THE ROYAL NIGER COMPANY 357 these missions in most cases expeditions of no little danger, which had to be conducted at the personal risk of the leaders whose services were secured to command them.

It was in 1884 that Mr. Joseph Thomson was commissioned to negotiate the first treaty of the Company with Sokoto. In 1894 my husband, then Captain Lugard, made his first experience of West Africa by conducting an expedition into Borgu, and negotiated the last treaties of the Company upon that frontier.

In the ten years which elapsed between these two expeditions, the action of the Company in the interior led to the further declaration of a British Protectorate over territories lying on the Middle Niger, and to the definition by successive international agreements of British frontiers round a territory covering an area of about 500,000 square miles, of which a considerable part was situated in some of the richest, most healthy, and most thickly populated regions of Western Africa.

The most important of these agreements were those with Germany of 1886 and 1893, and that of 1890 with France, to be followed a few years later by the agreement of 1898.

By the German agreements the eastern frontier of the territory was defined from the coast to the borders of Lake Chad. By the first of the French agreements the northern frontier, separating British territory from the southern extension of the French hinterland of Algeria, was fixed at a line of some 800 miles in length, to be drawn, with the necessary deviations for local political boundaries, near to the fourteenth parallel of latitude, and continued from a point upon the western shore of Chad to another selected point upon the Niger. The points chosen were Barrua upon Lake Chad, and Say upon the Niger, but these were altered by subsequent modifications. This line, when the details of its delimitation are finally fixed, will form the northern frontier of Nigeria. It runs now from Ilo on the Niger, and making a curve northward