NEW YORK, April 8, 1908.
Lieutenant-Commander E. L. Beach, U. S. N., Annapolis.
MY DEAR BEACH: If it be at all worth the while to bear a brave deed in mind, if there is to remain to the navy of the United States the recollection of one debt which it must ever owe and which, under the President's own hand, it has acknowledged, surely there must be some spot in the great hall of memory at the Naval Academy in which to niche these autographed photographs of Seumanutafa, chief of Apia, and of Fa'atulia, his wife, brave man, noble woman.
Official reports have recorded the deeds of Seumanutafa and his lifelong and unswerving friendship for America. Yet it will not come amiss to recite once more the crowning fact that when our sailor lads were battling for life in Apia Harbor a man there was upon the beach who was all man.
That dark March day of 1889 the rains descended and the floods came. The rain came down in blocks, the Vaisigano stream was booming in spate from the downpour on the Upolu mountains steeply rising behind Apia and was discharging all its fury upon one arm of the little harbor, where it met and warred with the swirl of the whole Pacific Ocean driven through the harbor mouth and to that very spot under the tempest blast of hurricane. The Nipsic had finished her wonder feat of scrambling, crawling, crashing over the reef's coral hedge, and lay crippled but snugly berthed in the sands just south of Matautu. The Vandalia's last cruise was done and she lay torn and bleeding, a wreck, a little south of the Nipsic. When her sail of men had proved ineffective the Trenton came fighting along to that one point where fiercely boiled that caldron of the water of the angry sea and the water of the burdened hills, the mouth of that Vaisigano, the "river of fragrant blossoms," where most times women laugh and chatter at their task of washing clothes in its warm and sluggish shallows.
Hope for the ship there was none, for her company there seemed less.
Out into that hell of waters one man inched his way, one hand holding out a hero clutch over that dark turmoil and that the stronger hand, the left behind him in the firm brown clasp of a trusty tribesman. Barefooted he won a footing on the jagged coral as well might one elect to tread on broken bottles and in that millrace set his form against the send of the mighty sea. Into the tumult followed upon his chief the second man, one hand holding his leader, one hand grasping both to sure hand-clasp upon the shore. Brave man by brave man this chain linked out from the beach, each bare foot taloning the jagged reef, each breast, in man's triumph over Nature the brute, buffeting back the waters. Link by link, and every link a man, these Samoans paid out the line of their generously jeoparded lives, the lifeline for the Trenton, until their leader was barely holding his own, his head awash. Yet his one free hand with one hand he held to life, with one he grappled death, the death brooding over American sailors his one free hand was ever reaching blindly into the dark and deadly turmoil and what he seized he held, a Trenton man snatched from death, and passed him back along the line from one mighty arm to the next and so to shore, so back to life. How many were saved by his untiring clutch no man ever knew, himself least of all, for in that theater of heroism none stood by to tally. But ever at the head of the line of life, ever playing a man's part, that man of men was Seumanutafa.
As fast as each man was brought to shore he was hurried to the chief's house, there to pass under the ministrations of Fa'atulia, who worked untiringly and directed her handmaidens in completing the rescue.
When I think upon that bitter day and its unshattered courage in disaster afloat met by such unshrinking bravery of our Samoan friends ashore, when I recall how many of us have gone already to their last account who knew Seumanutafa, even as the hero chief has passed where went Kimberly and Dick Leary before him, even as all of us must leave a brave world which honors its brave, then I feel sure that somewhere near the Vandalia's historic flag which I have already sent to the Academy there will be found a little space for two who proved to our old navy that they were friends both in the need and in the deed.
And when the tropic sky smiled once again upon that charnel port of dead ships, kissed warmly the scores of new graves upon the shore, when relief came and Admiral Kimberly sailed away from the warm heart of Samoa, then some unnamed bard of Seumanutafa's household poured out his soul in the "Farewell to the Admiral." One verse, the burden of the whole poem, I here set down with a bald rendering into English:
Tofa, mai feleni, Good-by, my friend,
O le a o'u tea; I now must lose thee;
'A e folau le va'a For the ship is going away
O le ali'i pule Ameleka. With the Admiral of America.
Ne'i galo mai Apia Never forget Apia,
Si o ta 'ele'ele, Loved place of my abode,
'A e manatua mai pea Still cherish her in heart,
Le 'aupasese. Ye men of the sea.
A generation has sped, songs have come and gone, but this remains the one song that all Samoans always know how to sing.
With warm regard for the Academy, with a fond recollection of Seumanutafa,
WILLIAM CHURCHILL.