Free Heligoland by George Drower Page B

House, where balls and concerts were frequently held, and an excellent reading room, amply stocked with newspapers and books for the islanders that used it – especially in winter. Taking shape were a new hotel and casino. The submarine telegraph cable that had been laid in 1859 to link Heligoland with Cromer in Norfolk and Busem in Schleswig-Holstein now had added to it – at the colony’s expense – a telegram office, while a conical-shaped Lloyds shipping signal station was built around HMS Explosion ’s old mast high on the red cliffs near the lighthouse. Alone of all Britain’s smaller colonies, Heligoland was free of debt by the late 1880s; indeed, it even boasted a secure reserve fund (of £2,500). So why was the constitutional future of this sophisticated possession about to become a subject of feverish speculation?

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Rivalries in Africa
    Knowing the strategic importance of their island, the Heligolanders could not have been totally surprised by the speculations about its prospects as a naval base, but they could never have anticipated that its future would be linked to rivalries in Africa. Ironically, for a people whose homeland rarely produced any people of noticeable leadership qualities, the character who was to play a vital part in that international power struggle in Africa had been born near the Elbe in 1856.
    Since leaving the river as a youngster, Karl Peters had developed a passion for adventure; he had successfully studied for a science doctorate, and became a campaigning journalist. Not content merely to advocate German colonisation overseas, Dr Peters was determined to be at the forefront of the process. Eventually he became Germany’s foremost explorer. In 1882 he was an inaugural member of the German Colonial Association but he soon perceived it to be insufficiently adventurous and in 1884, with a few friends, he founded the Society for German Colonisation, the function of which was to acquire, as urgently as possible, new lands for Germany’s overseas empire. Their initial scheme for colonising the interior of Angola was dismissed by the German Foreign Office because it would impinge upon territory claimed by Portugal, so Peters and his associates fell back on their alternative: a momentous expedition to East Africa. 1 This was notionally organised on behalf of Peters’s German East Africa Company, for which he sought a charter from Bismarck; it would prove a bitter rival to Sir William Mackinnon’s Imperial British East Africa Company.
    Germany was astonishingly late in getting into the colonial business. When Wilhelm I was declared an emperor in 1871, Germany was in the curious position of claiming to have created an empire within Europe, without yet having started to establish one overseas. It might easily have acquired an extensive, ‘readymade’ empire that year had it not been for the opposition of Chancellor Bismarck. For during the peace negotiations at Versailles he turned down the chance to seize not only Pondicherry but also many other French colonies, including Cochin-China, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, Reunion, Madagascar and Algiers. 2 Over the next few years Bismarck consistently resisted all the proposals for overseas annexation that colonial enthusiasts continued to press upon his attention. When the rulers of Fiji and Zanzibar, in 1872 and 1874 respectively, asked for the protection of the German Empire, he promptly declined to give it. Much occupied with domestic and military questions, and above all with the problem of Germany’s consolidation, he was unwilling to give any thought to projects of colonial expansion. To him it was folly to talk of an overseas German Empire before the German Empire in Europe had been properly established. In 1873 he remarked to Lord Odo Russell, the British ambassador in Berlin, that colonies would be a source of weakness, because they could only be defended by powerful fleets and Germany’s geographical position would not assist her