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Did You Know?

Samoa Has Crossed the Date Line Twice, in Opposite Directions, for the Same Reason

In 1889 a Scottish novelist with failing lungs arrived in Samoa looking for a climate that would keep him alive. He bought 314 acres on the slopes of Mount Vaea above Apia and built a house he called Vailima — Samoan for "five waters."

The house had five bedrooms, a library, a ballroom, a grand piano, a tablecloth given by Queen Victoria, a nude sculpture given by Rodin himself, and — in the tropics, at thirteen degrees south — the only working fireplace in Samoa.

The novelist was Robert Louis Stevenson, who had written Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Samoans called him Tusitala, teller of tales. He learned the language, took their side against colonial rule, and died there in 1894 at forty-four — not of the tuberculosis he had come to escape, but of a cerebral haemorrhage.

What happened next is the part worth counting. Local people built his coffin by hand and kept watch over his body overnight. The following day roughly 200 Samoans cut a thousand-foot path up Mount Vaea so the coffin could be carried to the summit, working in relays. They named it the Road of the Loving Hearts. He was buried near the top, overlooking the ocean, under an epitaph taken from one of his own poems.

Stevenson had been living in Samoa for three years when the country moved across the International Date Line for the first time — which is where this story properly begins.

In 1892, American traders persuaded the Samoan king to move the islands from the western side of the International Date Line to the eastern side, so that Samoa would share a working week with California.

To make the jump, Samoa had to repeat a day. The date chosen was 4 July. Samoa celebrated American Independence Day twice in a row.

119 years later, it went back.

By 2011 the arithmetic had reversed. Roughly 70% of Samoa's trade was with Australia, New Zealand and Asia; only about 15% was with the United States. And being a day behind meant losing something like two business days every week. As the country's leadership put it at the time: while it is Friday in Samoa, it is already Saturday in New Zealand — and while Samoans are at church on Sunday, Sydney and Brisbane are back at work.

So Samoa passed a law in June 2011, and at midnight on Thursday 29 December, the clock went straight to Saturday 31 December.

Friday 30 December 2011 did not happen in Samoa.

Neither did it happen in Tokelau, population about 1,500, which made the same jump on the same night. Samoa's 186,000 citizens went to sleep on Thursday and woke up on Saturday, having moved from UTC−10 to UTC+14 (daylight-saving time; UTC−11 to UTC+13 in standard time) — a twenty-four-hour shift in a single instant.

The government decreed that anyone scheduled to work on the day that did not exist would be paid for it in full.

Crowds gathered at the clock tower in Apia. There were sirens, fireworks, car horns, church bells and prayer services. A postage stamp was issued carrying the phrase into the future.

The clock: the consequences are still visible on the map.

American Samoa did not switch. It sits about a hundred kilometres away and is now exactly one day behind: the same time on the clock, a different date. A short boat trip between the two crosses an entire calendar date.

And Samoa's position in the world inverted. It had been among the last places on Earth to see each new day. It is now among the first — the country that used to end the world's day now starts it.

There was one consequence nobody had planned for. Seventh-day Adventist communities in Samoa found themselves divided over which day was now the true Sabbath, because the seven-day cycle they had been keeping no longer matched the calendar around them.

Samoa moved its date twice, and both times for the same reason: to be awake at the same time as whoever it was trading with. In 1892 that meant gaining a day. In 2011 it meant losing one.