Niger, it
gradually cut the ground from under the French companies which had been
formed for the exploitation and ultimate acquisition of those districts,
so that after a time the French shareholders agreed to merge themselves
in the British enterprise.

This important step was taken just in time to forestall German action
from the side of the Cameroons, which threatened to shut out British
trade from the banks of the River Benue and the shores of Lake Chad.
Forewarned of this danger, Sir George Goldie and his directors urged
that bold and successful explorer, Mr. Joseph Thomson, to safeguard the
nation's interests along the Benue and north thereof. Thomson had
scarcely recovered from the hardships of his epoch-marking journey
through Masailand; but he now threw himself into the breach, quickly
travelled from England to the Niger, and by his unrivalled experience
alike of the means of travel and of native ways, managed to frame
treaties with the Sultans of Sokoto and Gando, before the German envoy
reached his destination (1885). The energy of the National African
Company and the promptitude and tact of Mr. Thomson secured for his
countrymen undisputed access to Lake Chad and the great country peopled
by the warlike Haussas[451].

[Footnote 451: This greatest among recent explorers of Africa died in
1895. He never received any appropriate reward from the Court for his
great services to science and to the nation at large.]

Seeing that both France and Germany seek to restrict foreign trade in
their colonies, while Great Britain gives free access to all merchants
on equal terms, we may regard this brilliant success as a gain, not only
for the United Kingdom, but for the commerce of the world. The annoyance
expressed in influential circles in Germany at the failure of the plans
for capturing the trade of the Benue district served to show the
magnitude of the interests which had there been looked upon as
prospectively and exclusively German. The delimitation of the new
British territory with the Cameroon territory and its north-eastern
extension to Lake Chad was effected by an Anglo-German agreement of
1886, Germany gaining part of the upper Benue and the southern shore of
Lake Chad. In all, the territories controlled by the British Company
comprised about 500,000 square miles (more than four times the size of
the United Kingdom).

It is somewhat characteristic of British colonial procedure in that
period that many dif