and Magazine of the Ceylon Agricultural Society. 



371 



PLANTING NOTES FROM PORTU- 

 GUESE WEST AFRICA. 



By Lieut. -Col. J. A. Wyllie, f.r.g.s. 



I. 



Cacao, &c, in St. Thome and Principe. 

 St. Thome, Portuguese West Africa, July 22. 



Dear Sik, — When passing through Colombo 

 two or throe months ago, 1 promised to send 

 you some notes on the Rubber Exhibition at 

 Para, whither I was then bouud. But as that 

 Exhibition has not yet opened, and may not 

 open for some months to come, perhaps it may 

 interest you and your readers to have instead a 

 few particulars of these comparatively unknown 

 islands, where I am passing the time until I 

 can receive from Para definite information as 

 to the opening of the Rubber Show there. 



Since Sir Richard Burton, many years ago, 

 published his " Glimpses of Feverland'', very 

 little has appeared in English about the Portu- 

 guese and Spanish island colonies in the Gulf of 

 Guinea. Recent events, however, in which I 

 regret to say certain Britons (or Americans?) 

 have played a part where hysteria usurps the 

 functions on sane judgment, have drawn atten- 

 tion to the unsuspected existence and the re- 

 markable prosperity of a colony which is not a 

 British but a Portuguese possession. This dis- 

 covery indicated something irregular, improper, 

 contrary to the order of Nature, something that 

 required looking-into ; to account for it there 

 must be a screw loose somewhere ! Accordingly 

 the busybodies whose self-imposed task it is 

 to pry into other people's affairs— desfacedores 

 de entuertos, as good old Cervantes called them 

 in their great prototype Don Quixote, soon 

 furnished the enquiring British public (who 

 had not as a matter of fact troubled to enquire 

 at all) with a cut-and-dried solution. 



Apparently, judging from questions asked in 

 Parliament and out of it, the humanitarian 

 creed seems to assume that Great Britain has 

 not merely a right to censure a foreign power in 

 respect of arrangements concerning her internal 

 colonial administration alone, but a duty to en- 

 force upon her the ill-thought-out ideas of this 

 noisy school of faddists. Up to this stage, it is 

 the Portuguese islands of St. Thome and Prin- 

 cipe which have been 



SINGLED OUT FOE HOSTILE CRITICISM, 



their carefully organised system of inden- 

 tured labour being denounced as a Modern 

 Slavery. Tho Spanish colony of Fernando Po, 

 forming one of the same group of islands, and 

 furnishing likewise its quota of cacao to the 

 world's markets, has for the present escaped 

 attention. Its turn may come; but so far no 

 marked inclination to tackle the German Em- 

 pire on the subject of labour in the adjacent 

 colony of Kamerun, also a cacao-producing 

 area, has been displayed. And, still more re- 

 markable, the really justifiable outburst of in- 

 dignation against the methods of the Belgian 

 Congo has evaporated, leaving matters much as 

 they were. Poor little Portugal alone has to 

 stand up as an Aunt Sally to furnish a mark for 

 the missiles being heaved at her. All this 

 might be amusing enough, to those not directly 



interested in the case; but in point of fact it 

 does concern Ceylon and Malaya, for this year 

 or next their turn may come, and their labour 

 system, which has many features of resem- 

 blance to that of the Portuguese island colo- 

 nies, may be cited to justify its existence 



BEFORE THE HUMANITARIAN TRIBUNALS. 



A glance at the map will show the posi- 

 tion of the islands. The equator passes be- 

 tween the southern most of the group, the 

 Uha das Rolas, so-called from the numbers 

 of wild pigeons on it, and the principal 

 island— St. Thome itself — an island contai- 

 ning an area of about 612 square miles, its 

 greatest length from North to South being 33 

 miles, and its breadth 21. Seventy-five miles 

 to the North of St, Thome lies Principe, less 

 than half the size, and about as far again to the 

 North the Spanish possession of Fernando Po, 

 half-way from Principe to the mouth of the 

 Niger. To the East, on the nearest mainland, 

 lies the German colony of Kamarun. 



The scenery of the islands is of singular 

 beauty, the almost land-locked bay of Sa5 Ant- 

 onio de Principe, the first port reached on the 

 south ward -bound voyage after leaving Cape 

 Verde, reminding one strikingly of many points 

 in the Mergui Archipelago or of the anchorage 

 at Port Blair in the Andamans. Forest vege- 

 tation to the water's edge, the steep hill-sides 

 covered with cacao plantations interspersed 

 with the naked trunks of huge primeval trees 

 known locally as 



AMOKEIKA AND AZEITONA 



(fanciful names given to giant growths very dis- 

 tantly resembling the little European trees to 

 which these designations by right belong), with 

 here and there the familiar forms of the jak, man- 

 go, tamarind, and bread-fruit tree, grown partly 

 as shade for the cacao, partly for tood for the 

 labourers. On the little spurs and underfeatures 

 of the hills stand forth the houses of the roceiros 

 or planters, artistically coloured pink, or blue 

 picked out in white, so as to recall memories of 

 Lisbon to their residents in exile, for every true 

 Portuguese colonist, as Sir Richard Burton re- 

 marks, all the world over tries to make his new 

 abode resemble Lisbon. The roofing of these 

 chalets, however, is almost invariably composed 

 of the pattern of tiling known to us in India as 

 Mangalore tile, and for the moment creates the 

 illusion that one has never left India after all. 



Nothing could be more striking than the 

 contrast between these islands and those of the 

 Cape Verde group, at two or threo of which tho 

 steamers of the Empre^a Nacional do Navo- 

 gacao touch on their way south. This line, I 

 may mention in passing, is practically the only 

 one (thanks to a misguided ultra-protective 

 tariff— of which it is to be hoped Portugal will 

 repent before she kills off the sickliest of her 

 colonies and cripples the stronger ones) which 

 carries passengers and freight to these ports. 

 Travelling by it, one has facilities for noting the 

 great diversity of character of the various colo- 

 nies not only in aspect but also ' as regards soil, 

 vegetation, and population. 



ST. VINCENT, FOR INSTANCE, IS A BARE DESERT 

 ISLAND, 



owing its sole importance to its position as a coal- 

 ing station and a centre of junction for the vari- 



