At the outset, the new Protectorate aroused little enthusiasm in Germany as a colony where her surplus population could hope to settle and prosper under the German flag instead of going to foreign countries, as so many thousands of Germans were then doing. On a coast-line of 900 miles there was no good natural harbour except the one at Walfisch Bay, owned by the British. Swakopmund and Lüderitzbucht, on which the German colonists would have to rely, were then little better than open roadsteads. Considerable expanses of the territory itself consist of drought-stricken desert. The rainfall in Damaraland and Namaqualand averages only about three inches a year. In certain districts a period of five or six years has been known to pass without any rain at all. A record of rainfall on some parts of the coast has shown a total of one-fifth of an inch in the course of twelve months. At Walfisch Bay the British settlement imports its fresh water from Capetown. On the higher of the series of plateaux rising gradually to the Kalahari desert the climatic conditions are more favourable, and the better rainfall in the north-east allows of good crops being grown, while various sections are favourable for stock-raising. In later years, also, various deposits of copper were found in the district of Otavi, some 400 miles from Swakopmund, and diamond fields, which yielded nearly £1,000,000 worth of stones in the first year, were discovered east of Lüderitzbucht in 1908. But in Germany the Protectorate was regarded as a desirable acquisition mainly, if not exclusively, because of the advantages it was expected to afford as a base for the eventual creation of a German-African Empire. THE HERERO RISING The attainment of this higher purpose seemed likely to be furthered as the result of the steps taken to suppress the risings of the Hereros and the Hottentots between the years 1903 and 1907. Not only did the reinforcements sent out from Germany assume such proportions that at one time the Germans are said to have had no fewer than 19,000 men under arms in the Protectorate, but the troops took with them a plentiful supply of pom-poms, mountain guns, field guns and Maxims of various kinds, the _Revue Militaire des Armées Étrangères_ being led to remark thereon that "the German columns had an unusually large proportion of artillery, roughly two batteries to three companies of mounted infantry; and it is difficult to believe that so many guns were necessary, especially as the Hereros had no artillery at all.[58] Probably," the _Revue_ continued, "the artillery could have been dispensed with altogether; and had this been done, the columns would have been rendered more mobile."