Heligoland (10 page)

Salisbury prepared to play his diplomatic bargaining cards to best effect. On 13 May he engaged the German ambassador in a seemingly futile discussion in the Secretary of State’s room at the Foreign Office. Count Hatzfeldt expressed concerns about the dangers of a ‘steeplechase’ in East Africa. For a while the irreconcilable claims of ‘hinterland’ and ‘previous settlement’ were spoken of. Then Salisbury broke off the conversation and, after some hesitation, offered to reveal for Hatzfeldt’s personal benefit the ‘sum of his wishes’ with respect to East Africa. The Count, with ready curiosity, welcomed the offer and then listened with dismay to Salisbury’s formidable list of demands. It began with a full statement of the boundary concessions demanded by Mackinnon’s company at the edge of the Germany colony. Germany must recognise Uganda as within the British sphere; she must abandon Witu; and she must accept a British Protectorate over Zanzibar and Pemba Islands. In return Britain would drop her claim to a strip of territory by Lake Tanganyika, and would use her influence to persuade the Sultan to sell outright the coastal leases to Germany.
²⁰

Then, without further ado, and with no hint of an invitation from the wholly unprepared ambassador, Salisbury threw down Heligoland on the table. The British government would, he said, be willing to ‘hand the island of Heligoland to Germany’. Cleverly, Salisbury seemed to take Hatzfeldt into his confidence, by appearing to suggest that the cession of the island would be subject to some elements that were not necessarily within his control. He begged the ambassador to report to Berlin nothing of what had been said because he must ‘first see the Directors of the British Companies’. At the time, of course, Stanley’s rousing speeches were fanning colonial sentiments into a passion and misleading public opinion about the justice of German claims. Furthermore the handing over of Heligoland would need the approval of Parliament.

Berlin’s initial response to these proposals was indignation. On 17 May 1890 Baron von Marschall telegraphed Hatzfeldt instructing him not to accept Salisbury’s exorbitant African demands, but ‘do not
a priori
adopt an attitude of refusal’ towards it. The Heligoland element of the outlined package was never even mentioned. Within a week, in a move of supremely cool brinkmanship, Salisbury hinted that the entire British offer might be withdrawn. On 22 May 1890 Hatzfeldt replied to Berlin with startling news of a confidential discussion he had just had with Salisbury. Now, he wrote: ‘the situation is much complicated by Stanley’s hostile and inflammatory attacks, and Lord Salisbury is inclined to consider that it will be advisable to
postpone our negotiations
until the excitement is allayed’. Salisbury had so far consented to yield just a few trivial concessions near the Great Lakes, but Hatzfeldt reckoned that if Germany held her nerve ‘even more might be obtained’ after further negotiations.

But in Berlin there was curiously undiplomatic consternation. Overnight, the very prospect of Salisbury postponing negotiations caused Germany to capitulate almost totally. The following morning, 23 May 1890, a secret telegram from Foreign Minister Marschall arrived on the ambassador’s desk. Its opening line stated ‘Postponement of negotiations most undesirable.’ It went on: ‘I inform you that we are ready in return for the concession and probable further ones mentioned in your telegram, to hand over to England, Witu and Somali Coast with their respective hinterlands, and to concede a British Protectorate over Zanzibar, if England will hand over Heligoland and support us in demanding from the Sultan of Zanzibar the cession of the coast of the mainland.’ On 25 May Hatzfeldt received another telegram from Marschall which provided an inkling of just how fundamental the North Sea island was perceived to be in all of this. ‘The possession of Heligoland is highly important to us for military reasons because of the Kiel Canal, and the possession of the coastal strip leased to us by the Sultan is indispensable for the definite regulation of our position in East Africa.’ If Germany’s concessions were agreed to, including an acknowledgement of Britain’s Protectorate over Zanzibar, Germany was ‘ready for an immediate agreement on this basis’.

The unseemly haste to secure a deal was caused by the meddling intervention of Wilhelm II. As long ago as 1873, when his father was Crown Prince, he visited Heligoland and was so captivated by the mystique of the place that he vowed to make it part of Germany. Even then his personal characteristics were becoming apparent: he was vain, self-willed, rash in utterance, and alternated between excessive self-confidence and nervous depression. From the moment he came to the throne in 1888 he luxuriated in the public image of himself as
der Reisekaiser
(‘the travelling emperor’), and was delighted to be perceived by
Punch
as dashing when that satirical magazine ran its infamous ‘Dropping the pilot’ cartoon of the confident new Kaiser dismissing the elderly Bismarck. His pride knew no bounds in June 1889 when, as the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria, he was given the honorary rank of Admiral of the Fleet in the Royal Navy. In the spring of 1889 he had been crestfallen when the Bismarck/Chamberlain talks on the possible cession of Heligoland in exchange for Angra Pequena came to naught. He had hoped that the transfer of those territories would be completed in time to coincide with his triumphant acceptance of the prestigious – although meaningless – naval rank in June at Osborne. He wanted to wear the famous uniform of St Vincent and Nelson at the reception party at Cowes as the acknowledged new ruler of Heligoland.
²¹

Hatzfeldt could no longer doubt whose interference was shaping Germany’s negotiating strategy. On 29 May the ambassador received a secret telegram from Marschall, mentioning the Kaiser by name and promoting Heligoland – within a week – from being of ‘high’ to ‘supreme’ importance to Germany: ‘The possession of Heligoland is of supreme importance to us and is by far the most serious matter in the whole negotiation. His Majesty shares the Chancellor’s opinion that without Heligoland the Kiel Canal is useless to our Navy.’ The extent to which Salisbury was aware of the Kaiser’s meddling is unknown, but certainly his tactic of insisting that any agreement would necessarily be subject to the approval of certain forces within the Cabinet and Parliament, which were not necessarily within his control, caused invaluable uncertainty and anxiety in Berlin. Tension was heightened on 30 May when the German Foreign Office informed Hatzfeldt that Salisbury had written to the ambassador from Hatfield, blithely commenting that the British companies concerned were still not in agreement and, even more alarmingly, on 5 June that ‘he wished to discuss it with his colleagues, some of whom were nervous with regards Heligoland on account of Parliament and public opinion’.

Wilhelm was becoming frantic, as can be seen from a cipher telegram he received from Marschall on 4 June, upon which he scribbled various irate annotations.

Having convinced himself that no more concessions were to be garnered from Germany, on 5 June Salisbury closed the negotiations with Hatzfeldt, subject to the approval of his colleagues. It was a comprehensive draft agreement which covered not just Zanzibar but other parts of East Africa, and even reached as far as West and South-West Africa. In West Africa the boundary between Togo and the British Gold Coast colony was adjusted, and in the Cameroons there was a realignment of the western boundary between the German and British possessions. In South-West Africa the boundary between that German colony and British Bechuanaland was delimited, and Germany was given access from her Protectorate to the Zambezi by the cession to her of a strip of territory known as the ‘Caprivi Strip’. In East Africa new boundaries were defined. In the north Germany was to cede in favour of Britain all claims in respect of Witu and the Somaliland coast; and the immense region from the coast to the Congo was to be divided in such a manner that Britain took the territory lying north and Germany that lying south of a line from the River Umba across Lake Victoria to the frontier of the Congo Free State. Further, Germany agreed to acknowledge a British Protectorate of Zanzibar and the neighbouring island of Pemba.
²³
In return Britain undertook to persuade the Sultan to grant to Germany his coastal territory in East Africa. Eventually the Sultan agreed to cede his rights in the area for a payment of £200,000.

Map 3
Africa in late 1890.
(A Short History of Africa, Penguin, 1988)

The Kaiser had more reason to be pleased than both Karl Peters’s German East Africa Company, which was effectively barred from Uganda, and Sir William Mackinnon’s equivalent organisation, which found its ambitions for a Cape-to-Cairo route sacrificed for the sake of the Anglo-German agreement.

During all these discussions the questions of the rights, interests and especially the wishes of the Heligolanders had been virtually ignored. Their opinions had been given almost no consideration. In fact the islanders were regarded as something of a nuisance, who ought not to be allowed any opportunity to make trouble.
²⁴
Declassified Foreign Office papers show that on 18 June 1890 there was an exchange of letters about the islanders between Sir Percy Anderson in London and Sir Edward Malet, the British ambassador in Berlin, in which they spoke of the need to be watchful of possible ‘agitation by the natives’. It was curiously redolent of Governor Hamilton’s initial apprehension of the islanders all those years ago – except that this time there was genuine reason for them to be hostile.

Queen Victoria’s public image as a distant and rather frosty monarch obscured the reality that she had a keen and indefatigable sense of responsibility towards all the peoples of the British Empire, even though, throughout her long reign, she visited virtually none of her extensive collection of overseas colonies. Ironically, although Heligoland was the most diminutive of all her imperial possessions, it might quite possibly have been the one she had seen more of than any other. She never actually stepped ashore there but on her rare trips on the royal yacht to visit relatives in Germany, via the port of Bremerhaven, she might have been unable to resist glancing at the enchanting little island on the horizon.

Today, high on the island’s plateau, there is evidence of a once-distinctive landmark that the queen might have noticed. In the centre of the Upper Town stands the rebuilt war-torn church of St Nicolai. Cemented into a brick wall by the main door is a shrapnel-scarred bronze tablet. Donated by the Heligoland-born shipping magnate Rickmer Rickmers, it commemorates the construction of a distinctively pointed steeple on the church’s tower with the inscription: ‘For the honour and glory of God, and in great admiration of our gracious Queen Victoria.’ There were other reasons for Victoria to have enjoyed a quiet affection for the island. In 1863 the islanders had sent the Prince of Wales their best wishes on his engagement, and received him kindly when he visited them in 1886. Three years later, when she learned that the Governor had asked the Treasury to supply a portrait of the Queen for Government House, Victoria quietly ordered one to be sent at her own expense.

From the correspondence between the Queen and Salisbury, which was only made public many years later, it is evident that Salisbury was remarkably slow to inform Victoria of the relevance of the island to the Anglo-German Agreement negotiations. Perhaps it was because he wished to wrong-foot her or because he had a premonition that the swap scheme would provoke royal displeasure, but he saw to it that she was only belatedly informed of the details. As long ago as 13 May he had presented to Ambassador Hatzfeldt his proposals for a grand Anglo-German Agreement, of which Heligoland was the crucial centrepiece. Sir Percy Anderson had already commenced detailed negotiations in Berlin. On 23 May Salisbury sent a cipher telegram to Victoria in which he informed her of another meeting he had just had with Hatzfeldt: ‘The emperor wants to cut us off from the great central lakes, which I could not allow.’
¹
In fact the first proper inkling the queen had of the extent of Heligoland’s role in all this came as late as 4 June 1890 when she happened to be speaking with Lord Cross, the Secretary for India, who had just arrived at Balmoral Castle from a Cabinet meeting in London. According to her
Journal
they ‘talked of Africa and what we required, which he showed me on the map. Germany wants more; he said there was an idea of giving up Heligoland as an equivalent, its being of no use to us; but this has not been brought forward yet.’
²

The next communication she had on the subject came on 8 June. A telegram from Salisbury informed her that the previous day the Cabinet had held a meeting at which the Anglo-German draft agreement had been the principal subject of discussion. The full Cabinet had decided that – other than a few minor border modifications – so far as East Africa was concerned they were broadly satisfied with what had been negotiated. She was told by her Prime Minister that the next steps to be taken were conditional on the Cabinet being quite satisfied that it was wise to part with Heligoland. At this point Salisbury and his closest colleagues became aware of the queen’s rage. On 9 June she sent Salisbury a blisteringly annotated telegram from Balmoral: