Margen
Samoa's calendar contains two Mondays dated 4 July 1892, one after the other, and both were celebrated. They were put there by a proclamation of King Malietoa Laupepa, and with it the archipelago crossed the international date line for the first time. It would cross again one hundred and nineteen years later, in the opposite direction and by the opposite method.
Until that year Samoa kept the calendar of the Asian side of the line, the Sydney one, but the traders who bought its copra — the dried flesh of the coconut, from which oil is pressed — and sold it everything else were American. Lining up with San Francisco meant putting the calendar back a day, and a day can only be put back by living the same date twice. The proclamation appeared in the Samoan Times of 16 June 1892 and chose for the experiment, with an irony nobody has ever been able to call intentional or not, the national holiday of the United States.
Margaret Isabella Stevenson, mother of the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, was living on the island with her son at the time and noted it down with the appropriate bemusement: they had been ordered to keep "two Mondays in this week".
That way of counting the days lasted until 2011. The second crossing repeated no day: it skipped one.
The International Date Line Act 2011, given assent on 28 June of that year, came into force "at 12 o'clock midnight on Thursday 29th December 2011". From that second on, official time went from eleven hours behind universal time to thirteen ahead: a jump of exactly twenty-four hours, which is a whole day of the calendar. The clocks in Apia showed 23:59:59 on Thursday the 29th and the next second they showed 00:00:00 on Saturday the 31st. Friday 30 December 2011 did not exist in Samoa. Tokelau, an archipelago of three atolls to the north, made the same move the same night.
The reason this time was not coconut traders but Australia and New Zealand. With twenty-one hours' difference from Sydney and twenty-three from Auckland, the island's working week coincided with its customers' three days out of five: when it was Friday in Apia it was already Saturday in Auckland and the offices were shut; when it was Monday in Auckland it was still Sunday in Apia. A country that lives on exports and tourists was losing two office days a week against the neighbours it actually trades with. In 1892 the money was to the east and Samoa went east; in 2011 it was to the west and Samoa went west.
No monument is left of either crossing. What is left is two lines in the time-zone database carried inside the phones and servers of half the world: in one, dated 5 July 1892, Apia's time goes from twelve hours and thirty-three minutes ahead of Greenwich to eleven hours and twenty-seven minutes behind; in the other, dated 29 December 2011, it jumps to thirteen ahead. One Monday too many and one Friday too few, written in plain text.