Despite the outcome of the Berlin Conference, the idea of a trans-African Portuguese zone was not abandoned; to help to create it, Portugal signed treaties with France and Germany in 1886. The German treaty noted Portugal's claim to territory along the course of the Zambezi linking Angola and Mozambique. Following the treaties, the Portuguese foreign minister prepared what became known as the Rose Coloured Map, representing a claim stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. North of the Zambezi, these Portuguese claims were opposed by both the African Lakes company and the missionaries. The main opposition to Portuguese claims in the south came from Cecil Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company was founded in 1888. As late as 1888, the British Foreign Office declined to offer protection to the tiny British settlements in the Shire Highlands. However, it did not accept the expansion of Portuguese influence there, and in 1889, it appointed Henry Hamilton Johnston as British consul to Mozambique and the Interior, and instructed him to report on the extent of Portuguese rule in the Zambezi and Shire valleys. He was also to make conditional treaties with local rulers outside Portuguese control. The conditional treaties did not establish a British protectorate but prevented the rulers from accepting protection from another state.