_September-November_ 1888

Brandeis had held all day by Mulinuu, expecting the reported real attack.
He woke on the 13th to find himself cut off on that unwatered promontory,
and the Mataafa villagers parading Apia. The same day Fritze received a
letter from Mataafa summoning him to withdraw his party from the isthmus;
and Fritze, as if in answer, drew in his ship into the small harbour
close to Mulinuu, and trained his port battery to assist in the defence.
From a step so decisive, it might be thought the German plans were
unaffected by the disastrous issue of the battle. I conceive nothing
would be further from the truth. Here was Tamasese penned on Mulinuu
with his troops; Apia, from which alone these could be subsisted, in the
hands of the enemy; a battle imminent, in which the German vessel must
apparently take part with men and battery, and the buildings of the
German firm were apparently destined to be the first target of fire.
Unless Becker re-established that which he had so lately and so artfully
thrown down--the neutral territory--the firm would have to suffer. If he
re-established it, Tamasese must retire from Mulinuu. If Becker saved
his goose, he lost his cabbage. Nothing so well depicts the man's
effrontery as that he should have conceived the design of saving both,--of
re-establishing only so much of the neutral territory as should hamper
Mataafa, and leaving in abeyance all that could incommode Tamasese. By
drawing the boundary where he now proposed, across the isthmus, he
protected the firm, drove back the Mataafas out of almost all that they
had conquered, and, so far from disturbing Tamasese, actually fortified
him in his old position.

The real story of the negotiations that followed we shall perhaps never
learn. But so much is plain: that while Becker was thus outwardly
straining decency in the interest of Tamasese, he was privately