I originally compiled this web-site for my own amusement primarily, not expecting many people to visit it.
I have therefore been pleasantly surprised to find a number of surfers who have ancestors who either served on one of the ships involved in the hurricane at Apia, Samoa in 1889, or who are interested in the history of the dramatic events, and who have taken the trouble to make contact and provide additional data to expand the scope.
The web-site started off at Geocities, and being my first effort to compose a web-site, was utterly dire. I still have my old back ups on CD, so I know! Thank goodness Geocities is only active in Japan now. The site moved to somewhere else (that I've forgotten) but didn't get much better. I made a stronger effort when I uploaded it to Tesco, and then on Homecall, very similar to that version. Hopefully, the standard has improved dramatically over the years. I have now purchased my own domain name, and now use Freeola as my commercial hosting service. I have retained the Homecall site whilst I get the Freeola site sorted out, and will then replace all the pages on the Homecall site with "Redirects".
As of July, 2016, I have extensively revised the site in an attempt to make it more user friendly for tablets and mobiles, i.e. to make use of "Responsive Design". I had used Google's site statistics which showed around 60% of the clicks to my site originated from mobiles and tablets, and I realised I must improve the site for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as well as "other devices".
I have also added some German versions of paragraphs on the hurricane pages containing data that might be of interest to a German visitor. Hopefully, English language visitors will forgive this addition. I know German visitors could use Google to translate the entire page into their language, with the same degree of accuracy as Google Translator did for me with the paragraphs, but as I have yet to recieve a single German visitor that I know of, I decided that perhaps including some German text would help to attract them in their searches. Especially for keywords such as "Apia, Samoa, Hurricane, Adler, Eber, Olga". As of June 2017, I am considering removing the German text. I still await my first German visitor, and the presence of the text may be off-putting to the "usual" visitor.
Page down to the very bottom to find links for all the sections of my site, including the "Samoa Story".
By the way, if you do contact me, I would be interested to know how you got to this site. What you were searching for and how easy it was to find. It will help me in understanding how the site is listed by the browsers.
Click on the sub-links which have opened up in the navigation panel on the left hand side of this window to read about Scaramouche and Rafael Sabatini.
On any of the pages of my site, clicking the small image of a sword fencer in the top left corner (it is supposed to be Andre Louis Moreau, aka Scaramouche) will take you to the home page in the same way as clicking "HOME" will at the bottom of the page.