Arthur Havelock, Sierra Leone’s Governor and British consul to Liberia from February 1881, demands that Liberia cede disputed territory to the British colony.

The area in question is known as the Gallinas territory, an area lying between the Sewa River and the Mano River, and the vague border between Sierra Leone and Liberia has been unsettled for years.

On March 20, 1882, Havelock leads a flotilla of four British gunboats to the Liberian capital Monrovia, issuing a demand that Liberia cede all territories up to the Mafa River to Great Britain, and pay an indemnity of eighty-five hundred pounds to British merchant traders for injuries inflicted in 1871 by tribes inhabiting the area of the British claim.

A treaty is signed, but its ratification is refused by the Liberian Senate, and Havelock and his gunboats return to Monrovia in September this year, demanding immediate acknowledgment of the British claims, and ratification of the treaty.

The senate refuses once more, and although Havelock's diplomacy prevents a bloody conflict, ...

...Portugese, British and French traders have since the eighteeenth century established small stations on the coast called Rivières du Sud by the French.

The Portugese had established trading stations at Rio Pongo and Rio Nunez, mostly for the purchase of enslaved Africans captured inland and brought to the coast.

British suppression of the slave trade and Portuguese imperial decline had seen these posts abandoned by the 1820s,  with British and French traders moving in.

The French admiral Bouët-Willaumez had made a number of treaties with coastal communities in the area (usually under the threat of force), and ensured Marseille-based trade houses exclusive access to the palm oil trade by the 1840s.

Used for making soap, the palm oil trade is with Jola merchants who establish markets in the interior, and transport it to the coastal stations.

The French colonial governor of Senegal Louis Faidherbe in the 1850s had formalized the colonial structure that had been christened Rivières du Sud.

In 1854, Guinea ports had been placed under control of Naval administration and split from new colonial administration in Saint-Louis, Senegal under the name Gorée and Dependencies.

Previously, they had fallen under the naval 'supreme commander in Gabon' of the Establissements francais de la Cote de l'Or et du Gabon.

By 1859, Faidherbe's campaigns of conquest on the riverine coast south of Gorée had seen the region annexed to the colonial administration, under the arrondissement of Gorée.

The Rivières du Sud now referred to the entire region from Sine-Salmon to the border of British Sierra Leone.

In 1865 the fort at Boké had been built in the Rio Nunez area, expanding from the main French-controlled town of Conakry.

Shortly after this, Bayol had been taken as a 'protectorate' as well.

The Rio Pongo area, nominally held by Germany, had been traded to France for their 'rights' to Porto-Seguro and Petit Popo on the Togolese coast.

The British formally recognize French control of the area, and the administrative division collecting these possessions is created under the name Rivières du Sud in 1882.

The Anglo-French Convention of 1882, signed on June 28, 1882 between the United Kingdom and France, confirms the territorial boundaries between Guinea and Sierra Leone around Conakry and Freetown.

However, it will never be fully ratified by the French Chamber of Deputies although is officially recognized by the British Foreign Office.

British troops from Sierra Leone march into the disputed territory several months later.

Liberia, despite the support of the United States, realizes that resisting the British claim is futile, and signs the treaty in London on November 22, 1885.

The border will finally be settled in 1903 by a mixed commission from both countries.