than a slight suspicion of political 
ambition and jealousy is unavoidable and inherent in 
human nature. 
There was one luxury in Samoa which we could insist 
upon as no more than a necessity, and that was to keep 
clean and to look clean. This involved several changes 
a day, and in the same proportion required a wardrobe 
of considerable magnitude, though of extreme simplicit}^ 
Having two adult male persons to look after — and no 
mere man knows how helpless he ap- 
pears when he puts up the cry, 
"Where's a clean shirt for me?" — I 
had my sufficient task set out for me 
in keeping track of the shirt supply 
of the household. Samoan laundry 
methods of cleaning clothes in a 
stream by throwing jagged rocks at 
them as they lay spread out on one 
another and a flat stone were suffi- 
ciently mangling in their tendency to 
account for a certain large decrease in 
the shirt stock of the household. But 
the deficit was larger than could be 
accounted for on any principle of 
laundry mutilation. Then I discov- 
ered that the official head of the house- 
hold was by way of providing shirts 
for, a considerable group of Samoan 
chiefs. He solemnly swore that each 
shirt so expended would produce a 
tenfold crop of friendly alliances 
arnong the island politicians. Not 
being myself official, I made up a firm 
mind that it must stop. If the interests 
of the United States in that shabby 
kingdom demanded the exercise of 
bribery and corruption to the extent 
of one shirt for each proceeding of 
political infamy, there surely must be 
a shirt fund in the United States 
Treasury against which to draw. It 
certainly was not my intention to allow 
public services to be paid out of a 
purely private and personal collection 
of shirts. Just above the lower front 
hem on each and every shirt I wrote 
the name of the owner in nitrate of 
silver ink, in letters an inch high, and 
in Samoan, so that there might be no 
failure to comprehend the ownership 
of the garments thus marked. This 
indelible record of title did not inter- 
fere with the comfort of the real own- 
ers of the apparel, for it was out of 
sight when worn. But it put an ef- 
fectual stop to the shirt as a corrupt- 
ing agent and secret service fund for 
the payment of the price for small dip- 
lomatic secrets. No Samoan, chief or 
other, was supplied with the nerve to 
walk across his village green on Sun- 
day mornings on his way to his "re- 
ligion" clad in the spotless white of a 
wholly pure character with the in- 
criminating legend plain for all to see 
that he was wearing a shirt that he did 
not come by honestly. It could not be 
concealed, for the Samoans, you see, 
dress differently, in fact the shirt goes 
outside and quite over all. 
Therefore, I was all the more sur- 
prised when Laulu came in one even- 
ing all dripping with a fresh dubbing 
of cocoanut oil and told me that his 
new boat was on the beach, and that 
he was going up the coast and would 
bring me something back. He was, I think, the tallest 
man I had ever seen; at least the tallest with whom I 
was acquainted. As he sat cross-legged on the floor he 
seemed almost to look down on me, who was sitting- on 
a chair. This is that Laulu who made an American tour 
some years ago with Barnum. The surprising thing was 
that he wanted to borrow a shirt. The request was a 
specious one, for he knew very well that a request for a 
gift would be flatly denied, and he had more than a 
suspicion that a shirt received as a loan would not be 
reclaimed. And after a sufficient length of time Tonga 
could cut out the name and run up a new hem. 
Laulu had many reasons why that shirt should be 
loaned him. For one thing, he was poor, too poor to buy 
shirts for himself. How well I remember the proud 
formula of these pleas, "We are an insignificant people 
on puny islands, set far away in the middle of the flat 
sea, and great is our poverty." Even with this form of 
humility on his lips, the Samoan makes you feel that he 
regards himself as the best there is, and that you are 
asked only for politeness, when he had the right to de- 
mand or to take without demand. It was merely a form 
of words, this poverty plea, in this instance, for I paid 
Tonga well for her work for me, and I was well aware 
that she would not see her big husband lacking anything 
that would show her pride in him. His better reason was 
that runners had come stealing in by night from the dis- 
trict in rebellion to tell him that in Faleapuna they were 
deliberating about calling him to be their ruling chief. 
There was nothing unusual in that circumstance, even 
when the rebellion was in far more acute stages there 
wqs ueyejT ^ny difficulty ^bqut surfeptitigvfs correspQTid- 
ence back and forth. I knew that both Laulu and Tonga 
were rebels at heart, and that their continuance so near 
the court of Malietoa was really that they might serve as 
hostages, and was tantamount to a mild imprisonment. 
I rather welcomed the chance to dabble in political in- 
trigue, and I knew that the official member of the house- 
hold, who was just then in the rebel country in the efi^ort 
to prevent a threatened breach of the peace, would be 
sure to hear of Laulu's arrival at Faleapuna in time to 
stop any action if he were so minded. Accordingly I 
lent Laulu the shirt, and bade him go off bravely in his 
hunt for tlie rank and titles of a ruling chief, the town 
itself being one of the most important in Samoan politi- 
cal relations. It would take too long now to remember 
just what his title would be. but it would most cer- 
tainly be something of the most magnificent descrip- 
tion, and would entitle him to a large amount of rich and 
ripe flattery when speeches were made at him. 
And all seemed to depend on the loan of a shirt. He 
was careful to say that he had shirts of his own, but he 
wanted one of these shirts with the name in front. That 
v/ould show all the rebels that he was a man who had a 
pull with the administration, and politics is politics, 
whether it is played on a great continent or in a bunch of 
little islands. 
TONGA AND LAULU. 
From Mrs. Churchill's forthcoming volume, "Samoa Uma." 
Laulu had been gone so short a time that I seemed 
yet to hear the thump of the loom of his oar in the row- 
locks up the lagoon about the big shoal of the Vailoa. 
Then came Tonga with her maid. Being of an observing 
disposition and imitative way, my good Tonga had come 
to the conclusion that what was good for me was quite 
as good for her, and as she was my maid she had taken 
a maid for herself in the person of a sturdy young girl 
of the name of Evai. It being after Tonga's hours for 
work, she called socially as one lady upon another, and 
her maid sat dutifully in the background and made 
cigarettes for her mistress, and when Tonga interrupted 
her conversation with the interjected command, "Kusi 
mai le afi," the girl promptly "kusied," that being the 
Samoan equivalent for strike a match. It took several 
cigarettes to bring Tonga around to the point which had 
brought her. She wanted really to know if Laulu had 
been seen that evening. 
Tonga and Laulu had been married in about all the- 
ways possible in a community of so much divided juris- 
diction, and there was not the slightest doubt that she 
was Mrs. Laulu with a firmness and fixity that would 
stand all the tests of the most rigidly civilized country. 
Therefore, I felt no little satisfaction in relating to her 
my assistance in furthering Laulu's ambition to become 
so important a chief. 
"She is pig-faced and she stands up.oii the ground," 
was Tonga's sole comment. 
Thereupon I saw a great light and promptly subsided, 
for after that it was clear that this being a big chief was 
not altogether politics. 
Tpngfi yvM T^ot »t all the sort of woman tp sit ^iown 
when she had a crisis to deal with and idly wait for it 
to crash. She was in the habit of dealing with an ad- 
mirably prompt decision with all matters in which she 
was interested, and this case was no exception. She lost 
no time in going to the house of her nearest relation in 
our village and of taking a pair of paddles from their 
usual position in the rafters of the house. A canoe was 
soon chosen from the collection drawn up on the beach 
and carried down into the water. In^ this frail craft 
'longa and her maid set out upon a trip that might ex- 
tend to some sixteen miles. After the first few miles of 
still water in the lagoon there came a long stretch of 
open sea, where the shore reef was broken in but two 
places that would admit of the safe passage of even a 
canoe. As Laulu had had nearly an hour's start, and 
had two men to row his boat, it was altogether unlikely 
that Tonga could overtake him within the lagoon unless 
he should stop by the way to talk and drink kava. There 
was not much chance of this. Laulu was by birth en- 
titled to be the chief of the next village, Matafangatele. 
and to bear the name of Asi. But the place had been 
usurped by another, and the present Asi spent a large 
amount of time in detailing just what he would do to 
Laulu should he ever catch him. It was, you will see, 
by no means likely that Laulu would stop for mere 
sociability anywhere in Asi's territory. 
I was in a state of tremor about 
Tonga and her canoe when it should 
come to that long stretch of ocean 
voyage, which was bad enough in 
itself, and was made even worse by 
the sudden dangers of the hidden reef 
off the Solosolo shore, the Fale Aitu 
or "House of Devils." But I con- 
soled myself with the thought that 
Tonga invariably knew what she was 
about. Indeed, I felt the same sort 
of fear when I passed out from the 
lagoon to the open ocean, even in our 
gig, with its four rowers and 22 feet of 
length. In time I grew accustomed to 
breasting the ocean seas in all weathers, 
and grew to look upon such sport aS 
steeplechase jumps over reefs and 
through the breakers on shores of ab- 
solute rock as nothing more than a 
half-dime ride on a swan-boat in the 
park. Tonga was safe enough in her 
little canoe. I watched the gleam of 
her paddles in the shimmering lagoon 
under the moonlight. I watched her 
course as she skirted the Vailoa sands 
and then vanished on her way around 
the point at Moota. I was now in- 
terested in two parties headed cast 
over the moonlit ocean. In the lead 
was Laulu. Avith his two rowers, in a 
boat freighted with one shirt and a 
bundle of political ambition. Nearly 
an hour behind him came Tonga and 
her maid in a light canoe, both pad- 
dling like all-possessed, and deter- 
mined to wipe out that handicap. The 
freight of the canoe was franklv a 
clever wife's determination that 'her 
husband should not make a fool of 
himself. I fancy that so efficient a 
woman as Tonga always showed her- 
self was not altogether a peaceful cit- 
izen at home; but she never let that 
appear in public, and never failed to 
make it appear that she thought her 
big Laulu was everything that was 
right. 
Having thus dabbled to the extent 
of one shirt, as a loan, in what might 
be high Samoan political intrigue or 
again might not be that sort, and 
having forwarded Tonga in pursuit, 
there was no more to be done but to 
await developments, wishing Tonga 
more power to her elbow. 
Samoans are proverbially unable to 
keep a secret, and that is true without 
an excepiion as to the secrets of oth- 
ers; but in matters concerning which 
they do not wish to speak, there is no 
power can wring or cajole or buy the 
truth from them. The bare fact that 
Tonga in her canoe overhauled Laulu 
in his boat well this side of the Fale 
Aitu, and that he did not go on to 
Faleapuna, to be made a ruling chief, but went fishing 
instead, was about the sum of all I ever did learn of the 
domestico-politico-marine drama that was played out in 
the moonlight on the open sea. If Tonga's perspicacity 
was truly founded, and if indeed under the political pre- 
tense there was a woman, as Tonga more than implied 
by her ejaculation of "pig-faced and standing on the 
ground," which is about the limit of Samoan abuse, ir 
such a case, if I had been Laulu I should have recog- 
nized that if I went further I should have been certain to 
fare much worse, and I think he showed himself a pru- 
dent man in that he went fishing instead. 
Perhaps my opinion is not entirely unbiased, for I had 
a steak from that bopito for my breakfast. It appears 
that when the sea is just right and the tide is making a 
certain stream around the Fale Aitu, and when it is full 
moon in a certain quarter of the heavens, and the dawn is 
breaking with a rare green color at the horizon and 
fading out to a dainty fawn color toward the zenith, 
and if your boat is right, and if your fly-hook is tied 
rightly for luck, and if you are a fit person and will 
choicely troll in the last gasps of the night breeze off- 
shore and carry your lure through the very center of the 
Fale Aitu, you will surely get a bonito. What a lot of 
conditions there always are before you can catch fish! 
At any rate, they seemed to be all fulfilled that morning 
in Laulu's case, for he caught a young bonito with all 
the marks that go, to show that it is just at its best for 
eating. 
Tonga returned the borrowed shirt, still in its wrap- 
ping of waterproof tapa cloth, and explained that it wag 
3 misuuderstandio^i that Laulu did ^ot lieed bot'^ 
