While war was going on the chiefs and heads of families united in some central spot, and whatever they decided on, either for attack or defence, the young men endeavoured implicitly to carry out.  Their weapons were clubs, spears, and slings.  Subsequently, as iron was introduced, they got hatchets, and with these they made their most deadly weapon, viz. a sharp tomahawk, with a handle the length of a walking-stick.  After that again they had the civilised additions of swords, pistols, guns, and bayonets.  Around the village where the war party assembled they threw a rough stockade, formed by any kind of sticks or trees cut into eight feet lengths, and put close to each other, upright, with their ends buried two feet in the ground.  The hostile parties might be each fortified in this way not more than a mile from each other, and now and then venture out to fight in the intervening space, or to take each other by surprise at weak or unguarded points.  In their war canoes they had some distinguishing badge of their district hoisted on a pole, a bird it might be, or a dog, or a bunch of leaves.  And, for the bush-ranging land forces, they had certain marks on the body by which they knew their own party, and which served as a temporary watchword.  One day the distinguishing mark might be blackened cheeks; the next, two strokes on the breast; the next, a white shell suspended from a strip of white cloth round the neck, and so on.  Before any formal fight, they had a day of feasting, reviewing, and merriment.  In action they never stood up in orderly ranks to rush at each other.  According to their notions that would be the height of folly.  Their favourite tactics were rather of the surprise and bush-skirmishing order.  In some of their fights in recent times I have known of from two to fifty killed on each side in a battle, never more.  Prisoners, if men, were generally killed; if women, distributed among the conquerors.  In a battle which was fought in 1830 a fire was kindled and many of the prisoners were burned.

Their heroes were the swift of foot, like Achilles or Asahel; men who could dash forward towards a crowd, hurl a spear with deadly precision, and stand for a while tilting off with his club other spears as they approached him within an inch of running him through.  They were ambitious also to signalise themselves by the number of heads they could lay before the chiefs.  No hero at the Grecian games rejoiced more over his chaplet than did the Samoan glory in the distinction of having cut off a man’s head.  As he went along with it through the villages on the way to the place where the chiefs were assembled, awaiting the hourly news of the battle, he danced, and capered, and shouted, calling out every now and then the name of the village, and adding, “I am So-and-so, I have got the head of such an one.”  When he reached the spot where the chiefs were met, he went through a few more evolutions, and then laid