american samoa city

Contact with Europeans began in the early 18th century. Jacob Roggeveen (1659–1729), a Dutchman, was the first known European to sight the Samoan islands in 1722. This visit was followed by the French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729–1811), who named them the Navigator Islands in 1768. Contact was limited before the 1830s which is when English missionaries and traders began arriving.

Early Western contact included a battle in the eighteenth century between French explorers and islanders in Tutuila, for which the Samoans were blamed in the West, giving them a reputation for ferocity. The site of this battle is called Massacre Bay.
[edit] 19th century

Mission work in the Samoas had begun in late 1830 by John Williams, of the London Missionary Society arrived from The Cook Islands and Tahiti. By that time, the Samoans had gained a reputation of being savage and warlike, as violent altercations had occurred between natives and French, British, German, and American forces, who, by the late nineteenth century, valued Pago Pago Harbor as a refueling station for coal-fired shipping and whaling.
[edit] 20th century




american samoa city