March 16, 1889 – German-American War Begins in Pacific

As imperialism spread through the Pacific in the nineteenth century, three Western powers settled on the Samoan Islands. Although it was first sighted by the Dutch, the British, Germans, and Americans competed among the local tribes for control of the strategic island chain. Germans established numerous plantations while Britain created a consulship and Americans began trading extensively from posts around Pago Pago harbor. All three nations claimed the entirety of the island group and sold weapons to the locals, sparking a civil war in 1886.

As the war continued among the tribes, the diplomats of Germany, Britain, and America met in attempt to sort out the issue in Washington in 1887. They were unable to come to any agreement, however, and left with no progress made. Instead, more warships sailed for Samoa. In 1889, German foreign minister Count Herbert von Bismarck called for a meeting in Berlin that April for a new try to calm international tensions.

In March, however, a literal storm was brewing. A tropical cyclone of massive proportions rolled toward Apia, and natives warned the fleets anchored in its harbor with tales of a storm that had struck three years before. The captains could clearly see the signs of storms and the telltale plummet in barometric pressure. Sailing out into open sea would give the ships a chance of bracing themselves through the storm. However, each nation looked at each other to move first, and a game of chicken began.

A sudden south-westerly wind came up, pushing the cyclone farther to the north and giving the ships a chance to escape. The large British HMS Calliope managed to push its way to safety, but the smaller Germans and Americans were slower to follow. As they came to the entrance to the harbor on the north side, their engines bolstered by the wind, the two fleets became tangled up. Tempers rose to match the fury of the storm, and ships were fired upon to sabotage engines. Disabled ships were pushed back by the storm tide and smashed against the reef to the south. Hundreds ended up dead on both sides, and each blamed the other. The scuffle became a full battle, and the Americans became overwhelmed by the Germans who were able to call up reinforcements from their plantations.

Americans became infuriated. While former President Grover Cleveland had been anti-imperialist, Benjamin Harrison's term had begun eleven days before, and he took this as his first great act. After leading Congress to declare war, Harrison called the American Navy to action, assembling a fleet in San Francisco to retake Samoa once and for all.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, thirty-year-old Kaiser Wilhelm II had been on the throne less than a year. He had already begun to chafe with his ministers, particularly Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck suggested patience and to continue the planned meeting, but Wilhelm saw this war as a chance to prove German military prowess and strength in colonizing. He called for the resignation of both Bismarcks and assembled his own military advisers.

Both nations hurried to modernize their fleets, stalling the expansion of the war for months. Harrison's fleet succeeded in chasing off the Germans in Samoa, but the Kaiser was ready to dispatch a new wave of his own, and the Kaiserliche Marine was twice the size of the US Navy. Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson had moved to Samoa on an extended tour of the Pacific only months before and wrote a detailed account of the battles at sea as well as the chaos among native factions. Newspapers picked up the violent tales and contributed to the failing popularity of the war. Nearly one-third of American farmers had German backgrounds, and anti-German sentiment spread the violence to the United States as well. German immigration had halted, as had a good deal of business in trade. Harrison's “first great act” turned into a political nightmare from which he could not back down.

Finally, in 1892, Grover Cleveland was swept back into the White House, vowing to end the war. Britain hosted peace talks, saving face for both nations. While the war ended, German-American relations did not heal rapidly. Decades' worth of immigrants bent on coming to America were refused, instead heading to Germany's many colonies in Africa and the Pacific, where Samoa had been split into east-west spheres of influence. Wilhelm claimed victory in the war and successfully pursued his ideals of colonies and navy, which made a stunning show at the Fleet Review in his grandmother Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

The United States, meanwhile, struggled in an economic depression. The nation yearned for hope, and they found it in McKinley's renewed imperialism. The Spanish-American War reaffirmed America's reputation and brought Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and Cuba into the fold. When the World War broke out in Europe, however, war-weariness from Americans already facing quagmire in Cuba and the Philippines refused to participate. It finally ended in 1919 as a general draw, and Wilhelm II seemed to have his fill of war, instead focusing on empire-building in Germany's many colonies.

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In reality, the Apia cyclone hit the island directly, and the German and American ships had no hope of escaping. Over 200 sailors perished as ships were tossed onto the shore, slammed against one another, and torn apart by wind and waves. The disaster eased the tension, which later returned and was finally solved in 1899 with the Tripartite Convention dividing the islands.

May 31, 1902 – Treaty of Vereeniging Assures Boer Independence

After generations of colonial strife between Dutch Boer and British settlers, the matter of dominance in southern Africa came to an end with recognition of independence for the Boer Republics. Dutch settlement began in 1652 with the establishment of a refreshment station along the Cape Sea Route. Introducing slave labor, the Dutch expanded and defeated the native Xhosa in wars that gradually added more and more territory to Boer (“farmer”) control. As naval supremacy shifted from Dutch to British hands, new waves of British settlers arrived, pushing the Dutch toward an inland migration. The two peoples lived somewhat peacefully until the discovery of diamonds in 1866. European powers descended on Africa, carving it up into their own empires, and the British annexed mineral-rich Transvaal to ensure dominance.

The Boers balked under British government and declared independence in 1880. While they did not have the advanced weaponry of the British soldiers, the Boers did have intimate knowledge of the land and conducted devastating guerrilla attacks. Prime Minister Gladstone offered a treaty in 1881, which allowed Boers in Transvaal and the Orange Free State self-government with a parliament under Queen Victoria's rule. The peace lasted for a time until the discovery of gold in 1886 at Witwatersrand (“White Water Ridge”) prompted a predominantly British gold rush. Tensions grew again, and, in 1895, Cape Colony Prime Minister Cecil Rhodes launched the Jameson Raid to seize Johannesburg from Transvaal. The Boers repulsed and arrested the attackers, sending them back to the British for trial, and began an alliance between Transvaal and the Orange Free State for defense. Ultimatums were sent out on both sides, not met, and the war began with a devastating Boer offensive in 1899 with tactics comparable to the First Boer War. The British retaliated with more than 180,000 men, dealing with guerrillas by systematically searching out and arresting whole Boer families and placing them in concentration camps.

While the bloody war dragged on in southern Africa, it laid a pretense for the rest of Europe to attack on the high seas. Britain had held unquestioned naval superiority since the Battle of Trafalgar and the simultaneous defeats of the French and Spanish fleets, but new nations had grown over the tumultuous nineteenth century. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany took note of the bloodshed in Africa first with the Jameson Raid, after which he sent a telegram to President Kruger of Transvaal saying, “I express to you my sincere congratulations that you and your people, without appealing to the help of friendly powers, have succeeded, by your own energetic action against the armed bands which invaded your country as disturbers of the peace, in restoring peace and in maintaining the independence of the country against attack from without.” The telegram spurred outcry in Britain and much anti-German sentiment. Four years later in February of 1900, according to his memoirs, the Kaiser “received news by telegraph...that Russia and France had proposed to Germany to make a joint attack on England, now that she was involved elsewhere, and to cripple her sea traffic.”

Wilhelm was unnerved by the idea of attacking Britain, which had lost its beloved Queen Victoria, his grandmother, only weeks before, but he determined to feel out the possibility for success. Britain had recently begun renovating its fleet under the Naval Defense Act of 1898, a response to Germany's own First Fleet Act, showing that it meant to always outpace Germany's seaward expansion. In 1900, as German Admiral Tirpitz worked to completed a new bill for dozens of ships, three German mail ships were humiliatingly boarded by a British cruiser searching for weapon supplies for Boers. The efforts of British soldiers to restrict Boer freedom of movement to limit guerrilla flexibility came to press that fall, and Wilhelm saw his opportunity to act in their defense. He called a conference of Russia (who had battled with Britain in the Great Game for central Asia for decades), France (who had been humiliated at the Fashoda Incident in 1898), and Portugal (whose Pink Map strategy of linking Africa east and west had been destroyed by the 1890 British Ultimatum, demanding central Africa for Britain for its Cape to Cairo railway) in addition to old allies Austria-Hungary and Italy and drew up an ultimatum for Britain to remove her forces from the Boer Republics or face blockade.

Although many in Britain did not want to see war, it seemed to be a turning point for the end of her colonial power. Debate continued almost endlessly in Parliament between the peace-minded Liberals under David Lloyd George and Conservatives who controlled the government, and finally the deadline of January 1, 1901, passed without action hoping that the Kaiser had bluffed and could not maintain control of such a varied coalition. However, each nation seemed to have its own issues with Britain and were happy to form a united attack, leading to the First World War. Although Europe itself was practically devoid of military action, there were unprecedented sea battles along with a German, French, and Portuguese campaigns into central Africa from the Orange State to Sudan, seizure of the Suez Canal, and a Russian march on Tibet, threatening India. Britain's imperial resources became stretched thin, and its search for allies only turned up Japan, who effectively took Russia out of the war.

The end of the war in 1905 was brought about through a conference held by American President Theodore Roosevelt, who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his actions. Britain's empire became hamstrung, but the resulting treaties outlined a method of international oversight to ensure the actions taken against Boers (which continued to serve as the grounds of war) could never happen again became an international court to slow imperialism for other actions in later land-rushes in China and the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

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In reality, the Kaiser “objected and ordered that the proposal should be declined”, ending the notion of a multinational naval war with Britain. He instead notified “Queen Victoria and to the Prince of Wales (Edward) the facts of the Russo-French proposal, and its refusal by me. The Queen answered expressing her hearty thanks, the Prince of Wales with an expression of astonishment.” The British strategies of containment eventually wore down the guerrillas, ending the war in 1902 with the Peace of Vereeniging, which promised to return self-rule to the Boer Republics: a promise made good in 1907.