THE CAMEROONS [Illustration: VICTORIA, CAMEROON.] THE CAMEROONS BY ALBERT F. CALVERT, F.C.S., _Knight Grand Cross of The Royal Order of Isabel the Catholic, Knight Grand Cross of The Royal Order of Alfonso XII., etc._ AUTHOR OF _The German African Empire_, _South-West Africa_, _Nigeria and its Tinfields_, _The Political Value of our Colonies_, _The Exploration of Australia_, _Mineral Resources of Minas Geraes, Brazil, etc._ London: T. WERNER LAURIE, LTD., 8, ESSEX STREET, LONDON. 1917. _E. Goodman & Son, The Phœnix Press, Taunton._ PREFACE. Although the designs, which German philosophers conceived and German statesmen and strategists spent thirty years in perfecting, for the conquest of our Cape territories and the creation of a Greater Germany extending from the Mediterranean to Table Bay, are best illustrated and exposed by the defiantly defensive policy they pursued in South-West Africa, the rise, development and fall of the German Colonial Empire is more completely epitomised in the chapter dealing with the Cameroons. The establishment of the German East African protectorate forms a story that is intensely interesting, inasmuch as it reveals the duplicity of Teutonic methods in their relations with native races, European rivals and their own agents. Bismarck, the last barbarian of genius, repudiated Dr. Karl Peters when, equipped with private capital and acting on his own initiative, he was acquiring in the hinterland of Zanzibar a well-watered, fertile province equal in extent to South Germany, and obtaining from the Sultan the concession for the ports of Dar-es-Salaam and Pangani. It was necessary in 1884 for Germany to assure England that the Imperial Government had no intention of securing possessions in a region which was admittedly within Britain’s sphere of influence, and Bismarck pursued Dr. Peters to Africa with an official intimation that the State would not grant him protection for the lives of his party, or for any possessions he might acquire opposite Zanzibar. But when the intrepid Teuton, as the representative of the German East Africa Company, had accomplished the spade work and returned to Berlin, the Government continued negotiations with the Sultan through their Consul-General at Zanzibar. The formal ratification of the treaties made in the name of the Company, was followed by a revolt of the Arabs, and when the Company’s representatives had been allowed to be murdered or put to flight, Bismarck was able to declare that the situation that had arisen was beyond the control of private enterprise, and an expedition,