The Samoan Islands contain less than 600 white inhabitants, and the native population is a little over 40,000. The natives residing on Upolu amount to 18,000, and on Savaii 13,000; while imported labourers total about 1,500.
The origin of the natives is obscure, but ethnological students have declared them to be closely allied to the Maoris of New Zealand, and to have their origin in China; and there seems to be no reason to doubt their judgment.
While cannibalism was prevalent throughout the islands of the South Seas, its practice has always been denied by the Samoans.
By nature the Samoan natives are indolent, and would look upon any uncalled-for exertion as a midsummer madness; while, to the Samoan mind, the idea of growing food such as cocoa-nuts, etc., for the purpose of sending it away and selling it, held about it something barbaric, unhandsome, and absurd. There is for him no conceivable object in growing anything more than is necessary to provide daily food, and consequently he would have no share nor parcel in such a practice.
The question of labour, therefore, has always been a pressing one on the plantations; and to provide this Chinese have been imported under indentures, and by Chinese labour all the work is carried on.
From the time of their first gaining a footing in Samoa, the Germans began to oust the natives from the land; and as the Samoans could not be got to work, plantations were established under German managers who proceeded to extract from it, by means of the cheapest foreign labour procurable, as much as it would yield.
At Apia, which Stevenson describes as the seat of the political sickness of Samoa, a controlling German firm was established who gradually obtained possession of the most fertile lands, but their titles were at times of the flimsiest.
The same writer describes how a visitor would observe, near an ancient Samoan village which he had been informed was the proper residence of the Samoan kings, a notice-board set up indicating that the historic village was the property of the German firm. These boards, he adds, which were among the commonest features of the landscape, might be rather taken to imply that the claim had been disputed.
If the "sales" of land from the natives to the German firm were questionable, the Samoans beheld in the firm only the occupier of their land, and consequently regarded the constant raiding of the German plantations and the stealthy gathering of the cocoa-nuts merely in the light of a very trifling peccadillo, and certainly not as theft.
Such land as the firm was unable to find labour to work was "mortgaged" to natives, who were compelled, under a penalty of imprisonment, to sell their copra to no one except to the mortgagee. The firm, which Stevenson describes as "the true centre of trouble, the head of the boil," of which Samoa languished thus gradually, got into its own hands the practical monopoly of trade.