Massacre Bay (Aʻasu)

Massacre Bay is where Europe's exploration met Samoa's defense. On December 11, 1787, Captain de Langle of La Pérouse's expedition took sixty-one men ashore at A'asu for water — the boats ran aground in the channel, the Samoans waded out, and the fight killed twelve Frenchmen including de Langle himself and the naturalist Lamanon, with thirty Samoans dead in return. La Pérouse named the place Massacre Bay and sailed for Australia; his ships were never seen again after Botany Bay.

The killing was the encounter's collision — the French accounts record the kava branches thrown as welcome and the women making advances; the stuck boats and the rising tension turned the meeting into the melee. The Samoan account, recorded later, says the bodies were wrapped in bark and honored — the French dead given the ceremony of enemies, not the contempt of victims.

The bay kept the name the French gave it — Massacre Bay on the charts, A'asu to the village, the monument where both sides' dead are remembered. The file keeps the encounter's double record: the first land contact between Europeans and Samoans, the misunderstanding that turned it to blood, and the reputation for ferocity that kept Samoa out of European hands for another half-century.

Massacre Bay is the archive's first-contact file — the A'asu cove where La Pérouse's landing party and the Samoan defenders killed each other in 1787, the encounter that named the bay and kept Samoa free for fifty years.