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Capital: Pago Pago
Population: 45,000+
Language: English, Samoan
1 – Pago Pago (above)
Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa, curls around a deep bay on Tutuila formed from a flooded volcanic caldera, one of the largest and deepest natural harbours in the South Pacific, where a US Navy commander agreed rights to a coaling station with the high chief Mauga in 1872, and the Navy ran a naval station from 1900 until 1951.
Along the Pago Pago waterfront sit the Fagatogo market, the Fono, the territory’s legislature, as well as the Jean P. Haydon Museum in the former US Navy commissary, all beneath Rainmaker Mountain, known for drawing heavy rain down onto the harbour.
In December 1916 Somerset Maugham was held up in Pago Pago when a measles case aboard his steamer put its passengers in quarantine, and the stay gave him the short story “Rain”, later a hit play and three Hollywood films, while the building where he is said to have lodged bears the name of its heroine, Sadie Thompson.
2 – Blunts Point Battery
Blunts Point Battery stands on Tulutulu Point, the headland on the western side of the Pago Pago harbour mouth near Utulei, where two six-inch naval guns were mounted about 60m above the water in 1941 to guard the US naval station.
A steep, rocky trail climbs to the Blunts Point guns, with a concrete magazine built into the slope just below, while a matching pair of six-inch guns guarded the eastern side of the harbour mouth at Breakers Point, and Blunts Point has been a National Historic Landmark since 1987.
The Blunts Point guns never fired in anger, as the only Japanese attack on Tutuila came at about 2:30 a.m. on 11 January 1942, when the submarine I-20 surfaced off the north coast, where a ridge blocked the guns’ line of fire, and fired about 15 shells, the first hitting a store owned by a Japanese resident who had already been interned.
3 – Mount ‘Alava and the National Park of American Samoa
Mount ʻAlava rises above Pago Pago harbour in the Tutuila section of the National Park of American Samoa, the only US national park south of the equator, whose land is not owned by the federal government but leased from local villages under a 50-year agreement signed in 1993.
A ridge trail from Fagasa Pass climbs through rainforest to the summit of Mount ʻAlava, at about 490 m, with views down the length of the harbour, and the forest is home to flying foxes, fruit bats with a wingspan of up to about a metre.
A cable car once ran about 1.6 km across the harbour to the summit of Mount ʻAlava, until 17 April 1980, when a US Navy P-3 Orion taking part in Flag Day celebrations clipped its cable and crashed by the Rainmaker Hotel, killing all six crew as well as people on the ground.
4 – Vatia and Pola Island
Vatia is a small village at the head of Vatia Bay on Tutuila’s north coast, hemmed in by the National Park of American Samoa, and its bay is guarded by Pola Island, a basalt sea stack about 120 m high known as the Cockscomb.
A short, flat trail at the end of the road beyond Vatia leads to a rocky beach facing Pola Island, whose sheer cliffs are a nesting ground for seabirds such as boobies, noddies, terns and frigatebirds.
The Vaiʻava Strait, the narrow channel dividing Pola Island from the shore at Vatia, was one of seven sites in American Samoa declared National Natural Landmarks in 1972, as a classic example of wave erosion carving cliffs and isolated stacks out of a volcanic island.
5 – Ofu Beach
Ofu is one of the Manuʻa Islands, more than 100 km east of Tutuila, and Ofu Beach is a long, palm-lined stretch of pale sand on its south shore, beneath Sunuʻitao Peak, within the National Park of American Samoa.
The reef off Ofu Beach begins just metres from the sand, in a lagoon rich in corals and reef fish, and a single-lane bridge across the narrow Āsaga Strait links Ofu with neighbouring Olosega, the two islands home to only a few hundred people between them.
In the shallow back-reef pools off Ofu Beach the water can swing by up to 6 °C in a day and reach 34–35 °C at summer low tides, yet many corals survive, making Ofu a key site for Stanford biologist Stephen Palumbi’s research on heat-tolerant corals.
6 – Ta’ū
Taʻū, the largest of the Manuʻa Islands, is a shield volcano whose southern flank collapsed into the sea, leaving sea cliffs often described as among the tallest in the world, and it was the historic seat of the Tui Manuʻa, the paramount title of the Manuʻa group.
Much of Taʻū’s south-east lies within the National Park of American Samoa, where a coastal trail runs past Saua, remembered in Samoan oral tradition as the place of the first ʻava ceremony, to Siʻu Point, while Lata Mountain, at over 900 m, is the highest point in American Samoa.
In 1925, the 23-year-old Margaret Mead arrived in Samoa and spent several months on Taʻū interviewing adolescent girls for Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), one of the most widely read books in anthropology, though Derek Freeman later argued she had been misled, a claim many anthropologists dispute.