Lord Lansdowne might have reminded his hearers that, although the British Government was disposed to be friendly toward the Bagdad Railway, measures already had been taken which effectively precluded any possibility of the construction by the concessionaires, without British consent, of terminal and port works at Koweit. In 1899, when the first announcements came from Constantinople regarding the Bagdad project, Lord Curzon, then Viceroy of India, became alarmed at the construction of a railway which would link the head of the Persian Gulf with the railways of Central Europe. Lord Curzon was a trained imperialist. It was his custom to utter few words; to make no proclamations from the housetops; to act promptly—and in secret. It was at the instigation of the Indian Government that Colonel Meade, British resident in the Persian Gulf region, proceeded to Koweit and negotiated with the Sheik a clandestine agreement by which the latter accepted the “protection” of the British Government and agreed to enter into no international agreements without the consent of a British resident adviser.[26] When a German technical commission visited Koweit in 1900 to negotiate for terminal and port facilities, they found the Sheik suspiciously intractable to their wishes. Thereupon Abdul Hamid despatched an expedition to Koweit to assert his sovereignty over the Sheik’s territory, but the presence of a British gunboat rendered both reason and force of no avail.[27] “Protection” of Koweit by Great Britain served notice on both Turkey and Germany that the construction of a railway, owned and controlled by Germans, to a deep-water port on the Persian Gulf was deemed contrary to the interests of the British Empire. From first to last British officials persistently refused to accede to any arrangement which would thus jeopardize imperial communications. Control of the Persian Gulf, an outpost of Indian defence, became the keynote of British resistance to the Bagdad Railway.