This important step was taken just in time to forestall German action from the side of the Cameroons, which threatened to shut out British trade from the banks of the River Benue and the shores of Lake Chad.  Forewarned of this danger, Sir George Goldie and his directors urged that bold and successful explorer, Mr. Joseph Thomson, to safeguard the nation’s interests along the Benue and north thereof.  Thomson had scarcely recovered from the hardships of his epoch-marking journey through Masailand; but he now threw himself into the breach, quickly travelled from England to the Niger, and by his unrivalled experience alike of the means of travel and of native ways, managed to frame treaties with the Sultans of Sokoto and Gando, before the German envoy reached his destination (1885).  The energy of the National African Company and the promptitude and tact of Mr. Thomson secured for his countrymen undisputed access to Lake Chad and the great country peopled by the warlike Haussas[451].

[Footnote 451:  This greatest among recent explorers of Africa died in 1895.  He never received any appropriate reward from the Court for his great services to science and to the nation at large.]

Seeing that both France and Germany seek to restrict foreign trade in their colonies, while Great Britain gives free access to all merchants on equal terms, we may regard this brilliant success as a gain, not only for the United Kingdom, but for the commerce of the world.  The annoyance expressed in influential circles in Germany at the failure of the plans for capturing the trade of the Benue district served to show the magnitude of the interests which had there been looked upon as prospectively and exclusively German.  The delimitation of the new British territory with the Cameroon territory and its north-eastern extension to Lake Chad was effected by an Anglo-German agreement of 1886, Germany gaining part of the upper Benue and the southern shore of Lake Chad.  In all, the territories controlled by the British Company comprised about 500,000 square miles (more than four times the size of the United Kingdom).

It is somewhat characteristic of British colonial procedure in that period that many difficulties were raised as to the grant of a charter to the company which had carried through this work of national importance; but on July 10, 1886, it gained that charter with the title of the Royal Niger Company.  The chief difficulties since that date have arisen from French aggressions on the west, which will be noticed presently.

In 1897 the Royal Niger Company overthrew the power of the turbulent and slave-raiding Sultan of Nupe, near the Niger, but, as has so often happened, the very success of the company doomed it to absorption by the nation.  On January 1, 1900, its governing powers were handed over to the Crown; the Union Jack replaced the private flag; and Sir Frederick Lugard added to the services which he had rendered to the