The claim was not, at first, an act of the German state. It was a business venture. The German New Guinea Company was founded that same year in Berlin by the banker Adolph von Hansemann and a syndicate of investors who had watched British Queensland begin to annex parts of eastern New Guinea and decided they wanted their share. Bismarck blessed the enterprise and gave it an imperial charter, on the model of the British and Dutch East India Companies. For the first fifteen years, it was the Company, not the government, that ran the colony - and ran it badly. Plantation schemes struggled. Malaria killed the settlers faster than the settlers killed the forest. In 1899 the Imperial Government took over direct administration, but by then it was clear that the model worked only on paper. The number of European settlers was never high, and almost all of them clung to the coast.

In 1885, Lutheran and Catholic missions arrived. The Lutheran Johann Flierl established stations at Simbang and on Timba Island, and in 1890 began building a mission at Sattelberg, 700 meters up in the highlands above Finschhafen, connected to the coast by a 24-kilometer road he cut himself. The road turned a three-day journey into five hours, and for decades it was one of the few reliable paths into the interior. The missionaries found the going hard. Malaria epidemics in 1889 and 1891 killed almost half of the European settlers at Finschhafen. Many abandoned the town and resettled at Friedrich Wilhelmshafen, the place now known as Madang. The indigenous peoples were not quick to convert. The Lutheran mission found that its success came slowly, measured in generations rather than years, and came with a price tag paid in languages and ritual practices that the missionaries often did not understand.

For thirty years, Germany claimed sovereignty over a territory it had never walked across. The coastline had been charted in the seventeenth century by Dutch and English navigators. British admiralty surveyors had named the visible mountain ranges. But the interior was blank on the maps. In 1909 a joint British-German expedition fixed the boundary between Papua and Kaiser-Wilhelmsland on paper, though neither side had seen most of the line. Papuan gold prospectors kept crossing into German territory, which, from the German perspective, meant the border had better be real. In late 1913 the Imperial Colonial Office sent the military surveyor Hermann Detzner to lead an expedition along the border and into the interior. Detzner set out along the Langimar-Watut divide and floated by raft down the Watut River to its junction with the Markham, reaching the Lutheran mission at Gabmadzung. Then the world changed around him.

World War I began in July 1914. Australian troops overran the German protectorate between September and November of that year, capturing the coastal towns in a campaign that lasted weeks. Detzner, alone in the interior with a few carriers, refused to surrender. For nearly four years he wandered the highlands, hiding, claiming later that he was still surveying for the Kaiser. He emerged after the Armistice in 1919, his uniform in tatters, to find the German Empire gone. From 1920, under a League of Nations mandate, Australia administered the territory as part of the new Territory of New Guinea. The German names on the maps changed slowly but surely. Friedrich Wilhelmshafen became Madang. Finschhafen kept its name, as did the Bismarck Archipelago, odd linguistic fossils of an empire that had claimed a quarter of a vast island for thirty-six years and never truly known it.

Underneath all the European labels, the country the Germans called Kaiser-Wilhelmsland was not blank. Near Mount Hagen, in the highland valleys, the Kuk Swamp holds traces of agricultural drainage channels dating back some 7,000 years, one of the oldest independent agricultural sites in the world. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Austronesian languages Kâte and Yabem were spoken along the coast and the Markham Valley, with Kâte in the mountain hinterlands. Non-Austronesian languages, older still, filled the ranges. Mount Wilhelm rose 4,509 meters above the Hagen Range, and the Sepik River wound 1,126 kilometers from the highlands to the north coast. None of these had waited for a Kaiser to name them. None of them are called what Berlin called them now. The land went on being itself, under whatever word it was filed.