Mosquito Coast

This article is about the political entity. For other uses, see The Mosquito Coast.

Kingdom of Mosquitia
1638–1860
Flag Coat of arms
Anthem: God Save the King
Status	English and British protectorate (1638–1787, 1844–1860)
Capital	Sandy Bay Bluefields (after 1787)
Common languages	Miskito English Mayangna Creole
Government	Monarchy
King
• c. 1650–1687	Oldman (first known)
• 1842–1860	George Augustus Frederic II (last)
History
• Established	1638
• Treaty of Managua	1860
Preceded by Succeeded by Taguzgalpa Mosquito Reservation
Today part of	Nicaragua Honduras

The Mosquito Coast, also known as Mosquito Shore, and officially the Kingdom of Mosquitia, was a monarchy covering the geographical region with the same name as Mosquito Coast, extending from Cape Honduras down to the River San Juan.

History

Before the arrival of Europeans to Central America, the Mosquito Coast was divided into a large number of small, egalitarian groups, possibly speaking languages related to Sumu and Paya. Columbus visited the coast briefly in his fourth voyage. Detailed Spanish accounts of the region, however, only relate to the late 16th and early 17th centuries. According to their understanding of the geography, the region was divided between two "Provinces" Taguzgalpa and Tologalpa. Lists of "nations" left by Spanish missionaries include as many as 30 names, though careful analysis of them by Karl Offen suggests that many were duplicated and the regional geography included about a half dozen entities speaking related but distinct dialects occupying the various river basins of the region.

Attempted Spanish settlement

See also: Taguzgalpa and Tologalpa

During the 16th century, Spanish authorities issued various licenses to conquer the Mosquito Coast in 1545, 1562, 1577, and 1594, but no evidence suggests that any of these licenses resulted in even brief settlements or conquests. The Spanish were unable to conquer the Mosquito Coast during the 16th century and in the 17th century sought to "reduce" it through missionary efforts. These included several attempts by Franciscans between 1604 and 1612; another one led by Fray Cristóbal Martinez in 1622, and a third one between 1667 and 1675. None of these efforts resulted in any lasting success.

Because the Spanish failed to have significant influence in the Mosquito Coast, it remained independent of outside control. This allowed the native people to continue their traditional way of life and to receive visitors from other regions. English and Dutch privateers who preyed on Spanish ships soon found refuge in the Mosquito Coast.

British contact and recognition of the kingdom

See also: Providence Island colony

The first British contacts with the Mosquito Coast started around 1630, when the agents of the English chartered Providence Island Company—of which the Earl of Warwick was chairman and John Pym treasurer—occupied two small cays and established friendly relations with the local inhabitants. Providence Island, the company's main base and settlement, entered into regular correspondence with the coast during the decade of company occupation, 1631–1641.

The Providence Island Company sponsored the Miskito's "King's Son" visit to England during the reign of Charles I (1625–1649). When his father died, this son returned home and placed his country under English protection. Following the capture of Providence Island by Spain in 1641, England did not possess a base close to the coast. However, shortly after the English captured Jamaica in 1655, they recommenced relations with the coast, and Oldman went to visit England. According to the testimony of his son Jeremy, taken around 1699, he was received in audience by "his brother king", Charles II and was given a "lac'd hat" and a commission "to kindly use and relieve such straggling Englishmen as should chance to come that way".

Emergence of the Miskito Sambu

Main article: Miskito Sambu

The Wanks or Coco river, which forms an apex of the Mosquito Kingdom.

While accounts vary, the Miskito Sambu appear to be descended from the survivors of a shipwrecked slave ship who reached the Mosquito Coast in the mid-seventeenth century. These survivors intermarried with the local Miskito people, thereby creating a mixed-race group. They gradually adopted the language and much of the culture of their hosts. The Miskito Sambu settled near the Wanks (Coco) River. By the late 17th century, their leader held the office of general with jurisdiction over the northern portions of the kingdom. In the early eighteenth century, they managed to take over the office of king, which they held for at least the rest of the century.

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Miskitos Zambos began a series of raids that attacked Spanish-held territories and still independent indigenous groups in the surrounding areas. Miskito raiders reached as far north as the Yucatán, and as far south as Costa Rica. They sold many of the captives they took as slaves to English or other British merchants; the slaves were transported to Jamaica to work on sugar plantations. Through such raiding, the Zambo gained a more dominant position and the king's domain was inhabited primarily by Zambos. They also assisted the government of Jamaica in hunting down Maroons in the 1720s.

Sociopolitical system

Although English accounts referred to the Mosquito Coast as a "kingdom", it was relatively loosely organized. A description of the kingdom written in 1699, notes that it occupied discontinuous areas along the coast. It probably did not include a number of settlements of English traders. Although English accounts refer as well to various noble titles, Miskito social structure does not appear to have been particularly stratified. The 1699 description noted that people holding titles such as "king" and "governor" were only empowered as war leaders, and did not have the last word in judicial disputes. Otherwise, the author saw the population as living in an egalitarian state.

M. W. mentioned titled officers in his account of 1699, but later sources define these superior offices to include the king, a governor, and a general. In the early 18th century, the kingdom became organized into four distinct clusters of population, centered on the banks of the navigable rivers. They were integrated into a single if loosely structured political entity. The northern portions were dominated by Sambus and the southern ones by Tawira Miskitos. The king, whose domain lay from the Wanks River south to the Rio Kukalaya, including the king's residence near Sandy Bay, was a Sambu, as was the general, who ruled the northern portions of the kingdom, from the Wanks River to nearly Trujillo. The Governor, who was a Tawira, controlled the southern regions, from the Cucalaya River to Pearl Key Lagoon. In the later 18th century (post 1766), another title, Admiral, was recorded; this man was also a Tawira, controlling a region on the extreme south from Pearl Key Lagoon down to around Bluefields.

British Alliance and Spanish Resentment

The Mosquitian king Edward I and the British concluded a formal Treaty of Friendship and Alliance in 1740, and Robert Hodgson, Senior was appointed as Superintendent of the Shore. The language of the treaty includes what amounts to a surrender of sovereignty, and is often taken by historians as an indication that a British protectorate was established over the Mosquito Kingdom.

Britain's primary motive and the most immediate result of the treaty was to secure an alliance between the Miskito and British for the War of Jenkins' Ear, and the Miskito and British cooperated in attacks on Spanish settlements during the war. The most notable being the Raid on Matina in August by 1747 – the main fort (Fuerte de San Fernando de Matina) was captured and the cacao rich area was subsequently ravaged. This military cooperation would prove important as Miskito forces were vital to protecting not only British interests in the kingdom but also for British holdings in British Honduras (now Belize).

A more lasting result of this formal relation was that Edward I and other Miskito rulers who followed him allowed the British to establish settlements and plantations within his realm, and issued the first land grants to this effect in 1742. British settlement concentrated especially in the Black River area, Cape Gracias a Dios, and Bluefields. The British plantation owners used their estates to grow some export crops and as bases for the exploitation of timber resources, especially mahogany. Most of the labor on the estates was supplied by African slaves and by indigenous slaves captured in Miskito and British raids into Spanish territory. By 1786, there were several hundred British residents on the shore and several thousand slaves, mostly African.

The Miskito kings received regular gifts from the British in the form of weapons and consumer goods, and provided security against slave revolts and capturing runaways.

British evacuation

When the American Revolutionary War broke out, Spanish forces attempted to eliminate the British presence, seizing the settlement at Black River, and driving British settlers from the isle of Roatán; however, this ultimately failed when armed settlers led by the Anglo-Irish soldier Edward Despard retook the settlements.

Although Spain had been unable to drive the British from the kingdom or occupy any position, in the course of the diplomatic negotiations following the war, Britain found itself making concessions to Spain. In the 1786 Convention of London, Britain agreed to evacuate British settlers and their slaves from the Mosquito Coast to their as yet informal colony in what was to become British Honduras. Some of the settlers and their slaves remained after they swore loyalty to the King of Spain, especially in Bluefields.

Spanish planned colony

Government reorganization and Spanish settlement

After the British had evacuated from the Mosquito Coast, the Spanish sought to made it into a colony. The Viceroy Francisco Gil de Taboada even suggested that government over the Mosquito Coast should be transferred to Havana, Cuba, mirroring the long-standing relation that the Mosquito Kingdom had earlier with British Jamaica, but this idea was rejected by the Spanish Crown. Guatemala protested the perceived unruliness of the Spanish appointed governor at Bluefields, who was none other but a former British Superintendent of the Mosquito Coast who had sworn recent fealty to Spain, Robert Hodgson Jr., but his loyalty and good work were defended by the New Granadan Viceroy José Manuel de Ezpeleta, who succeeded Taboada in 1789 and considered that Hodgson's influence among the Miskito was vital to avoid a revolt. Hodgson Jr. was the son of Robert Hodgson Sr., the first British appointed Superintendent in 1749–1759, and he had occupied himself this post from 1767 to 1775, when his political enemies persuaded Lord George Germain to replace him with James Lawrie, the last British Superintendent before the evacuation and a declared adversary of Hodgson.

The Spanish hoped to win over support of the Miskito elite by offering presents like the British had and educating their youth in Guatemala, as many Miskito had been educated previously in Jamaica. Catholic missionaries also travelled to the kingdom with the aim of converting the native population in this period. The acceptance of the new order was unequal and often influenced by the underlying tensions within the own Miskito elites, divided between the northern regions controlled by the Sambu, loyal to King George II Frederic who remained himself friendly to the British, and the Tawira southerners aligned with Admiral Briton, who developed closer ties with Spain and adopted the name Don Carlos Antonio Castilla after his own conversion.

The Spanish also sought to occupy the positions formerly held by British settlers with their own colonists. Beginning in 1787, around 1,200 settlers were brought in from the Iberian Peninsula and the Canary Islands. They settled in Sandy Bay, Cape Gracias a Dios and Black River, but not in the new capital Bluefields.

Mosquitian revolt

The Spanish plans to form a colony suffered setbacks as a result of many of the settlers dying en route and the Mosquitian Crown showing its dissatisfaction with the gifts offered by the Spanish. The Miskito resumed trade with Jamaica and, when news of another Anglo-Spanish War arrived in 1797, George II raised an army to attack Bluefields, deposing Hodgson, and drove the Spanish out of the kingdom on September 4, 1800. However, the king died suddenly in 1801. According to British George Henderson, who visited the Mosquito Coast in 1804, many in the kingdom believed that George II had been poisoned by his brother Stephen as part of a deal with the Spanish. In order to prevent Stephen from seizing power for himself, General Robinson spirited George II's young heir George Frederic Augustus I to Jamaica by way of Belize and established a regency in his name.

With the Spanish power over the Mosquito Coast vanishing, the British influence rapidly returned.

In the meantime George II's brother Stephen made some overtures to Spain, who reciprocated by calling Stephen king and giving him the traditional gifts (albeit less frequently than to George II), but he later changed allegiances and raided Spanish held territory. In 1815, Stephen, styling himself "King Regent [...] of the Shore", and 33 other Miskito notables gave their "consent, assent, and declaration to, for, and of" George Frederic Augustus I as their "Sovereign King". His coronation in Belize on January 16, 1816, in a deliberate move to secure British support, marked the end of the regency. Meanwhile, Spain lost rule over New Granada in 1819 and over Central America in 1821, when the First Mexican Empire was proclaimed.

Renewed British presence

As internecine conflicts seized both Gran Colombia and Central America post-independence, the potential of any regional power to threaten the kingdom declined. Mosquitian Kings renewed their alliance with Great Britain, which in 1801 had merged with Ireland to form the United Kingdom, and Belize replaced Jamaica as the principal British connection to the kingdom. George Frederic Augustus I's 1816 coronation in Belize was imitated by his successor Robert Charles Frederic in 1845.

Economic expansion

A panoramic view of Black River in the (fictional) Territory of Poyais

Fort Wellington on the Black River (Engraving showing Fort Wellington (Poyais) on the Black River, Mosquito Coast, mid 1840s.)

The Mosquitian Kings allowed the settlement of foreigners in their lands as long as their sovereignty was respected, opportunity that was seized by British merchants and Garifuna people from Trujillo, Honduras. Between 1820 and 1837 the Scottish con man Gregor MacGregor pretended to have been named "Cacique of Poyais" by George Frederic Augustus I and sold forged land rights to eager settlers and investors in Britain and France. Most settlers suffered from the lack of infrastructure and died from tropical diseases, MacGregor having led them to believe that the area was already developed and just in need of skilled workers. In the 1830s and 40s King Robert Charles Frederic also appointed small traders, notably William Hodgson and brothers Peter and Samuel Shepherd, as his agents to administer his claims to tribute and taxes from lands as far south as Panama.

Dwellings in Bluefields in 1845

At the same time, the mahogany trade peaked in Europe, but the supply in Belize, a main exporter, was becoming scarce. The kingdom became an alternative source to Belize-based traders and wood cutting companies, who acquired concessions and land grants from Robert Charles Frederic. In 1837, Britain took diplomatic measures to prevent the new nations that left the imploding Federal Republic of Central America in 1838–1841 from interfering with the kingdom.

The expansion of the economy attracted and benefitted from the arrival of capital from the United States, and immigrants from the States, the West Indies, Europe, Syria and China. Especially abundant was the immigration of Afro-Caribbeans following the abolition of slavery in the British and French Caribbean in 1841, who settled mainly in and around Bluefields, merging with the descendants of the slaves that had not been evacuated in 1786 and giving origin to the Miskito Coast Creoles. Because of their greater knowledge of English, the Creoles soon became the workers most sought by foreign companies, occupying the intermediate levels in the businesses and relegating the native Miskitu to the worst paid occupations at the base.

In August 1841, a British ship, carried the Miskito King Robert Charles Frederic and the British Governor of Belize, Alexander MacDonald, to recapture the port of San Juan del Norte, placed at the mouth of the San Juan River and likely endpoint of a possible future transoceanic canal through Nicaragua, which was captured by the Nicaraguans in previous years. The commander of the port was removed by force, and the civilian population was told to leave the place by March 1842. The Nicaraguan government protested and the British did not carry on the threatened evacuation of the port, but neither did they take action against MacDonald for the incident. The port was later renamed to Greytown.

Second British protectorate and American opposition

In 1844, the British government declared a new protectorate over the Mosquito Kingdom and appointed a consul-general of the Mosquito Coast, Patrick Walker with seat in Bluefields. The proclamation was motivated by the state of anarchy in the Mosquito Kingdom after the death of Robert Charles Frederic, but also by the impending American annexation of Texas and the British desire to build a canal through Central America before the United States did.

The protectorate was claimed to extend from Cape Honduras in the north to the mouth of the San Juan River in the south. Nicaragua protested again and sent forces to San Juan del Norte, which the Mosquitian King George Augustus Frederic II replied to with an ultimatum demanding all Nicaraguan forces to leave before January 1, 1848. Nicaragua appealed to the United States, but the Americans, then at war with Mexico, did not answer. After the ultimatum expired, Miskito-British forces led by the King and Patrick Walker, and backed by two British warships, seized San Juan del Norte. They also destroyed Serapaqui, where the British prisoners captured during the first attempt on San Juan del Norte were interned, and advanced to Lake Nicaragua, during which Walker drowned. On March 7 Nicaragua signed a peace treaty where it ceded San Juan del Norte to the Mosquito Kingdom, who renamed it Greytown after Charles Edward Grey, governor of Jamaica.

With the Mexican–American War concluded, the new US delegate in Central America, E. G. Squier, tried to get Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras to form a common front against the British, who were now threatening to annex Tiger Island (El Tigre) in Honduras' Pacific coast. After British and American forces nearly clashed in El Tigre, both governments reprimanded the commanders of their forces there and concluded the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty on April 18, 1850. In this document the two powers pledged themselves to guarantee the neutrality and equal use of the proposed canal, and to not "occupy, or fortify, or colonize, or assume or exercise any dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast or any part of Central America", nor make use of any protectorate or alliance, present or future, to such ends.

The United States assumed that this meant the immediate British evacuation of the Mosquito Coast, while the British argued that it only bound them to not expand further in Central America and that both the 1844 protectorate and the 1848 peace treaty were still valid. On November 21, the American steamer Prometheus was fired upon by a British warship for not paying port tariffs at Greytown. One of the passengers was Cornelius Vanderbilt, business magnate and one of the richest people in the United States. The British government apologized after the United States sent two armed sloops to the area.

More incidents happened in the following years. In 1852, Britain occupied the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras and rebuffed the American protests claiming that they had been part of Belize before the treaty. The American representative in Nicaragua, Solon Borland, considered the treaty breached and argued openly for the US annexation of Nicaragua and the rest of Central America, for which he was forced to resign. In 1853, the buildings of the US-owned Accessory Transit Company in Greytown were looted and destroyed by the locals. In 1854, an American steamer captain killed a Greytown Creole, and Borland, who had remained in Greytown after his resignation, stopped the arrest for murder by threatening the marshal and his men with a rifle, arguing that they had no power to arrest an American citizen. Though he held no office, Borland ordered 50 American passengers bound for New York to remain on land and "protect US interests" while he sailed to the United States for help. In an example of gunboat diplomacy, the Americans sent then the USS Cyane and demanded 24,000 dollars in damages, an apology and a pledge of good behavior in the future. When the terms weren't met, the crew bombarded Greytown, then landed and burnt the town to the ground. Damage was extensive but no one was killed. With its attention seized by the ongoing Crimean War and the firm opposition of Britain's merchant class to a war with the United States, the British government only protested and demanded an apology that was never received.

Arrival of the Moravian Church

In the 1840s, two British citizens who travelled Europe advertising the sale of land in Cabo Gracias a Dios attracted the interest of Prince Charles of Prussia. Charles' first plan was to establish a Prussian settlement in the area and sent three German merchants to study this possibility on the ground. Their dictamen was against colonization, but their suggestion to evangelize the Mosquito Coast was taken up by the Prince of Schönburg-Waldenburg, who delegated the task in the Moravian Church. The first missionaries arrived in 1848 with a letter of recommendation from Lord Palmerston and began to work in 1849 in Bluefields, targeting the royal family and the Creoles before expanding to the rest of the Kingdom. In 1880, the mission saw a membership of 1,030 made up of mostly urban creoles. By 1890, the membership was 3,924 and made up of mostly Miskito and rural natives.

Anglicanism and the Moravian Church gained a significant following in the Mosquito Coast.

Early history of the Mosquito Coast also saw minor involvement from the Puritans.

Treaty of Managua and Mosquito Reservation

Main article: Mosquito Reservation

By 1859 British opinion was no longer supportive of their nation's presence in the Mosquito Coast. The British government returned the Bay Islands and ceded the northern part of the Mosquito Coast to Honduras, negotiating with Guatemala to enlarge the British territory in Belize as compensation. The next year, Britain signed the Treaty of Managua, ceding the rest of the Mosquito Coast to Nicaragua.

Britain and Nicaragua signed the Treaty of Managua on January 28, 1860, which transferred suzerainty of the Nicaragua over the kingdom's territory. Attempts to decide the sovereignty over the northern bank of the Wanks/Coco River which cuts Cabo Gracias a Dios in half, began in 1869, but would not be settled until ninety-one years later when the International Court of Justice decided in favor of Honduras.

The 1860 treaty also recognized that the Mosquito Kingdom, now reduced to the territory around Bluefields, would become an autonomous enclave, usually called Mosquito Reservation or Mosquito Reserve.

Monarchs

• c. 1650–c. 1687 Oldman
• c. 1687–1718 Jeremy I
• 1718–1729 H.M. Jeremy II
• 1729–1755 H.M. Edward I
• 1755–1776 H.M. George I
• 1776–1800 H.M. George II Frederic
• 1800–1824 H.M. George Frederic Augustus I
• 1824–1841 H.M. Robert Charles Frederic
• 1841–1865 H.M. George Augustus Frederic II
• 1865–1879 H.E. William Henry Clarence, Hereditary Chief of Miskito
• 1879–1888 H.E. George William Albert Hendy, Hereditary Chief of Miskito
• 1888–1889 H.E. Andrew Hendy, Hereditary Chief of Miskito
• 1889–1890 H.E. Jonathan Charles Frederick, Hereditary Chief of Miskito
• 1890–1905 H.E. Robert Henry Clarence, Hereditary Chief of Miskito

See also

• Garifuna people
• Miskito
• La Mosquitia
• The Mosquito Coast - a 1986 US movie

Sources and references

Internet resources

• https://web.archive.org/web/20050506032019/http://www.flag.de/FOTW/flags/ni-mc.html – Mosquito Coast flag
• Douglas, James (1867). "Account of the attempt to form a settlement in 1823, on the Mosquito Shore". Transactions. New Series (5). Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. Archived from the original on 2013-07-04. Retrieved 2013-04-27.

Printed sources

• Cwik, Christian; Displaced minorities: The Wayuu and Miskito people, in: The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, Ed.: Steven Ratuva. (London, New York, Singapure, Palgrave Macmillan 2019) url=http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-981-130242-8_117-1
• Dozier, Craig; Nicaragua's Mosquito Shore: The Years of British and American Presence, University of Alabama Press, 1985
• Floyd, Troy S.; The Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque (NM), 1967
• Hale, Charles R. (1994). "Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894-1987". Stanford (CA): Stanford University.
• Helms, Mary (1969). "The Cultural Ecology of a Colonial Tribe". Ethnology. 8 (1): 76–84. doi:10.2307/3772938. JSTOR 3772938.
• Helms, Mary (1983). "Miskito Slaving and Culture Contact: Ethnicity and Opportunity in an Expanding Population". Journal of Anthropological Research. 39 (2): 179–197. doi:10.1086/jar.39.2.3629966. JSTOR 3629966. S2CID 163683579.
• Helms, Mary (1986). "Of Kings and Contexts: Ethnohistorical Interpretations of Miskito Political Structure and Function" (PDF). American Ethnologist. 13 (3): 506–523. doi:10.1525/ae.1986.13.3.02a00070.
• Ibarra Rojas, Eugenia; Del arco y la flecha a las armas de fuego. Los indios mosquitos y la historia centroamericana, Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica, San Jose, 2011
• Naylor, Robert A.; Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600–1914: A Case Study in British Informal Empire, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, London, 1989
• Offen, Karl (2002). "The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu: The Colonial Origins and Geography of Intra-Miskitu Differentiation in Eastern Nicaragua and Honduras". Ethnohistory. 49 (2): 319–372. doi:10.1215/00141801-49-2-319. S2CID 162255599.
• Olien, Michael; The Miskito Kings and the Line of Succession, Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 39, no. 2, 1983, pp. 198–241
• Olien, Michael; Micro/Macro-Level Linkages: Regional Political Structure on the Mosquito Coast, 1845–1864, Ethnohistory, vol. 34, no. 3, 1987, pp. 256–287
• Olien, Michael; General, Governor and Admiral: Three Miskito Lines of Succession, Ethnohistory, vol. 45, no. 2, 1998, pp. 278–318
• Potthast, Barbara; Die Mosquitoküste im Spannungsfeld Britischer und Spanischer Politik, 1502–1821, Bölau., Cologne, 1988
• Romero Vargas, Germán; Las Sociedades del Atlántico de Nicaragua en los siglos XVII y XVIII, Banco Nicaraguënse, Managua, 1995