CHAPTER XIII
TONGA AND SAMOA
Not long after our return from New Caledonia I set sail again, this time to take advantage of an invitation from the Britannic Land Commissioner to stay with him at his house in Samoa. My brother Rupert Leigh and my daughter Margaret accompanied me on the Norddeutscher Lloyd mail-ship Lubeck. The Germans subsidised the line, but it was, I understood, run at a regular loss. We left on August 3rd, and encountered very rough weather, seas sweeping over the bridge, and even invading our cabins. Captain Mentz was very kind, installed us in his own quarters, and did his best to find food which Margaret and I could eat despite sea-sickness. I must say this for him, although he was a German!
We passed Norfolk Island, but did not land anywhere until we reached Nekualofa, the chief town of the Tongan group, which consists of about 100 islands and atolls. Tonga, like every island in the Pacific of which I ever heard, has its own particular quarrels and politics. It was governed at the time of our visit by an ancient potentate called King George, after George III of England. His wife had been Queen Charlotte, but she had died.
The hero, or rather villain, of recent Tongan history was one Shirley Baker, a Wesleyan missionary with the aspirations of a Richelieu or Mazarin. He belonged to the Wesleyan Church of Australia, which had previously become independent of the Mother Church in England. Shirley Baker, however, having made himself Prime Minister of Tonga, did not care to take orders even from Australia, but persuaded the dusky monarch that the right and proper thing was to have a Free Methodist Church of his own. This would not have mattered, but the inhabitants were all compelled to belong to this new connexion, and beaten and imprisoned if they wished to adhere to what was presumably the Church of their baptism. Other trifling accusations, such as of poisoning, were brought against this ecclesiastical Prime Minister, and ultimately the British High Commissioner from Fiji had to come down and deport him to New Zealand. Still, however, as far as we could learn during a brief stay of some twenty-four hours, though there was surface peace, intrigue and suspicion were still rampant.
Even before we landed my brother came to me and said that one of our fellow-passengers had warned him that if we paid a visit to King George the missionary interpreter in attendance would probably misrepresent what we had to say to the monarch. “But,” added Rupert, “I don’t think that we have anything particular to say, have we?” I agreed that I did not think that our communications would vitally affect the peace of the world, or even of the Pacific, so we ventured to enter the royal precincts.
The Palace was a comfortable-looking villa, of which the most striking adornment was a full-length oil-painting of the old German Emperor William, presented to the King for having declared the neutrality of Tonga in the Franco-German War of 1870. The High Commissioner of Fiji had countered this propaganda by presenting an engraving of Queen Victoria, but we were bound to confess, that, being merely head and shoulders, our Sovereign Lady was placed at a disadvantage in the artistic competition.
TONGAN LADIES