John Caesar Godeffroy himself had never visited the islands; his sons and nephews came, indeed, but scarcely to reap laurels; and the mainspring and headpiece of this great concern, until death took him, was a certain remarkable man of the name of Theodor Weber.  He was of an artful and commanding character; in the smallest thing or the greatest, without fear or scruple; equally able to affect, equally ready to adopt, the most engaging politeness or the most imperious airs of domination.  It was he who did most damage to rival traders; it was he who most harried the Samoans; and yet I never met any one, white or native, who did not respect his memory.  All felt it was a gallant battle, and the man a great fighter; and now when he is dead, and the war seems to have gone against him, many can scarce remember, without a kind of regret, how much devotion and audacity have been spent in vain.  His name still lives in the songs of Samoa.  One, that I have heard, tells of Misi Ueba and a biscuit-box—­the suggesting incident being long since forgotten.  Another sings plaintively how all things, land and food and property, pass progressively, as by a law of nature, into the hands of Misi Ueba, and soon nothing will be left for Samoans.  This is an epitaph the man would have enjoyed.

At one period of his career, Weber combined the offices of director of the firm and consul for the City of Hamburg.  No question but he then drove very hard.  Germans admit that the combination was unfortunate; and it was a German who procured its overthrow.  Captain Zembsch superseded him with an imperial appointment, one still remembered in Samoa as “the gentleman who acted justly.”  There was no house to be found, and the new consul must take up his quarters at first under the same roof with Weber.  On several questions, in which the firm was vitally interested, Zembsch embraced the contrary opinion.  Riding one day with an Englishman in Vailele plantation, he was startled by a burst of screaming, leaped from the saddle, ran round a house, and found an overseer beating one of the thralls.  He punished the overseer, and, being a kindly and perhaps not a very diplomatic man, talked high of what he felt and what he might consider it his duty to forbid or to enforce.  The firm began to look askance at such a consul; and worse was behind.  A number of deeds being brought to the consulate for registration, Zembsch detected certain transfers of land in which the date, the boundaries, the measure, and the consideration were all blank.  He refused them with an indignation which he does not seem to have been able to keep to himself; and, whether or not by his fault, some of these unfortunate documents became public.  It was plain that the relations between the two flanks of the German invasion, the diplomatic and the commercial, were strained to bursting.  But Weber was a man ill to conquer.  Zembsch was recalled; and from that time forth, whether through