o gain no advantage from his enterprise,
as he was drowned in the Orange River in 1886. His example as a
colonist, however, was followed by three Hanseatic merchants,
Woermann, Jansen, and Thormealen, of Hamburg, who acquired land in
Togo, a small kingdom to the east of the British Gold Coast, and in
the Cameroons, a large tract in the bend of the Gulf of Guinea,
extending to Lake Chad, and applied for German imperial protection.
Bismarck sent Consul-General Nachtigall with the gunboat _Moewe_ in
1884 to hoist the German flag at various ports. Five days after this
had been done the English gunboat _Flirt_ arrived, but was thus too
late to obtain Togoland and the Cameroons for England.

Dr. Carl Peters, the German Cecil Rhodes, now arrived at Zanzibar, and
on obtaining concessions from the Sultan founded the German East
Africa Company, with a charter from his Government. German hopes of
great colonial expansion began to run high, but they were dashed by
the Anglo-German agreement of June, 1890, delimiting the spheres of
England, Germany, and the Sultan of Zanzibar, and stipulating that
Germany should receive Heligoland from England in return for German
recognition of English suzerainty in Zanzibar and the possession of
Uganda, which had recently been taken for Germany by Dr. Peters. At
that time Germans thought very little of Heligoland, but there was
then no Anglo-German tension, and no apprehension of an English
descent on the German coast.

The lease for ninety-nine years of Kiautschau, a small area of about
four hundred square miles on the coast of China, was obtained from the
Chinese in connexion with the murder of two German missionaries in
1897 in the Shantung Province, of which Kiautschau forms a part. Herr
von Buelow, then only Foreign Secretary, referred to the transaction in
the Reichstag in words that may be quoted, as they describe German
foreign policy in the Far East. "Our cruiser fleet," he said,

"was sent to Kiautschau Bay to exact reparation for the
murder of German Catholic missionaries on the one hand, and
to obtain greater security for the future against a
repetition of such occurrences. The Government,"

he continued,

"has nothing but benevolent and friendly designs regarding China, and
has no wish either to offend or provoke her. We are ready in East Asia
to recognize the interests of other Great Powers in the certain
confidence that our own interests will be duly respec