The next day, 5 May, the French ships stood in front of Tutuila. Many canoes passed by ‘and the signs made by the Indians seemed to invite us to land’ (les Indiens semblaient nous inviter par leurs signes à aller à terre); but the reef barrier seemed to render it impossible and Bougainville decided to resume his course in the Pacific. In the distance he saw the eastern end of Upolu, but the fog was very dense and so he continued on his route. Thus ended this brief two-day interlude of contacts at sea, only the second recorded contact that Samoans had yet experienced with Europeans.

Some islands in the Samoan archipelago had not been visited by the first expedition (Roggeveen’s), nor even by the French during this second contact episode: for instance, the large island of Savai’i would have to wait for Captain Edward Edwards’s expedition in 1791 to see Papālagi passing by its shores for the first time (chapter 5). But judging by early 19^th-century observations, the demonstrable unity of the language throughout the archipelago observed from 1830 onwards, and the existence of a kinship system where marriage ties are widespread as each village was (and often still is) an exogamous unit, the practice of constant inter-village and inter-island visiting that lay at the heart of Samoan life in those years allows the supposition that news of any contact with the Papālagi on one island would have spread to inhabitants of the other islands within a few years if not a few months.