Samoan crisis

The Samoan Crisis was a confrontation standoff between the United States, Imperial Germany and Great Britain from 1887–1889 over control of the Samoan Islands during the Samoan Civil War. The incident involved three United States Navy warships (the sloop-of-war USS Vandalia, the screw steamer USS Trenton, and the gunboat USS Nipsic) and three Imperial German Navy warships (the gunboats SMS Adler and SMS Eber and the corvette SMS Olga), keeping each other at bay over several months in Apia harbour, which was monitored by the British corvette HMS Calliope.

The standoff ended on 15 and 16 March when a hurricane wrecked all six warships in the harbour. Calliope was able to escape the harbour and survived the storm. Robert Louis Stevenson did not witness the storm and its aftermath at Apia but did, after his arrival in Samoa (December 1889) write about the event. The Samoan Civil War continued, involving Germany, United States and Britain, eventually resulting, via the Tripartite Convention of 1899, in the partition of the Samoan Islands into American Samoa and German Samoa.