DIE Politik ist die Lehre von Moglichen, Bismarck once remarked: "Politics is the art of the possible." And sometimes, too, the weather plays a part, as it did even in the affairs of the Iron Chancellor himself a little over a century ago. A major storm in the Samoan Archipelago defused an ugly situation that might otherwise have advanced the date of World War I by 30 years.
Tropical revolving storms, occur on nearly all the equatorial oceans of the world. Typically they form some 5 degrees north or south of the line, track westwards for a time before curving, either north or south as the case maybe, to end their lives in slightly higher latitudes. When the occur in the Indian Ocean these violent storms are known as cyclones; in the China Sea and in the North Pacific they are called typhoons, and when they occur in the Caribbean and the North Atlantic they are hurricanes. But there is another region of the world where such storms are also known as hurricanes - when they occur in the Pacific Ocean south of the equator.
Unlike Caribbean hurricanes, whose season runs from, June until October, tropical storms in the South Pacific peak in January, February and March. Now and then, one of them in its youth passes over the islands of Samoa, which lie at a latitude of about 13 degrees south, very close to the dead centre of the Pacific.
Now it happened that during the 1870s and early 1880s; Samoa was in turmoil, as local chieftains struggled with each other for supremacy. As was the custom of the time, no doubt for very altruistic reasons, the major powers felt it their duty to step in and sort things out: Bismarck, in particular, had ambitions to make the islands a protectorate of Germany.
In pursuit of this noble aim, his gunboats, shelling a Samoan village, destroyed some, American property, and to make matters worse, a group of German sailors ripped, down and burned the American flag. US warships headed for the region, and on March 16th, 1889, the ships of the two nations faced each other cross the harbour of the Saoan town of Apia. War, it seemed was unavoidable.
"Then came the hurricane. The savage storm passed directly over Apia on this day 107 years ago, and reduced the opposing fleets to combined chaos. The seamen of both nations helped one another in their struggle to survive the savage elements, and the native Samoans came to the aid of both sides. In the end about 150 men were drowned - but in the immediate aftermath of this mutual disaster, political grievances were forgotten for a time, and in due course the future of Samoa was resolved by diplomatic means.