The Dutch noticed that the girl beside the Chief had her ‘neck encircled by a string of oblong blue beads’ and that the Chief pointed at it while looking at his visitors. Augustin Krämer, the famous German ethnographer who had sojourned in Samoa in the 1890s, mentions the early contacts in the introduction to Volume 2 of his Samoa Inseln and comments on the blue beads noticed by the Dutch (Kramer [1902] 1995: II: 6). He considers that they were not a native object, because, in the 19^th century, the only local object of that colour (fragments of nautilus shell) was used as the centrepiece of the ceremonial head-dress but not in necklaces. He therefore assumes that the beads were of European origin and that the Samoans had obtained them from the Tongans, who themselves received them from the Dutch expeditions of 1616 and 1643.

We shall see several confirmations of this later on. When he came to Samoa in 1791, Captain Edwards observed: ‘we saw a few of the natives with blue, mulberry and other coloured beads about their necks, and we understood that they got them from Cook at Tongataboo’ (Thompson ed. 1915: 56). Lapérouse noted in 1787 that the Samoans were very fond of these beads, as did Otto von Kotzebue in 1824, while Lafond de Lurcy added in 1831 that a necklace of these beads could be used for saving one’s life in a war when given by a prisoner to the victorious side. Indeed, the Samoan practice of togiola (literally ‘life[-giving] gift/payment’) is well affirmed in legends, and still operates today: it involves the giving of fine mats in a special presentation called ifoga, where the person guilty of murder, manslaughter or a severe breach of taboo and who is asking for mercy, entirely covers himself with one of these mats (Tcherkézoff 2002).

Thus, it seems that the Samoans, even before seeing the Europeans, the Papālagi, for the first time, had already elaborated a representation of the power inhering in some of the Papālagi objects. Actually the whole story of the life-giving value of these beads could have originated even before Cook’s arrival in Tonga. In 1616, LeMaire and Schouten fired on a canoe in north Tonga (near Samoa), killing several people. The canoe was apparently carrying twenty people or so, including women and children. The Dutch opened fire because the canoe did not stop its course in front of their ship after a first warning shot had been fired into the air. But immediately after they had done so, they manoeuvred so as to get near to the survivors and, feeling pity, as well as curious to make contact, they helped those who were in the water to get back on board their large canoe which was still afloat. They even attended to the wounds of those who had been shot, and they gave them some trinkets of the kind that European expeditions had carried with them, since the early voyages, to be used in bartering with the ‘Indians’ for food (Schouten 1619: 100-4).

I would favour one hypothesis about how the trinkets were received and understood by the Tongans: the survivors could only have concluded that these objects, given to them after initial gunfire that killed some of their companions, were a ‘life-giving’ sign handed over by these superior creatures. After LeMaire and Schouten in 1616, Tasman, in 1643, had also distributed such trinkets (Moyle ed. 1984: 78, note 133). LeMaire handed over linen, beads, nails, hatchets while Tasman also distributed satin, knives, copper wire, looking glasses, an earthenware dish, a drinking glass, tailored clothing such as a hat, shirt, and so on (Ferdon 1987: 281-5). These Dutch visits introduced the glass beads and opened up an era lasting in Samoa until the 1830s in which sacred value attached to these beads, after which new European objects—fabrics, tools, salted beef, bread—were to replace beads in local ceremonial exchanges. It is also probable that it was actually during these early encounters with the Dutch that the word ‘Papālagi’ was coined and then rapidly diffused through the Tonga-Fiji-Samoa region (see chapter 11).

Thus, the first contact with the Samoans in 1722 was not, from the Samoan point of view, entirely a first contact. Samoans already knew something about the Papālagi. They probably knew about the muskets: how else might we interpret the King’s order to his people to retreat behind the trees while he approached the Dutch? They certainly knew about the blue beads: how else might we explain why they immediately asked the Dutch for more of them?

The people from whom they could have heard stories about the Papālagi are the nearby Tongan islanders. It is not surprising that an event in Tonga would have been recounted all around the region. The pioneer missionary John Williams noted in 1830 the Samoan use of the word ‘Papālagi’, but we know that the expression had been in circulation in Western Polynesia since at least the time of Tasman’s passage through Tongan waters in 1643, as the Tongans repeated it to Captain Cook when the British arrived (see chapter 11). We know from various legends describing wars and marriages that the relations between East-Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa have been constant for a very long time (Kaeppler 1978, 1999, n.d.). In 1777, a member of Cook’s third voyage noted while in Tonga the nature of the Tongan relationship with Samoa: Samoans were established in Tonga and vice versa.^[4] We shall see that, in 1824, Kotzebue noted how Samoans spoke Tongan to him; that, in 1831, Lafond de Lurcy himself saw the big canoes of the Tongans coming regularly to Samoa. Between 1840 and 1842, the beachcomber John Jackson, who stayed at Ta’ū and later at various Fijian islands, noted how frequent were the visits and the war alliances between Fijians, Tongans, Samoans, and Uveans.^[5]