Sino-French War

This foothold, it may as well be explained now, was French Somaliland.

Here, a whole town, Obock, had been purchased for the surprisingly small sum of 50,000 francs from a local sultan many years before, in 1862, and forgotten until 1883, when, the English having closed Aden to French ships during the Tonkin War, the French decided to establish a naval base of their own here and voted a subsidy of 450 francs a year for the development of the place.

But the sandy roadstead of Obock was so ill-suited to the purposes of a harbour that in 1888 the French took Djibouti, a nearby town with better prospects, and from Djibouti planned to build a railway across Abyssinia to the Nile.

Need one add that railways are the steel girders of empire? Abyssinia, however, was coveted by Italian imperialists, whose modest aspiration was to carve off the eastern tip of Africa, including Abyssinia and its adjoining coastlands, as an Italian empire, small beside that of France or England, but satisfying to national pride.

In 1883, he achieved the widest celebrity, for not only did he publish Mon Frère Yves, a novel describing the life of a French blue jacket in all parts of the world, perhaps, on the whole, to this day his most characteristic production, but he was involved in a public discussion in a manner which did him great credit.

While taking part as a naval officer in the Tonkin War, Loti had exposed in a Parisian newspaper a series of scandals which succeeded on the capture of Hue, and, being recalled, he was now suspended from the service for more than a year.

He continued for some time nearly silent, but in 1886 he published a novel of life among the Breton fisherfolk entitled Pêcheurs d'Islande.

This had been the most popular of all his writings.