The Portuguese authorities have not yet, so far as is
known, released Mr. Bowskill, the Baptist missionary whose courage and devotion saved them from destruction at the hands of the natives who had been driven to insurrection by the attempt of the officials to impress some fifteen hundred men for work in the cocoa plantations. Serious as is the arrest, the attempted impressment is, as we feel sure Mr. Bowskill would be the first to acknowledge, far more serious. It shows that the Portuguese Government, instead of putting down the kidnapping of natives for the cocoa islands, as they pro- teas to have done, have actually themselves gone into the business of slave-raiding. Their method is apparently to insist that the local chiefs shall produce so many men for labour in the islands. This will, no doubt, be excused as one of the forms of forced labour "necessary in the interests of the State." And this though the labour impressed is not for Government works but for private plantations! Could we wonder if such oppression were to end in a servile war involving all the West African colonies of Portugal?
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