And yet if any part of it be true, the whole of
Becker's explanation falls to the ground. A boat which had skirted the
whole eastern coast of Mulinuu, and was already opposite a wharf in
Matafele, and still going west, might have been guilty on a thousand
points--there was one on which she was necessarily innocent; she was
necessarily innocent of proceeding on Mulinuu. Or suppose the diving
operations, and the native testimony, and Pelly's chart of the boat's
course, and the boat itself, to be all stages of some epidemic
hallucination or steps in a conspiracy--suppose even a second _taumualua_
to have entered Apia bay after nightfall, and to have been fired upon
from Grevsmuhl's wharf in the full career of hostilities against
Mulinuu--suppose all this, and Becker is not helped. At the time of the
first fire, the boat was off Grevsmuhl's wharf. At the time of the
second (and that is the one complained of) she was off Carruthers's wharf
in Matautu. Was she still proceeding on Mulinuu? I trow not. The
danger to German property was no longer imminent, the shots had been
fired upon a very trifling provocation, the spirit implied was that of
designed disregard to the neutrality. Such was the impression here on
the spot; such in plain terms the statement of Count Hatzfeldt to Lord
Salisbury at home: that the neutrality of Apia was only "to prevent the
natives from fighting," not the Germans; and that whatever Becker might
have promised at the conference, he could not "restrict German
war-vessels in their freedom of action.
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