When Sir George Goldie’s Company had expended nearly all its available capital in buying out the French and purchasing governing rights from the native chiefs, a fresh obstacle had to be overcome: German rivalry came into play. The Germans had just taken the Cameroons but had failed to secure the Oil Rivers, on which in 1884-5 they made several attempts. Herr Flegel was sent to obtain concessions beyond the limits of the Royal Niger Company’s immediate jurisdiction in the Nigerian Sudan. But Flegel was forestalled in his principal object by the explorer Joseph Thomson, who most ably conducted a mission to the court of Fula Sultan or the Emperor of Sokoto, and secured a treaty with that important potentate which brought his territories under British influence. In 1890 the British claims to a vast Niger empire were recognized by France and Germany. But the French recognition was allowed to remain too vague in regard to the northern, western, and eastern boundaries of British Nigeria; thus rendering it possible for France in the ensuing eight years to strive to cut into the British sphere from two directions, if not three. On the north it was sought to push back the boundary of the empire of Sokoto, so as to bring the French sphere as far as possible to the south, though this assertion went little beyond map-making. On the south, the Benue basin, Lieutenant Mizon made the most persistent, and, as it would seem, unpractical attempts to secure for France a large sphere of influence on the river Benue, which could hardly be approached from French territory because the German sphere would stand in the way. Finally as the delimitation in the Anglo-French agreement of 1890 merely carried the British boundary from Lake Chad to Say on the middle Niger, and did not provide a western boundary, the French (though unofficially according the British in 1890 a straight line drawn from Say due south to the boundary between Lagos and Dahomé) gradually pushed their acquisitions eastward from Senegambia until they had secured all the right bank of the Middle and Lower Niger as far as Busa, which is at the end of the Niger cataracts and at the commencement of its navigability seawards. A British protectorate over Busa having been announced to France in 1894, this act on the part of the French was considered a distinct trespass on British rights and caused considerable excitement at the time; but, as may be seen by the 1898 convention, the French finally yielded to British claims. They had some time before tacitly disowned the enterprise of Lieutenant Mizon, which had been rendered the more hopeless, firstly by the agreement between England and Germany in 1893 (which provided for a continuous Anglo-German boundary from the Rio del Rey on the