Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/282

 specifically reaffirmed by the negotiations with Turkey, that it was amended by an agreement of March 27, 1914, between Lord Inchcape, Mr. John F. Lynch, and the Bagdad Railway Company. The latter arrangement provided: 1. That Lord Inchcape should immediately organize the Ottoman Navigation Company to take over the concession of July, 1913, and the rights conferred upon Lord Inchcape by his agreement of February 23, 1914, with the Bagdad Railway Company; 2. That the Lynch Brothers should be admitted to participation in the new Navigation Company and that Mr. John F. Lynch should be elected a director thereof; 3. That the Bagdad Railway should assign to a new Ottoman Ports Company—in which Mr. Lynch and Lord Inchcape should be granted a 40% participation—all of the rights of the Railway to the construction of port and terminal facilities at Bagdad and Basra; 4. That the Bagdad Railway Company should be granted a 20% participation in the new Ottoman Navigation Company. Thus were Lord Inchcape's powerful interests further propitiated! Thus did the Lynch Brothers cease to be big fish in a small pond, to become small fish in a big lake!

Measures were now taken to protect another vested interest, the British-owned Smyrna-Aidin Railway Company. On March 26, a draft agreement, subsequently confirmed as part of the Anglo-German convention of June 15, was executed by Dr. Carl Bergmann, of the Bagdad Railway Company, and Lord Rathmore, of the Smyrna-Aidin Company. It provided for important extensions of over 200 miles to the existing Smyrna-Aidin line (including a junction with the Anatolian-Bagdad system at Afiun Karahissar), granted to British interests valuable navigation rights on the lakes of Asia Minor, and protected each railway from discriminatory treatment at the hands of the other. This settlement was