ABSTRACT
With the proclamation of the protectorate over Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land and adjacent island groups, the German territorial expansion in the South Pacific had almost come to a halt. Only Germany’s position in Samoa remained unsettled. There the relationship between the three main foreign competitors, Germany, Great Britain and the United States, continued to be an uneasy one. Economic rivalry, political strife and nationalist emotions, all played a role. About the German community Robert Louis Stevenson (1892: 34) noted, ‘Patriotism flies in arms about a hen; and if you comment upon the colour of a Dutch umbrella, you have cast a stone against the German Emperor’. Elsewhere he spoke of ‘national touchiness and the intemperate speech of German clerks’, which saw to it that a ‘scramble among dollar-hunters assumed the appearance of an inter-racial war’ (ibid.: 37-8). The culprit was the DHPG, ‘the true centre of trouble, the head of the boil on which Samoa languishes’ (ibid.: 28).
