ed to be suzerain. Next came, in 1889, the grant of a royal
charter to a company, known as the British South Africa Company, which
had been formed to develop this eastern side of Lo Bengula's dominion,
and to work the gold mines believed to exist there, an undertaking
chiefly due to the bold and forceful spirit of Mr. Cecil Rhodes, who
perceived that if Britain did not speedily establish some right to the
country, the Transvaal Boers would trek in and acquire it. In 1890 the
pioneer British settlers moved up through Bechuanaland into Mashonaland,
and the Company, which, like the East India Company of the eighteenth
century, was to be a ruling and administering power as well as a trading
association, established itself along the eastern part of the great
plateau and began to build forts. Here it came into collision with the
Portuguese, who, stimulated by the activity of other nations, had been
re-asserting their dormant claims to the interior and sending up
expeditions to occupy the country. A skirmish which occurred near
Massikessi, in Manicaland, ended in the repulse of the Portuguese, and
the capture of their commanders, who were, however, soon after released
by Dr. Jameson, the newly appointed administrator of the Company; and
another conflict in May, 1891, in which the Portuguese again suffered
severely, hastened the conclusion of a treaty (June, 1891) between Great
Britain and Portugal, by which the boundary between the Portuguese
territories and those included in the British "sphere of influence" was
fixed. By this treaty a vast region in the interior which lies along the
Upper Zambesi west of Portuguese territory and south of the Congo Free
State was recognized by Portugal as within the British sphere. An
agreement of the preceding year between Germany and Great Britain (July
1, 1890) had defined the limits of German and British influence on the
east side of the continent; and as Germany, Portugal, and the Congo
State were the only civilized powers conterminous with Great Britain in
this part of the world, these treaties, together with the instrument--to
which Great Britain had been a party--that determined the limits of the
Congo State, settled finally all these questions of the interior, and
gave to Great Britain a legal title to her share of it.

That title, however, like the other titles by which the European powers
held their new African possessions, was a paper title, and valid only as
against other neighbou