CHAPTER IV. 
THE FOUNDING OF THE PROTECTORATE 
A NY direct personal interest which I may have taken in the affairs of 
Nyasaland dates from the commencement of 1884. 
I had returned from a prolonged examination of the western basin 
of the River Congo and my opinion was invited at the Foreign Office on certain 
points connected with the proposed treaty with Portugal regulating the political 
and commercial affairs of the Lower Congo. 
This treaty contained a clause providing that Portuguese political influence 
should cease in the direction of Nyasaland at the junction of the Ruo and 
Shire rivers. Had the treaty been ratified this clause would have obviated any 
further frontier disputes with Portugal, north of the Zambezi; but owing to 
unreasonable opposition in certain quarters it was not ratified, and then the 
Berlin Conference was called to deal generally with questions affecting the 
Congo and the Niger, and Zambezian affairs were postponed in their settlement. 
The Portuguese were now free of any obligation in regard to Nyasaland, and 
being an enterprising and ambitious people, determined once more to revive 
their scheme of a trans-continental Empire from Angola to Mozambique, 
including the southern part of what is now Central Africa. They were aided 
in these assumptions by the remarkable journeys of their explorers, Capello 
and Ivens. 
Lord Salisbury’s Ministry, however, had succeeded to power, and in several 
speeches in the House of Lords the Premier could not conceal the interest that 
he felt in the struggle going on between the Arabs and the African Lakes 
Company, or his resolve to maintain Nyasaland as a country open to British 
enterprise without the restrictions which would result from its transference 
to any other European Power. Owing to the difficulty about a direct water 
route into the heart of South Central Africa to which I have alluded in the 
last chapter, I believe it was not the object of Her Majesty’s Ministers in 1887 
to establish any actual Protectorate over Nyasaland : they merely wished that 
it should become neither German nor Portuguese, but be ruled by its native 
chiefs, under the advice, it might be, of a British Consul, but in any case 
that it should remain open to the British traders, planters and missionaries 
without let or hindrance. 
In 1888 I had returned from three years of Consular work in the Niger 
Coast Protectorate, and in the summer of that year Lord Salisbury held a short 
conversation with me at Hatfield in which he developed his views about 
Zambezia. From this conversation I date, to a great extent, my own concep- 
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