The Germans were the earliest to commence work. Through the agency of a company they made a treaty with the Sultan of Zanzibar for his long strip of coast land, undertaking to pay him a certain sum per annum for the right of collecting the customs. But the imprudent conduct of the officers, their imperious and peremptory manner of proceeding, impelled the Arabs to attempt to drive them from the coast. At Kilwa, Dar Salaam, Bagamoyo, and Saadani the officers of the German company were attacked; some had to fly, others were massacred, and innocent British missionaries returning home after a long residence in the interior were waylaid and murdered by the excited natives; and the first attempts of German colonization ended disastrously. Naturally the imperial German government could not brook this humiliation, and Major Wissmann, a well-known explorer, was appointed with full powers to suppress the revolt. Within two years the Arabs were crushed, but the German position in East Africa became completely changed in consequence. It had been originally proposed to hold the East African coast by lease from the Sultan, with the view of including the Hinterland as far as Lake Tanganika within the sphere of their colonizing operations when results would permit; but the Germans now claimed nearly the whole of the east coast and east central Africa. This led in 1890 to the Anglo-German Convention, by which the German frontier was drawn south of latitude 1° S., across the Victoria Nyanza, thence east to the Indian Ocean, skirting the northern base of Kilima-Njaro to Wanga, a few miles south of the port of Mombasa. The British territory extended north from Wanga on the sea as far as the mouth of the Juba River, a distance of about 450 miles, thence inland as far as the Congo State. These two great divisions of Africa, now converted into British and German territory, included the major part of the area wherein the slave trade of the east central part of the continent so long flourished. The countries west of Lake Nyassa, extending westward to Portuguese territory and south to the Zambezi, conceded to the great South African Company, absorbed the remainder of the slavery area. These last are under the control of a British commissioner, Mr. H. H. Johnston, to whom is granted an annual subsidy of £10,000 from the South African Company, and who, with the aid of two British gunboats now on their way to Lake Nyassa, must shortly succeed in closing the interior of Africa in that direction to all slave caravans.