Table of Contents
- SAMOA Early European views…
- … and colonial times
- Then photographs replaced engravings, while Samoan houses remained the same
- Early Europeans misinterpreted…
- ‘Taupou’ and Manaia or Chiefs, all wrapped in siapo and fine mats, represented the dignity mamalu of the Samoan way aganuu FaaSamoa
- TAHITI: the view from the literary salons in London and Paris
- TAHITI: a more realistic view
- Sources of Illustrations
In relation to the encounters with Samoans, no drawing was made (or survived) from the Bougainville expedition or from the Lapérouse expedition. For the official and posthumous publication of the Lapérouse expedition narrative (1797), only the ‘Massacre’ was drawn and engraved by Parisian artists (in a style which departed from the 1770-1790s’ ‘noble’ representations of Tahitians; see pictures in the section on Tahiti). This view went right through into the German colonial period: the 1797 French engraving was reproduced or redrawn many times, as in this case (pl. 2) for a German account of Samoa. The author, formerly Supreme Judge of ‘German Samoa’, has compared on two adjacent pages what he called in his captions the ‘Samoan raid on the French’ (pl. 2) and the ‘Hawaiian murder of Captain Cook’ (pl. 4).