The emperor then ordered Stern's possessions to be searched, with the result that he received confirmation of his suspicion that he, together with Rosenthal, another converted German-Jewish missionary whom Stern had recruited, had been writing disparagingly of him and his people. Theodore was furious and ordered the arrest first of the missionaries and a little later of Cameron. Thus began the long saga of the Abyssinian captives. The Foreign Office was in a dilemma. After six months' deliberations it was decided to send Hormuzd Rassam, a Mesopotamian Nestorian who was employed on the staff of the British administration in Aden, to act as envoy and carry a personal letter from Queen Victoria to the emperor. Rassam's reward was to be thrown into prison together with two other British officiais.who accompanied him. It was now the turn of Theodore to send an emissary to Queen Victoria to request technical aid in the form of skilled craftsmen who could teach his people. He also asked for a gift of guns, pistols and gunpowder with the necessary equipment to enable the Ethiopians to manufacture their own armaments. The British Government was inclined to agree to these requests provided the prisoners were released. Artisans as well as materials were dispatched to Massawa to await there until the captives were brought to the coast. In the absence of a satisfactory settlement, the Foreign Office warned, an armed expedition would be dispatched. Theodore treated these threats with disdain and, not trusting the British to fulfil their side of the proposed bargain, he allowed matters to take their own course. Public opinion in Britain, not surprisingly, was becoming impatient and, though the Government was genuinely reluctant to become involved in a war, it eventually found that it had no alternative. The final decision was taken by the Cabinet on 19 August 1867 and the wheels of the military machine were set in motion.

If the reports of travellers such as Bruce, Salt, Beke and d'Abbadie had failed to arouse more than a cursory interest among the Jews of the West, the accounts which began to be published in London and elsewhere of the activities of the missionaries, and especially of the apostate Stern, at last produced some reaction. Dispatches from their representatives in the field were published with pride in the C.M.J.'s monthly magazine, The Jewish Intelligence, and were reproduced frequently from the mid-1850s onwards in the Jewish Chronicle combined with urgent pleas that