Samoan crisis

The Samoan Crisis was a standoff between the United States, the German Empire, and the British Empire from 1887 to 1889 over control of the Samoan Islands during the First Samoan Civil War. The incident involved three US Navy warships (the sloop-of-war , the screw steamer , and the gunboat ) and three German warships (the gunboats and and the corvette ), which kept each other at bay over several months in Apia Harbour, which was monitored by the British corvette .
The standoff ended when the 1889 Apia cyclone, on 15 and 16 March, wrecked all six warships in the harbour. "Calliope" escaped the harbour and thus survived the storm. Robert Louis Stevenson did not witness the storm and its aftermath at Apia but after December 1889 arrival to Samoa, he wrote about the event. The Second Samoan Civil War, involving Germany, the United States, and Britain, eventually resulted in the Tripartite Convention of 1899, which partitioned the Samoan Islands into American Samoa and German Samoa.