Williams (2013) Diplomacy and Politics in 18th Century Mosquitia

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Caroline A. Williams
The Americas, Volume 70, Number 2, October 2013, pp. 237-268 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/tam.2013.0116
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THE AMERICAS
70:2/October 2013/237–268
COPYRIGHT BY THE ACADEMY OF
AMERICAN FRANCISCAN HISTORY
LIVING BETWEEN EMPIRES:

Diplomacy and Politics in the
Late Eighteenth-Century Mosquitia
I
n June 1787, Lieutenant Colonel Gabriel de Hervías, on behalf of the
Spanish crown, took possession from Major James Lawrie of the small
British settlement of Black River (Río Tinto), marking the formal end of
three decades of diplomatic wrangling over the existence of the British Super-
intendency over the Mosquito Shore (1748 to 1787).1 Within three years of
Lawrie’s departure, along with that of 537 British settlers and 1,677 slaves,2
the narrow stretch of territory extending along the Atlantic coasts of Honduras
and Nicaragua and known to the Spanish as costa de mosquitos was engulfed in
violent conflicts between leaders of the Miskitu peoples and their followers.
The first outbreak of intra-Miskitu hostilities pitted the Indian governor
Colville Briton against other prominent chiefs, including his nephew Admiral
Alparis Dilson; a second pitted Admiral Dilson and his brother Major Hewlett
against the Afro-Indian or “Zambo” King George II. By the time the conflicts
had come to an end, both Briton and Dilson had been executed, Hewlett had
escaped the region for the safety of the Panamanian coast, and George had
asserted his ascendancy over rival chiefs and their people.3 An uneasy peace
returned to the region in late 1791, but it was broken in 1792 by a brief but
I would like to thank Karl Offen, Kirsty Reid, Christine Macleod, and the two anonymous reviewers for The
Americas for invaluable comments that have helped improve this analysis.
1. William Shuman Sorsby, “The British Superintendency of the Mosquito Shore, 1749–1787,” (Ph.D.
diss., University College London, 1969), pp. 321–22; Frank Griffith Dawson, “William Pitt’s Settlement at
Black River on the Mosquito Shore: A Challenge to Spain in Central America, 1732-87,” Hispanic American
Historical Review 63:4 (November 1983), pp. 703–704; and Frank Griffith Dawson, “The Evacuation of the
Mosquito Shore and the English Who Stayed Stayed Behind, 1786–1800,” The Americas 55:1 (July 1998),
pp. 67–68.
2. Karl H. Offen, “Race and Place in Colonial Mosquitia, 1600–1787,” in Blacks and Blackness in Cen-
tral America: Between Race and Place, Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe, eds. (Durham, N.C., and
London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 109.
3. Hodgson to Troncoso, Bluefields, September 6, 1790, Archivo General de Simancas, Secretaría del
Despacho de Guerra [hereafter AGS SGU] 6949, 21; Troncoso to Conde del Campo de Alange, Guatemala,
January 1, 1792, AGS SGU 6950, 1; Troncoso to Conde del Campo de Alange, Guatemala, October 9, 1792,
AGS SGU 6934, 50; “Diario que han llevado Don Francisco Meani Vecino de Río Tinto y Don Juan Sivelly
Subteniente del Real Cuerpo de Artillería . . . ,” June 12, 1791, AGS SGU 6950, 6.
237
238 LIVING BETWEEN EMPIRES
unsuccessful attempt on the part of Major Hewlett to extract revenge on the

Zambo perpetrators of his brother’s death.4 King George emerged from this
second wave of hostilities with his prominence enhanced, and by 1800, when
he led an assault on Río Tinto and brought Spain’s colonial ambitions in the
region to an end, he had established his authority as principal chief of the eth-
nically diverse and politically divided Miskitu nation.5
The bitter internal divisions provoked by the resolution of a long-standing

Anglo-Spanish contest for sovereignty over the territory were understood by
the Miskitu to be of momentous importance. A century later the conflicts
would be remembered as a “civil war” that had marked the beginning of a
process resulting in the subordination of the Indian or Tawira Miskitu to the
Zambo or “Sambo” Miskitu.6 The latter were terms used by both groups to
differentiate the peoples who emerged from the encounter between Africans
and indigenous Americans in this part of Central America, from the predomi-
nantly indigenous Miskitu, competitors, by the early 1700s, for control of
people and resources.7 Pivotal in the history of the Miskitu, the events that
unfolded in the region in the early 1790s are also of significance to scholars
concerned with understanding the complex character of intercultural relations
in those parts of the Americas where powerful, independent indigenous popu-
lations negotiated with more than one European nation during the centuries
of colonial expansion.
Conceptualized as middle grounds, borderlands, frontiers, strategic frontiers,

native grounds, or Indian homelands, these regions occupied a distinctive
place in the emerging Atlantic world, and the societies forged there have been
equally and variously defined as having been based on compromise, negotia-
4. Hewlett was known to the Spanish as Sulera or Solera. José del Río, “Disertación del viaje . . . a las
islas de San Andrés, Santa Catalina, Providencia y Manglés, en la Costa de Mosquitos,” Trujillo, August 25,
1793, AGS SGU 6950, 4.
5. Sproat to Bassett, Belize, September 27, 1800, The National Archives, London, Colonial Office
[hereafter TNA CO] 137/105, f. 21; William S. Sorsby, “Spanish Colonization of the Mosquito Coast,
1787–1800,” Revista de Historia de América 73-74 (January-December 1972), p. 151; and Dawson, “The
Evacuation,” p. 87.
6. According to the Moravian missionary Heinrich Ziock, who recorded the oral testimony of a Zambo
elder in 1893, the violence was devastating for the Indian Miskitu. The elder also claimed that after the deaths
of Dilson and Hewlett, George ordered the destruction of all the Indian villages and all their people, and
relented only on the advice of a prominent chief that he should keep “part of the tribe alive to act as tribu-
taries and slaves.” For a translation and analysis of Ziock’s account, see Karl H. Offen, “The Sambo and Tawira
Miskitu: The Colonial Origins and Geography of Intra-Miskitu Differentiation in Eastern Nicaragua and Hon-
duras,” Ethnohistory 49:2 (Spring 2002), pp. 324–325.
7. The most detailed analysis of Miskitu identity politics during the period of the British Superinten-
dency can be found in Offen, “The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu,” pp. 319–372. Offen also discusses relations
between Indians and Afro-Indians in “Race and Place,” pp. 92–129. See also Douglas Arthur Tompson,
“Frontiers of Identity: The Atlantic Coast and the Formation of Honduras and Nicaragua, 1786–1894,”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 2001), pp. 49–53.
CAROLINE A. WILLIAMS 239
tion, accommodation, incorporation, or entanglement.8 The late eighteenth-

century Mosquitia opens a window onto one such region, strategically located
between Spanish and British empires in Central America and the Caribbean,
and vital to both. Marked as the period was by political upheaval and change,
it provides us with an opportunity to interweave and juxtapose, to borrow
John Elliott’s terms, British and Spanish approaches and interactions with the
region’s native inhabitants.9 It also enables us to examine the consequences for
the Miskitu of their long engagement with Europeans, and thus to bring to the
center of analysis the experiences and perspectives of a peoples who, while not
themselves colonized, were nonetheless implicated in and affected by the
broader processes that brought the Atlantic world into existence.10
The extant scholarship on the region—whether focused on the period of British

influence to 1787, or that of Spanish involvement to 1800—has touched only
superficially on the conflict that factionalized the Miskitu leadership class,
attributing it primarily to hostility toward Spanish colonizing (and evangelizing)
aims and methods or attachment to British political and cultural values, or
degrees of both.11 Given the brevity of Spain’s colonizing endeavor, and the fact
8. See for example Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great
Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Kathleen
DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Gail D. MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the
Frontiers of Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Stephen Aron, American Conflu-
ence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 2009); David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New
Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2005); and Claudio Saunt, “‘Our Indians’: European
Empires and the History of the Native American South,” in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000, Jorge
Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, eds. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2007), pp.
61–75. See also Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States,
and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104:3 (June 1999), pp.
814–841; Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” The Journal of American History 98:2
(September 2011), pp. 338–361; and Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-
Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112:3 (June 2007), pp. 764–786.
9. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. xviii.
10. The question of how to incorporate the complexity and sheer diversity of indigenous experience
into Atlantic narratives has most recently been debated by the contributors to the Ethnogenesis forum in The
William and Mary Quarterly 68:2 (April 2011). See especially James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra,
“Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic,” pp. 181–208, and “On the Genesis of Destruction,
and Other Missing Subjects,” pp. 240–246; Pekka Hämäläinen, “Lost in Transitions: Suffering, Survival, and
Belonging in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” pp. 219–223; and Claudio Saunt, “The Indians’ Old World,”
pp. 215–218. On the place of indigenous peoples in Atlantic historiography, see Paul Cohen, “Was there an
Amerindian Atlantic? Reflection on the Limits of a Historiographical Concept,” History of European Ideas,
34:4 (2008), pp. 388–410; and Amy Turner Bushnell, “Indigenous America and the Limits of the Atlantic
World, 1493–1825,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, Jack P. Green and Philip D. Morgan, eds.
(Oxford, U.K., and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 191–222.
11. Dawson, “The Evacuation,” p. 83; Michael D. Olien, “General, Governor, and Admiral: Three
Miskito Lines of Succession,” Ethnohistory 45:2 (Spring 1998), pp. 300–301, 306–307; Nicholas Rogers,
“Caribbean Borderland: Empire, Ethnicity, and the Exotic on the Mosquito Coast,” Eighteenth-Century Life
26:3 (Fall 2002), pp. 134–135; Claudia García, “Interacción étnica y diplomacia de fronteras en el reino miskitu
that Colville Briton, a Spanish ally and a recent convert to Catholicism, was the
first casualty of the violence, it is perhaps unsurprising that it should be inter-
preted in these terms. The documentary record, however, suggests that the atti-
tudes and interactions of the various actors who came into contact in the
Mosquitia from the late 1780s were not so starkly delineated. The sources show,
for example, that in forming early policy toward the Miskitu, senior Bourbon
officials pragmatically drew on the local knowledge and social connections of
antiguos colonos (Britons of long residence) who thought it preferable to pass to
the Spanish service rather than lose their profitable business ventures in the
region.12 They also show that the pragmatism that informed Spaniards and their
British advisors was matched by that of native leaders on both sides of the
Indian-Zambo divide. As in other parts of the Americas where indigenous pop-
ulations were courted by rival European powers, prominent Miskitu chiefs con-
sidered where their own interests lay in dealing with the Spanish, and opted to
cooperate with the newcomers while they explored the potential for establish-
ing with them political and economic relations of the kind they had formerly
enjoyed with the British. Indeed, the determination of Miskitu leaders to come
to terms with the changed environment of the late 1780s combined with Span-
ish concern with closing a gap in their imperial defenses to open a period of
largely peaceful exchange that was sustained for at least a decade.
This is not to suggest that the Miskitu welcomed the Spanish, or that they were
unaffected by the British government’s decision to relinquish its interests on
the coast. For much of the eighteenth century, the Miskitu had exploited their
occupation of a territory contested by Spain to extract maximum advantage
from the Britons who sought their friendship and alliance. In addition to secur-
ing their autonomy from Spanish colonial rule, ties to the British had brought
the Miskitu political rewards in the form of commissions and titles, and these
in turn had provided access to a wide array of European manufactures in the
form of gifts and trade goods.13 Never pawns of the British, through the
a fines del siglo XVIII,” Anuario de Estudios Americano 56:1 (1999), pp. 113, 115, 117–118; García, “Hibri-
dación, interacción social y adaptación cultural en la Costa de Mosquitos, siglos XVII y XVIII,” Anuario de Estu-
dios Americanos 59:2 (2002), pp. 460–462; García, Etnogénesis, hibridación y consolidación de la identidad del
pueblo miskitu (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2007), pp. 81–82, 89–94; Troy Floyd,
The Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1967), pp. 172–182;
and Robert A. Naylor, Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600–1914 (Ruther-
ford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989), p. 71. See also Weber, Bárbaros, 242–243.
12. Dawson, “The Evacuation,” pp. 71–86; Doug Tompson, “The Establecimientos Costeros of Bour-
bon Central America, 1787–1800: Problems and Paradox in Spain’s Occupation of the Atlantic Coast,” in
Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759–1821, Jordana Dym and Christophe
Belaubre, eds. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007), pp. 165–179.
13. See Offen, “Sambo and Tawira”; Offen, “Race and Place”; and Offen, “Creating Mosquitia: Map-
ping Amerindian Spatial Practices in Eastern Central America, 1629–1779,” Journal of Historical Geography
33:2 (April 2007), pp. 254–282.
decades of contact the Miskitu became seasoned negotiators, adept at capital-

izing on settlers’ ever-present fears of a Miskitu-Spanish alliance to shape the
nature and terms of the British relationship. However, if their ability to maneu-
ver between empires brought real benefits, it also changed their society so pro-
foundly that when the British, by treaties of 1783 and 1786, ceded to Spain
their Mosquitian possessions14 local leaders were left with few options but to
consider Spanish offers of political recognition, hospitality, gifts, and trade in
exchange for peaceful cooperation in the process of establishing settlement. All
the region’s leaders understood the challenges they faced in 1787, and all
sought, however reluctantly or ambivalently, some form of accommodation
with Spaniards. The strategies they developed to achieve that end, however,
diverged. Explaining the interests and motivations that informed their choices,
and the impact of these on intra-Miskitu relations, is a key aim of this analysis.
By examining the background to the conflicts that divided the Miskitu in the
early 1790s, and the part played in them by leading Indians and Afro-Indians,
this study also advances our understanding of the impact of British policy and
presence on Miskitu political structures. Central to this discussion is the emer-
gence of the Miskitu kingdom, “an incipient African Amerindian polity” con-
sisting by the 1760s of four semi-autonomous geographic and political jurisdic-
tions over which four authority figures, each holding a British commission,
exercised a form of leadership. The two predominantly Zambo districts from
Sandy Bay to Black River (Río Tinto) on the Honduran coast were overseen by
a general and a king; the two predominantly Indian districts from Sandy Bay to
Río Grande/Pearl Lagoon on the Nicaraguan coast were overseen by a governor
and an admiral.15 The British role in the formation and operation of the king-
dom, the part played by British commissions in validating its principal offices,
and the nature of the functions fulfilled by the holders of those offices as repre-
sentatives of their people have been comprehensively debated in the scholarship
on the British Superintendency.16 Among the more recent contributions, those
14. For a discussion of Anglo-Spanish diplomatic negotiations, see William S. Sorsby, “British Superin-
tendency,” pp. 291–322.
15. Offen, “Race and Place,” p. 93; Offen, “Creating Mosquitia,” pp. 260–263.
16. Karl H. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom: Landscape and the Emergence of a Miskitu Ethnic Iden-
tity, Northeastern Nicaragua and Honduras, 1600–1800” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1999); Offen,
“Creating Mosquitia,” pp. 254–282; Offen, “Sambo and Tawira Miskitu,” pp. 320–372; Offen, “Race and
Place,” pp. 92–129; Nicholas Rogers, “Caribbean Borderland,” pp. 117–138; Germán Romero Vargas, Las
sociedades del Atlántico de Nicaragua en los siglos XVII y XVIII (Managua: Fondo de Promoción Cultural-
BANIC, 1995); Michael D. Olien, “The Miskito Kings and the Line of Succession,” Journal of Anthropolog-
ical Research 39:2 (Summer 1983), pp. 198–241; Philip A. Dennis and Michael D. Olien, “Kingship among
the Miskito,” American Ethnologist 11:4 (November 1984), pp. 718–737; Olien, “General, Governor, and
Admiral,” pp. 277–318; Mary Helms, “Miskito Slaving and Culture Contact: Ethnicity and Opportunity in
an Expanding Population,” Journal of Anthropological Research 39:2 (Summer 1983), pp. 179–187; and
Helms, “Of Kings and Contexts: Ethnohistorical Interpretations of Miskito Political Structure and Function,”
American Ethnologist 13:3 (August 1986), pp. 506–523.
of Michael Olien and Karl Offen have shown convincingly that the Mosquitia’s
native populations were neither dominated by British rule nor subordinated to
it. They have also demonstrated—notwithstanding the critical importance of
externally conferred commissions and externally acquired authority symbols in
legitimizing claims to leadership—that the emergence of the kingdom’s princi-
pal political offices, to which succession was hereditary, was the outcome of
indigenous rather than European agency, and that leaders played crucial roles in
controlling British trade, resource extraction, and land acquisition.17
On the basis of the patchy British archival record, however, scholars of the
Superintendency have found it hard to unravel the internal structures of the
kingdom, particularly in regards to the relationships among leaders, the nature
of the authority each leader exercised within his respective district, and the
basis upon which political authority rested in native society. Still a matter of
debate, therefore, is the extent to which Miskitu political organization retained
its traditional pre-contact forms even as it incorporated British commissions,
titles, and authority symbols, or evolved in ways that came to resemble and
function as a kingdom in the sense that Europeans understood the term.18
Michael Olien and Philip Dennis, for example, have interpreted the promi-
nence of successive kings relative to other leaders in the historical record as evi-
dence of a process of increasing centralization that paved the way for the trans-
formation of the figure of the king, by the turn of the nineteenth century, into
a paramount chief exercising control over a hierarchy of positions governing
the kingdom as a whole.19 Working with the same sources, Mary Helms has
taken issue with the notion that a centralized and hierarchically organized
structure came into being before the end of the colonial period. Drawing
attention to the egalitarian nature of indigenous society, which was composed
of small kinship-based communities in which councils of elders fulfilled crucial
roles in decision-making, Helms has argued that no single individual emerged
to rule the territory or its peoples, and that the “more compelling locus of rec-
ognized authority” continued to rest instead in “the one traditional area”—
namely, warfare—in which kings as well as other chiefs held “real authority.”20
The Spanish archival record, a rich and under-explored source for the study of
the Miskitu, provides crucial insights into these questions. In documenting the
17. Offen, “Miskitu Kingdom,” especially chapt. 5. See also Olien, “Miskito Kings,” pp. 198–241;
Olien, “General, Governor, and Admiral,” pp. 277–318; and Dennis and Olien, “Kingship among the
Miskito,” pp. 718–737.
18. Offen, “The Miskitu Kingdom,” especially pp. 191–210.
19. Olien, “General, Governor, and Admiral,” pp. 277–318; Olien, “Miskito Kings,” pp. 198–241; and
Dennis and Olien, “Kingship among the Miskito,” pp. 718–737.
20. Helms, “Of Kings and Contexts,” pp. 506–523. See also Tompson, “Frontiers of Identity,” pp.
54–56.
challenges that colonial officials encountered as they tried to understand the

unfamiliar ways in which native chiefs related to each other as well as to out-
siders, Spanish sources bring into sharp focus countless indigenous actors
whose activities and interactions cast new light, in a new context, on Miskitu
social, economic, and political organization as the eighteenth century was
drawing to a close. Their actions and statements are inevitably mediated by the
Europeans who recorded them. Nevertheless, that record offers important
glimpses into a complex society, a society that attached new and different
meanings to those elements of European cultures that it selectively incorpo-
rated into its own. Among other findings, this analysis confirms that by the end
of the eighteenth century the Miskitu king had emerged as the most powerful
of the region’s principal chiefs, but it attributes his prominence specifically to
processes set in motion by the arrival of Spaniards in 1787. On the other hand,
it also supports the contention that the Miskitu king did not rule or reign over
a centralized kingdom. His prominence derived from success in war. His legit-
imacy, like that of other regional leaders, was based on a network of fragile
alliances that depended on his procuring and distributing prized resources and
remained constrained by the authority exercised by powerful elders, shamans,
and village chiefs. These features of indigenous society and politics at the end
of the colonial period have important and as yet unappreciated implications for
our understanding of the nineteenth-century Mosquitia, which Nicaraguan
nation-builders were to mark as a place of inassimilable “racial others.”21
CONTENTMENT AT ANY PRICE: EUROPEANS IN THE MOSQUITIA
The pragmatism that informed Bourbon policy toward the Miskitu region, at
least during the initial period of sustained contact, is reflected most clearly in
the decision, made at the highest levels of royal administration in Spain and the
colonies, to recruit to the Spanish service a small number of British settlers to
serve as intermediaries with, and interpreters for, the native population. Of
those so recruited, Robert Hodgson and Francis Meany were to play particu-
larly prominent roles. As is well known, Hodgson was the son of the first
British superintendent of the Mosquito Shore, Robert Hodgson Sr.
(1749–1758), a position that he went on to occupy between 1768 and 1775.22
By late 1782, when he was captured by the Spanish off the coast of Porto-
bello,23 Hodgson had become a wealthy planter, merchant, and contraband
21. Juliet Hooker, “Race and the Space of Citizenship: The Mosquito Coast and the Place of Blackness
and Indigeneity in Nicaragua,” in Blacks and Blackness, Gudmundson and Wolfe, pp. 246–277.
22. Sorsby, “British Superintendency,” pp. 156–197.
23. “Extracto general y sucinto de lo ocurrido con . . . Roberto Hodgson . . . desde su prisión,” AGS
SGU 6945, 1.
trader. An adult life spent in close contact with the Miskitu, however, had given
him such a deep familiarity with the territory and its inhabitants as to persuade
the Spanish authorities to grant him a commission as colonel in exchange for
his cooperation in “conciliating” native populations, and bringing about their
peaceful submission to the Spanish crown.24 Francis Meany played a different
role. The son of an English consul to the Canary Islands, Meany was a partner
in the Black River-based trading concern of Pitt, Meany, and Kaye, which was
granted exclusive privileges to import from England merchandise that would
enable the Miskitu, during what was expected to be a period of transition to
Spanish rule, to receive the same kinds of gifts and trade goods that had been
furnished to them during the time of the British.25 In exchange for the license
to trade, Meany was to strive to consolidate Spanish “friendship” with the
Miskitu, and to keep the peace between their chiefs and Spanish establishments
in the territory.26
If this was an unusual approach toward the incorporation of a native popula-

tion whose alleged hostility toward Spaniards was attributed in large part to
British inspiration and intrigue,27 it reflected a widely held official view that the
Mosquitia as a place, and the Miskitu as a people, were different from those
over which Spain exercised dominion elsewhere. “These Indians are not like
the others,” Colonel Juan Nepomuceno de Quesada wrote from Río Tinto,
where he was overseeing the handover of the British settlement to Spanish
troops: “they are very civilized, and a great deal of tact is required [in dealing]
with them.”28 It was not just that the region’s native peoples were familiar with
the English language, or that some, including King George and his brother
Prince Stephen—“an exceptionally refined man for his race,” having lived in
London for 18 months “among the principal families of that Court”—had
experience of travel to British territories overseas. It was also that through long
association with the British they had developed attitudes and behaviors that
defied Spanish expectations of “savage” unassimilated Indians, thereby con-
founding the putative new authorities’ notions of the best ways to establish
24. Caballero y Góngora to Marqués de Sonora, Cartagena, March 6, 1787, in “Extracto general y
sucinto”; Hodgson to Caballero y Góngora, Black River, April 7, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 32; and Hodgson
to Marqués de Sonora, Cartagena, March 5, 1787, AGS SGU 6946, 9. A copy of the commission may be
found in AGS SGU 6948, 32. See also Tompson, “Establecimientos Costeros,” pp. 157–158, 166–167.
25. John Pitt died before the first of the shipments from London was made. See Kaye to Gordon, Río
Tinto, July 8, 1788, in “Testimonio . . . sobre la llegada . . . de . . . Roberto Kaye,” AGS SGU 6948, 15, f.
6; and Hervías to Estachería, Río Tinto, September 20, 1787, AGS SGU 6948, 14.
26. Marqués del Campo to Floridablanca, London, August 20, 1790, AGS SGU 6949, 20; Troncoso
to Conde de Alange, Guatemala, December 28, 1790, AGS SGU 6950, 3.
27. Caballero y Góngora to Gil y Lemos, Turbaco, February 26, 1789, Archivo Histórico Nacional,
Madrid [hereafter AHN], Diversos-Colecciones, 32, 36; Ezpeleta to Valdés, Santa Fe, May 19, 1790, AGS
SGU 6949, 5.
28. Quesada to Estachería, Río Tinto, April 29, 1787, AGS SGU 6947, 2.
relations with them. In April 1787, for example, Quesada wrote to his superi-
ors to inform them about a dinner to which he had invited Prince Stephen and
Captain Augustus, a relative of the governor, when they came to Río Tinto to
receive the gifts the British delivered at that time of year. Quesada believed that
the Spanish goods and hospitality proffered on that occasion, as well as the
assurances given as to the sincerity of Spanish friendship, had pleased and sat-
isfied his guests, so much so that they undertook to pay him further visits. Yet
only a few days later, the officer learned that Stephen, despite the evident
politeness of their initial encounter, had recounted their meeting in a quite dif-
ferent way. Even as he acknowledged that he had been well treated, he attrib-
uted this to Spanish duplicity, rather than generosity: it was all intended to
encourage the Miskitu to return to Río Tinto after the evacuation, so that they
could “cut off their heads.” Stephen vowed, therefore, that he would not
return, and he also warned that any attempt on the part of Spaniards to mobi-
lize their troops would be seen as a declaration of war, to which he would
respond by mercilessly “[doing] away with our people.”29
Quesada admitted to the great confusion that his interactions with the Miskitu
were causing him, and his subsequent meetings with Perkin Tempest, nephew
of General Tom Lee, leader of the northernmost district, and then with Lee
himself, only served to emphasize his sense of the challenges that Spaniards
faced in the region. Quesada reported that about a week after Stephen left Río
Tinto, Tempest arrived, accompanied by his own interpreter—an Indian cap-
tive from the district of Olanchito—to ascertain whether Spaniards came as
friends or enemies. Though stating at the outset that the presence of troops
suggested the latter rather than the former, Tempest accepted an invitation to
dine with the officer, on which occasion he was assured of the Spanish king’s
peaceful intentions, and informed that officials were under orders to treat the
Miskitu generously in his name. Fresh meat and aguardiente having been pro-
vided for the entire delegation, Quesada continued, Tempest then asked “what
gift I was to give him.” When cloth, twine, and ribbon for his wife were pre-
sented, as well as “six pesos to buy a hat which he asked for, [and] to which I
agreed believing that by such means I would win over a powerful enemy, all of
a sudden he gave it all back saying that it was a mere pittance, and . . . boarded
his piragua and left with his people.”30 General Tom Lee’s stance, on visiting
a few days later, was no more conciliatory. Indeed, it suggested that as a prin-
cipal Zambo leader, he had come to negotiate with the Spanish on the basis of
equality, not submission. Lee spelled out for Quesada the conditions that
would have to be met before he would reach a peace agreement with the new-
29. Quesada to Estachería, Río Tinto, April 21, 1787, ibid.

30. Quesada to Estachería, Río Tinto, April 29, 1787, ibid.
comers, the formality of which would be denoted by its being “in writing.”
These conditions included commitments that no forts or fortified posts would
be established on the coast, that the British would be permitted to trade freely
there, and that the Miskitu would not be prevented from traveling to British
territories in the Caribbean and beyond.31
Spanish experiences further south were entirely different, however. When

Gabriel de Hervías and Captain Gonzalo Vallejo sailed to Tuapí (Twappi) in
early May to sound out the Indian governor Colville Briton, they received a
welcome they described as affectionate, as well as strong assurances that he
“did not want war with any nation, and that Spaniards could freely and safely
form establishments in his territory.” Far from challenging the visiting officials,
Briton offered to release to them some 70 captives, men and women, many of
whom had been taken during a wartime incursion into the town of Juigalpa in
1782.32 Although only 10 individuals, all “Spanish Indians,” were freed at that
time, the governor promised that “the next time a Spanish vessel appeared in
those parts he would surrender as many [captives] as he was able to assemble
. . . in that country.” The officers also noted that, compared with the many
gifts that they had presented to King George and General Lee, Briton had
received only a trifling number, from which they inferred that there would be
no opposition to their introducing troops where convenient in the territory
under his command.33
Not yet fully aware of the interests that informed the actions of the region’s
principal chiefs, Spaniards accounted for their diverse reactions by pointing to
what they termed the “Indian character,” and by accusing the British officers
who were overseeing the evacuation of prejudicing natives by a variety of
underhand means.34 Officials attributed their difficulties in large part to British
influence, but at the same time they came to see some among the antiguos
colonos as critical to the success of the colonizing enterprise.35 This conviction
reflected their growing realization that what had passed to Spain by the terms
of successive treaties was not a “made-to-order colony,” as Frank Dawson has
defined it36 but, rather, possessions conceded to the British by a native leader-
ship that had remained independent from them throughout the period of the
31. Estachería to Marqués de Sonora, Guatemala, June 15, 1782, ibid.

32. Hervías et al. to Estachería, Río Tinto, May 2, 1787, ibid.
33. Hervías to Estachería, Trujillo, May 3, 1787; Estachería to Marqués de Sonora, Amatitlán, May 15,
1787; and Hervías et al. to Estachería, Río Tinto, May 2, 1787, ibid.
34. Hervías to Estachería, Trujillo, May 3, 1787; Estachería to Quesada, Amatitlán, May 11, 1787; and
Estachería to Marqués de Sonora, Guatemala, May 15 and June 15, 1787, ibid.
35. For example, Marqués del Campo to Floridablanca, London, July 13 and September 8, 1787, AGS
SGU 6946, 4.
36. Dawson, “The Evacuation,” pp. 68–69.
Superintendency.37 The leaders of the four jurisdictions that comprised the

Miskitu polity had come to depend on externally conferred commissions to
legitimize and validate their authority. The British had not, however, attempted
to create institutions for governing or converting the diverse populations
among whom they lived.38 According to Scottish doctor and long-time resident
Robert Sproat, it was because the British had accepted indigenous power struc-
tures and ways of life, and made no more than “gentle” (and ineffective) efforts
to introduce Christianity, that Miskitu regard for the British style of “govern-
ment” was greater than it was even among the British themselves.39
The Miskitu-British relationship, however seemingly unequal, was not strictly

colonial. Instead, it was based on a finely balanced and continually negotiated
exchange of goods and favors. In return for the right to settle, extract
resources, employ labor, enjoy protection, and occasionally recruit soldiers for
military service, the British distributed gifts, hospitality, manufactured goods
(including tools and weapons), and political rewards, both real and symbolic.40
If Spaniards were to emulate the British model of interaction, in the long-term
interest of securing possession of this “rich jewel that had become detached
from its Crown,”41 then the experience and influence that British settlers could
bring to the endeavor outweighed even the risks associated with the clandes-
tine trade from which they would seek to profit.42 As viceroy Antonio
Caballero y Góngora explained of his own efforts to bring the younger Hodg-
son into the Spanish service, “my aim was none other than to attract this man
at whatever cost, so as to make use of his influence over those Savages [in
order] to dominate them by peaceful means, and [to] make of them a useful
and civilized people.”43
37. Indeed, as late as 1798 the Spanish themselves referred to Río Tinto (rather than the Mosquitia) as
“la colonia,” implying that they understood its status to be that of a Spanish settlement within territory
deemed to be Miskitu. Echeverría to Domás, Río Tinto, September 17, 1798, in “Testimonio del Cuaderno
7 sobre la llegada del nombrado Príncipe Esteban al establecimiento de los Zambos . . . ,” AGS SGU 6951,
3, f. 118. Offen has characterized the Miskitu polity as one that “overlapped in space but was independent
from the British Superintendency. See “Race and Place,” p. 93. See also Jennifer Allan Goett, “Diasporic Iden-
tities, Autochthonous Rights: Race, Gender, and the Cultural Politics of Creole Land Rights in Nicaragua,”
(Ph.D. diss.: University of Texas at Austin, 2006), pp. 110–111, 118–120.
38. Olien, “Miskito Kings,” pp. 200–209.
39. “Diario formado por el Doctor Sproat,” Río Tinto, August 31, 1798, in “Testimonio . . . sobre la
llegada del . . . Príncipe Esteban,” AGS SGU 6951, 3, f. 93. See also Caroline A Williams, “‘If You Want Slaves
Go to Guinea’: Civilisation and Savagery in the ‘Spanish’ Mosquitia, 1787–1800,” Slavery and Abolition,
forthcoming.
40. Offen, “Creating Mosquitia,” especially pp. 272–273; Offen, “Race and Place,” pp. 109–112.
41. Caballero y Góngora to Gil y Lemos, Turbaco, February 26, 1789, AHN, Diversos-Colecciones,
32, 36.
42. Caballero y Góngora to Valdés y Bazan, Turbaco, October 16, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 32; Marqués
del Campo to Floridablanca, London, February 7, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 15; and Troncoso to Conde del
Campo de Alange, Guatemala, December 28, 1790, AGS SGU 6949, 17.
43. Caballero y Góngora to Marqués de Sonora, Turbaco, November 20, 1722, AGS SGU 6945, 1.
“FAMILIARITY AND EQUALITY”: LESSONS OF THE

BRITISH EXPERIENCE
For reasons both personal and commercial, those Britons who chose to enter
the Spanish service after 1787 tended to overstate the degree of influence they
enjoyed in native society, and to exaggerate the threat posed to Spanish secu-
rity by a people they commonly characterized as warlike, fearsome, and cruel.44
Indeed, it is ironic that although no Spaniards were either targeted or harmed
as a result of the conflict that engulfed the region in the early 1790s, long-
standing grievances relating to the commercial practices of former superin-
tendent Hodgson did come to a head at that time. In September 1790, 300
Miskitu, led by their chiefs, forced him to flee his Bluefields residence, leaving
the bulk of his property and fortune behind.45 Nevertheless, in different ways
and at different times, both he and Francis Meany provided valuable insights
into the economy, society, and political organization of the Miskitu, insights
that both illuminated the nature of Miskitu-British interactions and con-
tributed significantly to shaping Spanish policy toward the region during the
first key years of contact.
Spaniards learned, for example, about the volume, variety, and value of goods
that the British had distributed as gifts, in time of war as well as peace, and
about the manner in which such goods were given. Meany advised that jefes
principales should never be given the same gifts as commoners, but should
instead be distinguished from them both by the number of gifts received, and
by their quality. This was especially important where items of dress, such as
shirts, hats, and stockings were concerned. To give “to one of those Indian
principales things . . . inferior to those to which they are accustomed,” he
emphasized, “can never have a good outcome, nor can this be the means to
attract . . . them to the [Spanish] nation.”46 Hodgson advised that Spaniards
would need “to furnish such means as may persuade them at first . . . that they
have changed their situation for the better,” which from their experience of
British “usage”—lately so familiar, he said, that it bordered on equality—
meant that a plentiful supply of gifts would be essential. Goods alone, however,
would not suffice to bring the Miskitu into friendship with Spaniards. Unless
distributed “with an address that will mark them as proceeding from the
Benevolence of a Fatherly King,” Hodgson warned, they would be seen in
44. For example Kaye to Marqués del Campo, London, October 9, 1787, AGS SGU 6948, 15; and
Kaye to Marqués del Campo, Honduras, June 3, 1790, AGS SGU 6949, 20.
45. Hodgson to Troncoso, Chagre, November 17, 1790, AGS SGU 6948, 21; “Diario” (Meany-Siv-
elly), AGS SGU 6950, 6. See also Goett, “Disaporic Identities,” pp. 101–105.
46. Meany to Troncoso, Guatemala, August 25, 1792, AGS SGU 6950, 8, fs. 32-3.
“the base light of being a Tribute for peace,” with inevitably negative effects
on Miskitu attitudes toward the newcomers.47
From the British the Spaniards also learned of the tensions that existed
between the two groups that comprised the Miskitu polity, and of the rivalries
that shaped relations between its principal chiefs. “Those we call Mosquitos,”
Hodgson explained, “are nearly divided equally into two castes,” each dis-
trustful of and hostile toward the other. On the one side were the “original
Indians.” Generally “tractable,” they considered themselves “owners of the
country.” On the other side were the Zambos. Unreliable and, in the former
superintendent’s view, incapable of any “sense of justice, gratitude, or human-
ity,” by the 1780s they were clearly seen by the British as the more obdurate
and demanding of the two population groups.48 Each of the jurisdictions was,
for the most part, self-governing through its respective chiefs, but these were
neither equal, nor entirely independent. Hodgson described Admiral Dilson,
for example, as the “principal man” of Pearl Key Lagoon, and as the leader of
a large district. This, however, could now only “almost” be called the “fourth
separate state” that it had functioned as under his father’s leadership.49 The
Indian governor he described as the “principal Mosquito Man of all,” one who
enjoyed “more command than the King,” and also as “the next man to the
King,” who was independent of him but only “in many respects.”50
Seemingly contradictory, these observations reflected Hodgson’s understand-

ing of the internal functioning of the evolving Miskitu kingdom as one consist-
ing of separate, competing, but simultaneously interdependent jurisdictions,
with the latter quality demonstrated especially when matters of concern to the
entire polity were at stake. Thus, Hodgson informed the Spanish of “the great
jealousy, if not dislike” that characterized relations between the Indian gover-
nor and the Zambo king, and of the absolute necessity in conducting business
on the coast of respecting customary diplomatic formalities in order to avoid
affronting one or both. At the same time, he showed the ways in which the four
47. Hodgson to Estachería, Trujillo, April 17, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 32; Hodgson to Marqués de
Sonora, Cartagena, March 5, 1787, AGS SGU 6946, 9. There was no implication of submission in native peo-
ples’ acceptance of formulations of this kind. They were, rather, commonly used devices to make the mon-
archs of allied European nations provide for their needs. See for example MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements,
pp. 32, 40; DuVal, Native Ground, pp. 137, 181; White, Middle Ground, pp. 271, 275; Weber, Bárbaros, pp.
215–216; and Aron, American Confluence, p. 56.
48. Hodgson to Caballero y Góngora, n.p., n.d., AGS SGU 6945, 1; Hodgson to Marqués de Sonora,
Cartagena, March 5, 1787, AGS SGU 6946, 9.
49. “Diary (Robert Hodgson),” June 1 and 23, 1787, AGS SGU 6948, 29; Hodgson to Caballero y
Góngora, Boca Chica, June 2, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 31.
50. Hodgson to Fuertes, Punta Gorda, September 25, 1787, AGS SGU 6945, 1; Hodgson to Caballero
y Góngora, Boca Chica, June 2, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 31; and Caballero y Góngora to Gil y Lemos, Tur-
baco, February 26, 1789, AHN, Diversos-Colecciones, 32, 36.
political jurisdictions collectively participated in ritual drinking and consulted

across jurisdictional and ethnic divides on matters of common interest. Over the
early months of 1787, for example, when leaders and other chiefs within and
across the Indian-Zambo domains were debating the implications of the British
government’s decision to abandon its political and economic interests on the
coast, Hodgson recorded frequent consultations, exchanges of messages, and at
least one Indian congress taking place, consisting of 17 chiefs of the governor’s
and the king’s districts, “and at least seventy of their people.”51
Francis Meany and the Spanish officer Juan Sivelly recorded similarly wide-
spread consultations within villages, clusters of villages, and the kingdom as a
whole when, commissioned by the Guatemalan audiencia to conduct an inves-
tigation into the Indian governor’s death, they travelled through the region in
1791. In a diary covering the months from May to September, they made
repeated reference to the customary assemblies or juntas, sometimes accom-
panied by festive drinking and dancing, that brought together jefes and prin-
cipales before any important matters were discussed with outsiders. While in
Sandy Bay on June 12, for example, they recorded that King George had
assured them that he would explain the circumstances surrounding Briton’s
death, but that he would first gather together “all the principales of his par-
cialidad.” In Tuapí on June 21, the investigators noted the arrival of Colonel
Norwich, General Smee, and other parciales, who had also come to discuss
recent events. “Before this,” however, “in accordance with the custom of the
Mosquito Indians . . . all the principales who were present there got together.”
At Laguna de Perlas (Pearl Lagoon) on July 8, Admiral Dilson was likewise
said to have assembled “all his principales” before conversing with the investi-
gators, and to have done so again on August 8, on which day Meany and Siv-
elly observed a “great gathering of Indians, forming as is customary [a] junta,”
before taking part in “one of their excessive chichadas [drinking sessions].”52
In their testimony before the investigators, native witnesses also pointed to the
many consultations that had preceded the sentence handed down to the Indian
governor in August or September 1790. They stressed that the decision to
inflict the ultimate punishment upon Briton had been made not by individuals
but rather by a junta consisting of 14 chiefs and elders, including the king’s
uncle or cousin Eugene and his brother Prince Stephen; Captains Powell,
Boswain, Wilson, and Springs; and Pedro the Christian.53 In this way, they
51. “Diary” (Hodgson), especially the entries for June 14 and 18 and September 14, 22, 23, 24, and
27, 1787, AGS SGU 6948, 29.
52. “Diario” (Meany-Sivelly), June 12 and 21, July 8, and August 8 and 10, 1791, AGS SGU 6950, 6.
53. Ibid., June 14, 1791. Although Meany and Sivelly referred to Eugene as the king’s uncle, Offen
considered that he was either cousin or brother to George II. Offen, “Sambo and Tawira,” p. 351.
informed Meany and Sivelly, the Miskitu had followed their customs, agreed
that Briton “had deserved to die,” and they then “came together to take his
life . . . requesting George’s assistance for this undertaking.”54
The men who participated in Miskitu juntas were the “headmen,” “leading
men,” or “principal men”—jefes, principales, or cabezas de partido for the
Spaniards—who also appear in the sources in a different guise. They were the
major generals, generals, admirals, colonels, and captains whose numbers pro-
liferated in the late eighteenth century, and whose identities and functions
have confounded scholars of the Mosquitia.55 According to Spanish estimates,
there were in 1790 some 60 men, aside from the regional leaders, who were
recognized as “chiefs and captains of Zambos and Mosquitos.” Accounting
for the costs to the royal treasury of the goods that had been distributed as
gifts over the previous three years, Alejo García, intendant-governor of
Comayagua, indicated that three “head chiefs” and 30 “captains and officers”
resided in the region stretching from Río Tinto to Cabo Gracias a Dios, and
a further “two head chiefs, two Generals, three Admirals, and 24 captains and
officers” in that extending from Cabo Gracias to Bluefields.56 Many were said
to hold paper commissions that confirmed their rank and status57; these com-
missions had been conferred by successive British superintendents when, once
each year, they delivered the gift allowance and “made officials.”58 Signifi-
cantly, this does not appear to have been a process instigated by Europeans,
but rather by the four regional leaders themselves. Discussing the progress of
negotiations with Colville Briton in January 1789, Nicaragua’s governor Juan
de Ayssa noted that, at Briton’s request, he had issued a commission as alférez
for “one of his subjects” and one as sergeant for “another subject.”59
Although these were only minor commissions, at the higher ranks such recog-
nitions carried substantial material rewards. According to Spanish officer
Antonio Porta y Costas, men of senior rank were distinguished from the gen-
eral population by the range of European goods they possessed—the “pretty
objects” and “fine English china” with which their homes were equipped—
and by the quality and refinement of their clothing. Whereas it was not
unusual, he explained in 1792, to find among the “common people” some
dressed in the finest of hats with no more than a loincloth, and others dressed
in the finest of silk stockings but without shoes, officers and cabezas princi-
54. “Diario” (Meany-Sivelly), June 22, 1791, AGS SGU 6950, 6.

55. See for example Olien, “General, Governor, and Admiral,” pp. 282–283.
56. “Estado que manifiesta los Regalos que se han calculado para los Gefes y Capitanes,” Comayagua,
September 20, 1790, AGS SGU 6949, 21.
57. Ibid.
58. Hervías to Estachería, Rio Tinto, September 20, 1787, AGS SGU 6948, 14.
59. Ayssa to Estachería, León, January 23, 1789, AGS SGU 6948, 17.
pales wore uniforms so elaborate and impressive that he had seen “none better
among the nobles of the Court [of Spain].”60
Spanish records associate the higher ranked among titled individuals with lead-
ership of villages and extended families (kaimkas), or parcialidades.61 The
latter term was used to refer to the four districts or precincts, as the British had
called them, which together comprised the Miskitu kingdom, and to the indi-
vidual commands of each of the district’s many chiefs that together comprised
its leader’s following.62 In 1791, for example, Meany and Sivelly identified
General Augustus, Colonel Mystery, and Admiral Robocle as chiefs of the
towns of Tara, Owastara (Awastara), and Tacora (Dakura), respectively, and
the latter as chief of “all the heads of family of his parcialidad.”63 In British and
Spanish sources they were frequently portrayed as the officers, and even some-
times as the subalterns, of district-level leaders, especially in the context of
negotiation with outsiders.64 The evidence shows, however, that many of these
men were powerful in their own right, potentially even rivals for leadership.
When in November 1787, viceroy Caballero y Góngora informed Madrid of

the arrival in Cartagena of the Zambo General Maclean and the Indians Gen-
eral Smee and Colonel Norwich, he drew on Hodgson’s insights to comment
of the first that he commanded “a quite considerable parcialidad,” and that
because he was “one of those visionaries or soothsayers [shamans or sukias]”
and had spent time in Jamaica, he was “a chief of some consequence among
them.” Of Colonel Norwich he observed that although he had not previously
travelled outside the Mosquitia, he was “a thoughtful man, of great courage,
[who] enjoys influence among those peoples, and his parcialidad is quite
large.” Of General Smee, Caballero y Góngora noted that he had travelled to
London, commanded a large parcialidad, enjoyed “influence over the popula-
tion at large,” and was “as respected as the governor.”65 The prominence of
these individuals derived, then, from the size of their parcialidades (or com-
mands), from courage and success in war, from their knowledge of the world
that lay beyond the Mosquitia, and, for some, their roles as elders or shamans.
That they also enjoyed independence as powerful chiefs and war leaders is
shown by the record of private discussions held between Smee and the viceroy
in October 1787. According to the (English language) interpreter José Bena-
60. Porta y Costas to Troncoso, Guatemala, September 22, 1792, AGS SGU 6950, 8. On the adoption
of British uniforms and other emblems of authority, see also Offen, “Creating Mosquitia,” pp. 272–277.
61. Offen, “Miskitu Kingdom,” pp. 167–169.
62. Offen, “Creating Mosquitia,” p. 263.
63. “Diario” (Meany-Sivelly), June 12 and 20, 1791, AGS SGU 6950, 6.
64. See, for example, “Relación del Reconocimiento . . . Antonio Porta y Costas,” AGS SGU 6949, 17;
and “Proceedings at a General Congress,” TNA CO 137/79, fs. 164-67.
65. Caballero y Góngora to Valdés y Bazán, Cartagena, November 5, 1787, AGS SGU 6948, 29.
vides, Smee offered in those discussions to “reduce, of his own accord, the
other chiefs, and to declare war on those reluctant to embrace a party so . . .
advantageous to his entire nation.” The general also expressed “his confidence
that he would reduce them all . . . for in joining [forces] with Governor Briton
. . . the most powerful chief of the region . . . who would surely follow his lead,
he had no doubt that he would gather more than enough men for the under-
taking, with no [Spanish] assistance other than some arms and ammunition.”66
Jefes and principales thus appear to have been the allies and supporters, rather
than the subjects or subordinates, of district-level leaders. Other evidence sug-
gests that their allegiance was conditional and never guaranteed. Clarifying the
weight and prominence of the region’s principal men in 1787, Hodgson
explained that while Admiral Dilson was the most prominent chief of Laguna
de Perlas, and enjoyed the largest of its various commands, he no longer led the
properly separate state that his father had led before him.67 Hodgson provided
no details to substantiate his assessment. However, a 1783 report by Edward
Despard and James Lawrie, the last of the British superintendents, indicates
that, four years prior to the evacuation, Dilson had by far the smallest following
among the regional leaders, perhaps suggesting a hemorrhaging of support after
his father’s death. Informing the governor of Jamaica of the size of the Miskitu
male population, Lawrie and Despard divided the total of 2,550 into six sepa-
rate commands. Of these, they estimated that 700 men in the north of the ter-
ritory, between Caratasca Lagoon and Sandy Bay approximately, were “General
Tempest and Colonel Lee’s people,” and that 600 were “King George’s
people.” From Tuapí to the southward, they classified 800 men as “Governor
Briton’s people,” but only 200 as “Admiral Dilson’s people.”68
Yet when Antonio Porta y Costas reported on a tour of inspection that

brought him into contact with prominent chiefs across the region in 1790, he
drew attention to the fact that rising tensions between chiefs were leading
many to reconsider their loyalties, thereby enabling Dilson to attract new fol-
lowers from among Briton’s disaffected partidarios. Moreover, in discussing
the “absolute” authority that George exercised over his “dependents”—“there
is no Law,” Porta y Costas said, “but his desire and to his desire no opposi-
66. Benavides, “Declaración,” Cartagena, October 25, 1787, AGS SGU 6948, 29.
67. Hodgson to Caballero y Góngora, Boca Chica, June 2, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 31.
68. Of the two final commands identified, one, “Colonel Caesar’s people,” comprised approximately 50
men in the Pearl Key Lagoon region; the other, “Colonel Jasper Hall’s people,” consisted of 200 men in the
Great River region. See Lawrie and Despard to Campbell, Kingston, June 16, 1783, National Army Museum,
London, 6807/183-1, f. 15. José del Río estimated the total population residing between the River San Juan
and Cabo Gracias a Dios at between 4,000 and 5,000, when he reported on a tour of inspection of the region
in 1793. See José del Río, “Disertación,” AGS SGU 6950, 4.
tion”—the officer also revealed that multiple independent factions existed

within the district the king led. As he attempted to make sense of this contra-
diction, Porta y Costas explained that “the life of he who has the misfortune
to provoke [the king’s] displeasure is at risk while [he remains] in allegiance
with him.” For that reason, chiefs who found themselves at odds with the king
withdrew support, gathered “malcontents” to their side, and formed rival fac-
tions, with previously cooperative relationships sinking instead into mutual
“insolence and insult.” As of August 1790, Porta y Costas claimed, George
had as rivals Admiral Walton, General Maclean, and the “old man” Malteze,
who had formed an opposition and rejected the king’s authority, although this
did not mean “that they entirely embrace ours.”69
Drawing on the knowledge of the antiguos colonos as well as personal obser-

vation and experience, Spaniards who first came into close contact with the
Miskitu learned that theirs was a dispersed system of political organization,
based on consultation within and across districts and ethnic groups. They also
learned that the authority of commissioned leaders was dependent on and con-
strained by powerful elders, shamans, and village chiefs. As a result, they came
to understand that colonization and evangelization—Spain’s long-term objec-
tives for this as for all its frontier territories—would require them to gain the
trust not of one, but of all of its leaders and “men of consequence,” as the
British termed them.70 As Hodgson implied in March 1787, when he pro-
posed to bring the most consequential chiefs with him to Cartagena, the high
financial cost that such a measure would impose on the royal treasury would
be far outweighed by the opportunities it would afford each chief personally to
experience Spanish hospitality and individually to swear an oath of allegiance
to the crown.71 This proposal received Caballero y Góngora’s strong support,
and it led to the visits of more than 30 Miskitu principales between October
1787 and May 1789.72 Among these were Governor Briton; King George;
Generals Smee and Maclane; Colonels Sweetwilliam, Norwich, Caesar, and
Hall; Admirals Dilson, Rodney, and Walton; and Captain Augustus and 18
other “generals” or “caciques.”73 Indeed, some of these visits were so
69. “Relación” (Porta y Costas), AGS SGU 6949, 17.

70. For example, Kaye to Marqués del Campo, Honduras, June 3, 1790, AGS SGU 6949, 20; and
“Diary” (Hodgson), June 23 and September 14 and 19, 1787, AGS SGU 6948, 29.
71. Hodgson to Marqués de Sonora, Cartagena, March 5, 1787, AGS SGU 6946, 9; Caballero y Gón-
gora to Marqués de Sonora, Cartagena, March 6, 1787, AGS SGU 6945, 1.
72. Caballero y Góngora to Marqués de Sonora, Cartagena, March 6, 1787, AGS SGU 6945, 1.
73. Caballero y Góngora to Valdés y Bazán, Cartagena, November 5, 1787, AGS SGU 6948, 29;
Hodgson to Caballero y Góngora, Boca Chica, June 2, 1788, Caballero y Góngora to Valdés y Bazán, Tur-
baco, May 28, 1788, Caballero y Góngora to Valdés y Bazán, Turbaco, June 11, 1788, and “Lista de los
Pasajeros,” in AGS SGU 6948, 31; “Cuenta del Coronel . . . Hodgson,” AGS SGU 6949, 21; and Gil y
Lemos to Valdés, Santa Fe, May 15, 1789, AGS SGU 6949, 5.
extended, and Spanish hospitality so costly, that at the same time as the new
viceroy Francisco Gil y Lemos informed Madrid in May 1789 that the arrival
of the latest delegation from the Mosquitia signaled the culmination of its peo-
ples’ peaceful submission to the crown, he also advised Hodgson that the great
expense that the chiefs’ residence imposed on the royal treasury could be
reduced if they were returned to their places of origin as soon as they had
sworn fidelity to the king of Spain. “I am persuaded,” he concluded, “that they
will by now have experienced [enough of] our generosity.”74
FIDELITY AND VASSALAGE: NEGOTIATING TERMS

WITH THE KING OF SPAIN
Such receptivity to Spanish offers of friendship and hospitality was not new. As
scholars have shown, there were numerous occasions during the decades of
British settlement on which Miskitu leaders had made contact with colonial
officials in neighboring territories, or had responded with interest to their
approaches.75 However, those attempts at negotiation had invariably been iso-
lated, localized, and short-lived. As in so many other regions where Europeans
competed for the loyalty of Indians, such overtures on the part of the Miskitu
are likely to have been aimed primarily at exploiting moments of British vul-
nerability to re-negotiate the basis of the alliance—to remind the British of
their obligations or to obtain for themselves more favorable terms of commer-
cial exchange.76 Miskitu promises of loyalty and allegiance after 1787 were of
a different character, in the sense that they were driven by the pressing need,
in the aftermath of the departure of all but a small number of their long-stand-
ing trading partners, to find new markets for local produce, as well as an alter-
native source of supply of European manufactured goods. In traveling to
Cartagena in 1787, for instance, General Smee sought to obtain a commit-
ment that the Spanish would purchase “the produce and effects of their indus-
try”—the sarsaparilla and tortoiseshell that constituted key items of trade for
his people—at prices equal to those paid by the British.77 Admiral Dilson came
to request a “passport” that would enable him to enter any port of the viceroy-
alty, “to sell the products of his country, and to acquire other items for his own
personal use, or for sale to his own people.”78
74. Ibid.; Gil y Lemos to Hodgson, May 15, 1789, AGS SGU 6949, 21.
75. Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico, especially chapt. 8; Offen, “Sambo and Tawira,” pp.
346–354; Rogers, “Caribbean Borderland,” pp. 129–130; Olien, “General, Governor, and Admiral,” pp.
288–291, 297–298; and Sorsby, “British Superintendency,” especially chapts. 7 to 10.
76. See for example Du Val, Native Ground, pp. 130–134; and MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements,
p. 89.
77. Caballero y Góngora to Valdés y Bazán, Cartagena, November 5, 1787, AGS SGU 6948, 29.
78. “Pasaporte,” Turbaco, July 26, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 24.
The widely reported willingness of leading chiefs to identify themselves with

the titles and insignia that symbolized authority among the Spanish is also
indicative of efforts on their part to develop political relations of the kind
previously maintained with the British. King George, for example, not only
made strong representations that he be permitted to travel to the Spanish
court, where he wished to pay his respects in person to King Charles III, but
he also offered to relinquish, in Caballero y Góngora’s words, the “investi-
ture with which he was decorated by the English [in exchange] for any other
that His Majesty should care to give him.”79 On his return from Cartagena,
Governor Briton kneeled before Pedro Brizzio, the senior officer at Cabo
Gracias a Dios, and swore fidelity to the Spanish king, for a second time,
before accepting as symbols of that act of submission a uniform, a walking
cane, and a gold medal bearing the bust of Charles III.80 Both he and his
brother Robin Lee also followed another practice that had been common in
the time of the British. On receiving baptism, Briton took the name Don
Carlos Antonio de Castilla. Robin Lee adopted the name of the highest-
ranking Spanish officer (the same Pedro Brizzio) then resident at Cabo Gra-
cias a Dios. The missionary Manuel Barrueta referred to him as “Don Pedro
Brizzio brother of Don Carlos Antonio de Castilla” and noted that he was
“also known as Rabin-Li.”81
Miskitu cooperation with Spaniards during the early years of settlement did not
mean that a people who, as Offen has argued, considered themselves a free and
independent nation equal to the nations of Europe, would acquiesce to the
colonial status to which Spaniards aimed to reduce them.82 It indicates instead
the degree to which, through the decades of British contact, their economy
had become dependent on the European tools and weapons that facilitated
hunting, fishing, and warfare. Their material culture too had become depend-
ent on European items of consumption, including the luxury goods that
denoted status and prestige in native (and European) society, and their politi-
cal structures had become dependent on external recognition and its associated
commissions for legitimacy and stability.83 The Miskitu-British relationship had
been born of mutual convenience, and both sides had been able to exploit the
needs and fears of the other by playing on the perils posed, or possibilities
79. Caballero y Góngora to Valdés y Bazán, Turbaco, May 28, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 31.
80. Ayssa to Valdés y Bazán, León, December 23, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 24; Estachería to Valdés,
Guatemala, January 5, 1789, in “Extracto de la Representación que el Presidente de Guatemala dirige a S.
M . . .,” AGS SGU 6948, 8.
81. Barrueta to Ayssa, Alabará de Mosquitos, February 28, 1789, and Barrueta to Ayssa, Tubapi, April
26, 1789, AGS SGU 6948, 24.
82. Offen, “Race and Place,” pp. 93, 101, 104; Offen, “Creating Mosquitia,” pp. 262, 272–274, 278.
83. This is not to suggest, however, that the Miskitu-British relationship was free of tension. See for
example Sorsby, “British Superintendency”; and Romero Vargas, Las sociedades.
opened, by the presence of Spaniards beyond the borders of Miskitu territory.

However, the British government’s decision in 1786 to cede to Spain its inter-
ests on the coast created new and unexpected challenges for the peoples who
had made possible British settlement, trade, and resource exploitation for half
a century.84 That the nature of those challenges was grasped by them is sug-
gested by Colville Briton’s assessment of his people’s situation when he was
negotiating with Governor Ayssa the terms of his incorporation in Spanish
structures for the government of the region. As Ayssa reported it, Briton
lauded the manufacturing capacity of that province’s indigenous population
and at the same time protested the British failure to develop industry despite
their many years of settlement in Miskitu territory.85
Indeed, the evidence shows that even during the years of conflict that fac-
tionalized first the Indian Miskitu, and then the Indians and Zambos, their
leaders purposely sought to avoid a break with the Spaniards. Violence broke
out approximately a year after the Indian governor’s return from the city of
León, where he had married a former captive, the Nicaraguan María
Manuela Rodríguez, and had been rewarded for his swift move toward the
Spanish orbit with an official appointment as governor of Indians and
Zambos.86 This office conferred on Briton authority over districts and peo-
ples under the command of four leaders, each of whom held a British com-
mission. It also conferred on him additional privileges, including the right to
fill posts in native administration and to receive a salary and other “honors
associated with this type of appointment.” The decision to bestow wide-
ranging powers and privileges on one of the region’s principal leaders
responded to a long-standing Spanish preference for governing Indians indi-
rectly through a single paramount chief.87 That it was made at all, however,
given how much the Spanish had learned about Miskitu political organiza-
tion since 1787, reflected differences of approach between the various over-
lapping jurisdictions to which fell the responsibility for bringing the territory
under Spanish control.88
84. Sorsby, “British Superintendency,” pp. 325–329.

85. On visiting León in 1788, Admiral Sambo similarly “complained with bitterness that the English
had left them in ignorance, to the extent that they neither instructed them in the repair of their tools, nor pro-
vided the most rudimentary knowledge of [any] other trade.” Ayssa to Estachería, León, December 23, 1788,
AGS SGU 6948, 8; Ayssa to Estachería, León, January 23, 1789, AGS SGU 6948, 17; and “Testimonio de
lo consultado,” AGS SGU 6948, 8, f. 12. Ironically, as Rogers has shown, this was the same accusation that
the British made against the Miskitu. Rogers, “Caribbean Borderland,” pp. 129–130.
86. Ayssa to Valdés y Bazán, León, December 23, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 24. For an outline of the
Ayssa-Briton negotiations, see Tomás Ayón, Historia de Nicaragua, 3 vols. (Nicaragua: Fondo de Promoción
Cultural Banco de América, 1977), Vol. 3, pp. 209–236.
87. Weber, Bárbaros, p. 211.
88. Tompson, “Establecimientos Costeros,” pp. 160–165.
Unlike officials in the viceroyalty, who advocated gradual methods based on

the British model,89 those in the Captaincy General of Guatemala were less
willing to act on the advice of the British, particularly Hodgson, whose
integrity they doubted.90 Thus, when presented with the opportunity to
govern through a Spanish ally, they ignored prior experience and sought
instead to accelerate the colonizing process by bringing all the Miskitu under
Briton’s authority.91 This, however, proved to be a serious error of judgment.
It not only sparked violent contention over the rights and responsibilities of
leadership, but also forced the Spanish to acknowledge their inability to deter-
mine where the locus of authority in Miskitu society lay. “I do not believe,”
Francisco Pérez Brito reported from Cabo Gracias a Dios in November 1790,
“that in the election of a governor to succeed . . . Don Carlos,” the Indian
chiefs “will ever agree to my intervening.”92 Two months later, Bernardo
Troncoso, audiencia president and captain general of the Kingdom of
Guatemala, confirmed that the selection of a successor had taken place with-
out Spanish participation. The Indians, he informed Meany, had “elected as
governor in Tubapi [Tuapí], in place of . . . Carlos Antonio de Castilla . . . his
brother Pedro Rablin [Pedro Brizzio/Robin Lee],” and had “demanded of
this government that it approve [the appointment].”93
Spanish misdjugement and Miskitu assertions of independence notwithstand-

ing, the actions of their leaders show that this was a conflict aimed at resolving
internal tensions over leadership of the kingdom in the period following the
British evacuation, rather than any movement of resistance against the Spanish.
Thus, at the same time as Colville Briton requested, in mid-May 1789, that
Ayssa dispatch 400 troops and a supply of weapons to assist him in enforcing
his authority over a resistant nation,94 Viceroy Gil y Lemos informed the crown
of the arrival in Cartagena of the fourth Miskitu delegation to reach the city
since October 1787. Consisting of the “Generals who had not previously pre-
sented themselves or yet acknowledged due vassalage to His Majesty,” he
reported, these men came “with the same sincere intentions” as those who pre-
89. Caballero y Góngora advocated good faith, and gradual and peaceful methods. No restrictions, he
advised his successor, should be placed on the Miskitu people’s freedom to pursue their economic activities,
“industry, or preoccupations.” Caballero y Góngora to Gil y Lemos, Turbaco, February 26, 1789, AHN
Diversos-Colecciones 32, 36.
90. See for example Estachería to Caballero y Góngora, Guatemala, May 7, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 17;
and Ayssa to Valdés y Bazán, León, February 23, 1789, AGS SGU 6948, 24. See also Tompson, “Establec-
imientos Costeros,” pp. 157–179.
91. Ayssa to Barrueta, León, October 6, 1789, AGS SGU 6948, 24.
92. Pérez Brito to Salablanca, Cabo de Gracias a Dios, November 11, 1790, AGS SGU 6949, 17.
93. Troncoso to Meany, Guatemala, February 5, 1792, “Testimonio de los autos sobre la comisión con-
ferida a Don Miguel Sánchez Pareja,” Cuaderno 5, AGS SGU 6951, 3.
94. Castilla to Ayssa, Alabará, May 15, 1789, and Barrueta to Ayssa, Alabará, May 15, 1789, AGS SGU
6948, 24.
ceded them, and expressed their willingness to receive missionaries in their set-
tlements with “friendship and kindness.”95 In 1791, as the conflict widened to
draw the Indian Admiral Dilson and the Zambo King George into a struggle
for control of the kingdom, both chiefs contrived to obtain Spanish approval to
advance their own claims to leadership. In July, Meany and Sivelly recorded that
Dilson had approached them and invited them to his home, where he related
that he had been elected king by the Indians. Stating that he considered him-
self worthy of the role because he was “legitimately Indian” (rather than Afro-
Indian), he requested of them, as the representatives of the audiencia president,
that they confirm him in that position.96 As a chief of longer standing and with
a larger following, George stressed his stronger claim to leadership. Whereas, he
informed Meany and Sivelly, the admiral was not recognized as leader outside
the territory, he himself was “well-known, first in England and Jamaica, and
now in Cartagena, as king of the Mosquitos.”97 Moreover, in notifying officials
of his intention to thwart Dilson’s ambitions, George insisted that he desired
friendship with Spaniards, and assured them “that any action he should take
would be directed to no purpose other than that he . . . indicated.”98
“THEY ALL GO WHEREVER THEY FEEL LIKE IT”
In seeking to explain to his superiors what lay behind reports reaching Spanish
territories over the summer of 1789 of a threatened uprising on the coast, Juan
de Ayssa rehearsed a range of possible motives: Briton’s lengthy absence from
the region, his baptism and marriage, the “sinister ideas” that British fishing and
trading vessels planted in the minds of a susceptible population, rumors of an
impending Anglo-Spanish war, and shortages that the Miskitu were beginning
to experience in the supply of Spanish goods.99 In reporting in May, for exam-
ple, that the expected uprising against Briton had taken place, Ayssa attributed
it to his “reduction to Christianity, and submission to the king.”100 Warning in
June, however, that problems in the supply of tools, gunpowder, and clothing
had to be addressed as a matter of urgency, he suggested “that the [current]
state of affairs may be attributable to the scarcity [of goods] they experience.”
It would come as no surprise, he added, were this situation to lead the Miskitu
to renege on the oath of fealty that they had sworn to the king of Spain.101
95. Gil y Lemos to Valdés, Santa Fe, May 15, 1789, AGS SGU 6949, 5.
96. “Diario” (Meany-Sivelly), July 5 and 10, 1791, AGS SGU 6950, 6.
97. Ibid., June 15, 1791.
98. Ibid., September 4, 1791.
99. Ayssa to Valdés y Bazán, León, February 23, 1789, and July 23, 1789, AGS SGU 6948, 24.
100. Ayssa to Valdés y Bazán, León, May 23, 1789, ibid.
101. Ayssa to Estachería, León, June 23, 1789, ibid. See also Estachería to Valdés, Guatemala, June 18,
1789, AGS SGU 6948, 5.
By mid-1789, there were sources of tension in the Miskitu-Spanish relation-

ship, some of which would become increasingly problematic over time. None,
however, is more critical to understanding the events of 1790-1791 than
Colville Briton’s appointment as paramount chief of the Miskitu nation.102 The
bitter contention to which the Spanish gave rise in empowering Briton to exer-
cise authority over a polity that had long-since been governed by four leaders
at the district level, and a multiplicity of jefes and principales at the village level,
is particularly significant to this analysis. It casts new light on the causes and
consequences of a conflict that has been poorly understood by scholars of the
Mosquitia.103 More importantly, it sheds light on Miskitu political organiza-
tion, on the basis upon which political authority rested in native society, and
on the porous boundaries between the kingdom’s jurisdictions and ethnic
groups as the eighteenth century came to a close.
Writing to Ayssa in May 1789, for example, the Indian governor reported that
on his return to the coast he had found Indians and Zambos in an uproar. The
Zambo king, he stated, alerted to the fact that Briton was to assume command
over the region, had responded to the threat by striking an alliance with Admi-
ral Dilson. This was why, Briton explained, he was now in need of 400 Spanish
troops. “I find myself alone here,” he complained, “with no one who supports
me, because . . . the Mosquitos . . . all go wherever they feel like it whereas if I
had troops [at my disposal] they would not do so.”104 According to Manuel Bar-
rueta, who served as Briton’s scribe at this time, the Indian governor attributed
his inability to make good his new command to the kingdom’s divided jurisdic-
tions, and to the consequent weakness of political authority among the Miskitu:
Because the English commissioned a Zambo king, a general . . . called Tambli

[Tom Lee] and an admiral they call Alparis, these Mosquitos recognize no subor-
dination [and] nothing can they be instructed to do. They can neither be punished
for any infraction, nor be held in prison for three or four months, nor can even one
from every settlement be required to assist him or live with him as he has seen
occur . . . in the towns of that Kingdom [Guatemala], for if they come today, they
are gone the day after tomorrow, and if they are detained for any offense, they
transfer [support] to the other chiefs as . . . [Briton] says, has now occurred, most
of his soldiers having passed over to Alparis, the admiral.105
102. Ayssa to Valdés y Bazán, León, December 23, 1788, AGS SGU 6948, 24.
103. Almost without exception, scholars have emphasized the impact of Briton’s baptism and marriage,
and his alleged support for missionary efforts to end the Miskitu practice of polygyny. See for example Floyd,
Anglo-Spanish Struggle, p. 174; Olien, “General, Governor, and Admiral,” pp. 300–301, 307; García, “Inter-
acción étnica,” pp. 113, 115, 117–118; and Rogers, “Caribbean Borderland,” p. 135. See also Weber, Bár-
baros, pp. 242–243.
104. Castilla to Ayssa, Alabará, May 15, 1789, and Barrueta to Ayssa, Alabará, May 15, 1789, AGS
SGU 6948, 24.
105. Barrueta to Villegas, Alabará de Mosquitos, May 15, 1789, ibid.
An unsympathetic observer concerned by what he interpreted as Briton’s

hypocrisy in requesting baptism and contracting marriage, Barrueta concluded
that the favor shown him by colonial officials, first in Cartagena and then in
León, had fostered his ambition “to govern everywhere”—across the region
and including people nominally under the authority “of the Zambo [king], of
Tambli [Tom Lee], of Alparis.”106 Other observers commented instead on the
effects that the favor bestowed on Briton had on rival leaders. Writing in
August 1790, Porta y Costas drew attention to the fact that every conversation
or assembly between the chiefs of the king’s district had as its subject the terms
of Spanish trade—a perennial grievance by the 1790s—and the little regard in
which Spaniards appeared to hold George.107 The dispatch at about the same
time of an armed militia, 300-strong, to the mouth of the San Juan River—a
show of force aimed at demonstrating to the “suspicious” Miskitu, to borrow
Ayssa’s word, that the Spanish king would support Briton until such time as
his people deferred to his leadership108—can only have underscored the impli-
cations of the new arrangements for the government of the territory. Indeed,
when Meany and Sivelly conducted their investigation into Briton’s death in
1791, they stressed the resentment of jefes and principales, at the root of which
lay “the great esteem in which it seemed to them Don Carlos Antonio [de
Castilla/Colville Briton] was held [by Spaniards],” and which was not
extended “to any of them.”109
Historians of indigenous societies have, of course, to approach assessments of

native motivations written by Europeans with utmost caution. This is perhaps
particularly true of the Miskitu. For in discussing local politics in the late 1780s
and 1790s, British and Spanish observers alike highlighted what they perceived
as the ambition, arrogance, vanity, and conceit that informed the actions of
their principal chiefs, and the envy, jealousy, and avarice that shaped relations
between them. In 1787, for instance, Hodgson commented on the jealousies
that arose between King George and Governor Briton, even before the last of
the British had left the region, over who should be the first to undertake a
formal visit to the viceroy. The governor, Hodgson claimed, seemed “jealous
of the King’s going at the same time” as himself. The king, “equally jealous,”
was concerned that the governor should not be the first to negotiate with the
Spanish.110 Similarly, Meany and Sivelly attributed to vanity the growing con-
106. Barrueta to Villegas, Laguna de Perlas, June 24, 1789, ibid.

108. Ayssa to Castilla, León, July 9, 1789, Ayssa to Valdés y Bazán, León, July 23, 1789, and “Instruc-
ciones dadas . . . a Don Manuel Dambrine,” AGS SGU 6948, 24; Estachería to Valdés, Guatemala, Septem-
ber 9, 1789, AGS SGU 6949, 1.
109. Meany and Sivelly to Troncoso, Río Tinto, October 4, 1791, AGS SGU 6951, 3.
110. “Diary” (Hodgson), June 1, 16, 20, and 28, and September 23, 1787, AGS SGU 6948, 29.
flicts they witnessed developing as the Indian admiral and the Zambo king vied
for control of the kingdom. Its principal cause, they stated, was “the vain and
conceited idea that the first has formed that he should be recognized as King
of the Indians, not having been elected governor by the assembly . . . in Tuapí
. . . which selected Pedro Rablin [Robin Lee] for this role.” Such was Alparis’s
conceit, they wrote, that his only option was to assign to himself a title that
would lend credibility to the role he aspired to assume, and that he had then
had audacity to request that they, in their role as commissioners, recognize him
as king.111
However, the evidence that Meany and Sivelly gathered during their investi-
gation, when read alongside other European reports, enables us to place these
kinds of aspirations in the context of Miskitu political and social practices, as
they had evolved over a long period of sustained contact with Europeans.
Native witnesses who came before Meany and Sivelly, for example, revealed
that a range of grievances lay behind the actions of those chiefs who led the
resistance against Briton. These included his efforts to assume control over the
entire Miskitu region, his threats to send dissenters as slaves to Spanish terri-
tories, his failure to compensate followers for the captives released to the col-
onizers, his alleged support for Spanish aims to end polygyny, and, crucially,
his appropriation of “the gifts that the Spaniards had given him to distribute
among . . . officers and commoners.”112 The significance of this last transgres-
sion of the social responsibilities of leadership cannot be overstated. Among
the Miskitu, as among many other native groups in the Americas, a leader’s
personal authority rested not on his ability to accumulate commodities, but on
procuring prized resources and redistributing them generously.113 In 1790,
not long before Briton’s death, Spanish officer Porta y Costas noted the
importance of the redistributive functions of leaders when he recorded his
impression of the paradoxical ways in which king and governor were expected
to relate to their followers.114 “In the same way as . . . [George] is absolute
112. “Diario” (Meany-Sivelly), July 14, 1791, AGS SGU 6950, 6.
113. Offen, “Miskitu Kingdom,” p. 207. For comparison with other native groups, see for example
Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians,
1733–1816 (Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 42–45; Weber, Bár-
baros, p. 191; and Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “Gaining the Diplomatic Edge: Kinship, Trade, Ritual, and Religion
in Amerindian Alliances in Early North America,” in Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial
Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World, Wayne E. Lee, ed. (New York and London: New York
University Press, 2011), p.25.
114. On native gift economies, see also David Murray, Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-
White Exchanges (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers:
The Cultural Origins of North America (New York and Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2001); and
Seth Mallios, The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violence at Ajacán, Roanoke, and Jamestown
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006).
master of the property of his dependents,” he stated, “so they are of his: for
they have a right to everything that is not consumed by his household.” As for
Briton, even had his possessions amounted to nothing more than “one cow,
four horses, and two donkeys,” his followers understood that they would share
in those resources.115
In the same report, Porta y Costas also alerted the authorities to the growing
sense of grievance he perceived among Indians and Zambos regarding the
increasingly inequitable manner in which local officials were distributing Span-
ish gifts. In what was claimed to be a departure from British practice, whereby
gifts had been apportioned according to a scale that took account of the pres-
tige and prominence of the recipient—from the leaders of the four jurisdictions
down through higher-ranked chiefs, captains, and commoners—Porta y Costas
noted that by August 1790 allocations were being made only to the four lead-
ers, supposedly for onward distribution to other chiefs and their people. How-
ever, he warned, with specific reference to King George and Governor Briton,
“as these chiefs are . . . ruled by various prejudices . . . it transpires that they
have kept the greatest proportion for themselves, and to others individually
they have given little or nothing, and what little [they have given, they have
given] only to their favorites,” or closest allies.116
As an outside observer reporting grievances communicated by unidentified

informants, it was perhaps inevitable that Porta y Costas should fall back on
characterizing political and cultural practices that he did not fully grasp as
avarice or prejudice. The evidence, however, suggests that it was through the
allocation of commissions and the distribution of commodities that the king-
dom’s leaders obtained and sustained the allegiance of its powerful chiefs.
Through the intercession of leaders, the more prominent among these indi-
viduals obtained the commissions—as generals, colonels, and so on—that in
turn ensured favored access to essential tools, weapons, clothing, and other
items of European material culture.117 It is, then, significant that among other
transgressions, witnesses cited Briton’s failure to remunerate or compensate his
followers, and to distribute equitably the gifts that he had obtained through
personal dealings with Spaniards, as key factors provoking unrest and resist-
ance, leading finally to a realignment of alliances that saw some leading chiefs
cross the jurisdictional divide to the domain of the Indian admiral, and others
cross the ethnic divide to the domain of the Zambo king. Among the latter
115. “Relación” (Porta y Costas), AGS SGU 6949, 17. See also “Diario” (Meany-Sivelly), June 19,
1791, AGS SGU 6950, 6.
117. Claudio Saunt has drawn a similar conclusion for the Choctaws of the colonial Southeast. See “Our
Indians,” p. 68.
were General Augustus, Colonel Mystery, and Admiral Robocle. The reasons
that lay behind their decisions, and the implications of these for understanding
the fragile and shifting nature of political followings in late eighteenth-century
Miskitu society, emerge from Augustus’ testimony. Once empowered by the
Spanish, Augustus stated, Briton “made [his people] work without remunera-
tion,” required them to relinquish their prisoners to the Spanish “without
compensation,” subjected them to “cruel punishments,” and threatened to
send them to Spanish colonies “for use as slaves in the mines.” It was for these
reasons that he had “consulted his people and unanimously they had resolved
to leave the governor’s parcialidad, and pass over to that of George.”118
Particularly revealing of Miskitu social and political practices, however, are the
efforts made by Admiral Dilson—leader of the smallest and, in the British
analysis, weakest of the political divisions to emerge during the Superinten-
dency119—to build the alliances that would enable him to rival governor and
king for control first of the Indian polity, and then of the kingdom as a whole.
Witnesses reported that as opposition to Briton intensified from mid-1789,
Dilson won over some of his supporters—including Smee, Polson, and Nor-
wich, the most powerful of his allies—by fuelling fears that soon they would all
become “slaves.” By means of “promises to make Smee governor and various
inducements to the others,” it was said, Dilson succeeded in persuading them
that they should take Briton’s life, and they “brought over the commoners” to
join in that undertaking.120
To consolidate his gains and extend his following, however, Dilson required
the external recognition that translated into new commissions, goods, and
resources. It is surely this that explains his request that Meany and Sivelly for-
mally approve his election as king, and accounts for his hostile reaction to their
refusal to do so. On replying that they lacked the authority to confer political
appointments, Dilson, according to the investigators, expressed his dissatisfac-
tion in gendered terms. He was, he told them, “now a man,” and if Spaniards
refused to recognize him as king of the Miskitu, he would find the means to
secure that recognition for himself.121 The ways in which he sought to buttress
118. “Diario” (Meany-Sivelly), June 12, 1791, AGS SGU 6950, 6. See also Major Hewlett’s testimony,
in the diary entry for July 14.
119. See also Olien, “General, Governor, and Admiral,” pp. 280, 304–305.
121. “Diario” (Meany-Sivelly), July 5 and 6, 1791, AGS SGU 6950, 6. Gendered discourse of this kind
pervades the sources on intra-Miskitu and Miskitu-Spanish interactions during the period 1787–1800. Gale
MacLeitch and Nancy Shoemaker have shown that a similarly gendered language was employed by the Iro-
quois. See MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements, pp. 40–41; and Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becom-
ing Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.
106–112. See also Nancy Shoemaker, “An Alliance between Men: Gender Metaphors in Eighteenth-Century
his claim to the kingship further emphasize the importance of a leader’s abil-
ity to bestow commissions, hospitality, and gifts. In return for acknowledging
Dilson’s authority as chief, General Smee reportedly received arms, ammuni-
tion, and a quantity of cloth.122 Lavish feasts held in Laguna de Perlas from
July through August 1791 were said to have been aimed at attracting the sup-
port of one Baran, son of the Zambo Colonel Caesar, in exchange for a com-
mission as general and unspecified gifts.123 Significantly, even as Dilson pro-
ceeded to build alliances independently of the Spanish, he made a final request
that Meany and Sivelly supply him with a written general’s commission, which
“he wished to give said Baran.” Faced with a second refusal, they wrote, “he
appeared aggrieved,” and although “we told him that a commission or dis-
tinction not awarded by the . . . Spanish government would have no value . . .
this had no effect, and Alparis called his people together . . . and named Baran
as his general.”124
CONCLUSION
In bringing their investigation to a close, Meany and Sivelly predicted that in

this struggle for control of the Miskitu polity, the Indian admiral was unlikely
to be successful. In their analysis, the outcome would be determined by the
relative size of each chief’s following, and, as of October 1791, George had a
larger number of men to deploy than Dilson.125 Spanish records, however, pro-
vide no more than hints as to the nature of the confrontation that took place
between them, of the composition of the forces that were drawn into conflict,
or of the extent of the casualties suffered by either side. This is because the
events of 1791, like those of 1790, were played out beyond the view of the
Spanish. That they occurred offstage, however, is of crucial significance. It
shows that conflict between rival chiefs reflected not the intensity of Miskitu
hostility toward the Spanish, but contention over leadership of the Miskitu
polity in the context of a new relationship with them. Indeed, according to tes-
timony of the king’s interpreter Samuel Burras in his presentation of evidence
in relation to Briton’s death, the intention had been from the beginning to
avoid any occurrence from which Spaniards might infer that the Miskitu had it
in mind to harm them.126
American Diplomacy East of the Mississipi,” Ethnohistory 46:2 (Spring 1999), pp. 239–263. For a recent con-
tribution to the study of masculinity in the colonial Americas, see the essays in New Men: Manliness in Early
America, Thomas E. Foster, ed. (New York and London: New York University Press, 2011).
122. “Diario” (Meany-Sivelly), August 24, 1791, AGS SGU 6950, 6.
123. Ibid., July 10 and August 6, 1791.
124. Ibid., August 6, 1791.
126. “Diario” (Meany-Sivelly), June 9, 1791, AGS SGU 6950, 6.
Thus, it was not until January 1792 that officials in Guatemala established
that, sometime after October 1791, George had mobilized his men and had
led them to the admiral’s district, where he surrounded the chief ’s dwelling
and forced him “to set fire to it and to die in it.”127 At this time they also
established the aspirations that lay behind the actions of the Zambo king.
His brother Prince Stephen, audiencia president Troncoso informed his
superiors, had indicated to Spanish officers his desire to serve as governor
of the Indian Miskitu, which Spaniards interpreted as evidence that George
intended, with their (and Stephen’s) support, to become “chief of the
Indian parcialidad . . . through a third party, as he is that of the Zambos.”128
By 1792, however, experience had shown that no part of this nation that
saw itself as free and independent would submit to colonial attempts to
transform the ways in which it was governed. Although Bourbon officials
would continue to pursue a strategy of attracting prominent chiefs to
friendship and loyalty through hospitality and gift-giving, plans for the gov-
ernment of the Miskitu through a Spanish-appointed paramount leader
were abandoned. As Troncoso acknowledged, at least the three largest, if
not all four, of the divisions of the Miskitu polity should each retain its own
governor, as in former times.129
Sources dating from 1797 and 1798—a period of intense Spanish efforts,
against the background of renewed European war, to protect their Central
American territories from British incursions—provide us with further
insights into the wider impact of the conflicts, as well as their longer-term
effects. For example, when Spanish officer Miguel Sánchez Pareja reported
from the region in April 1797, he noted that the Miskitu no longer posed
the military threat that they had during earlier times, because the “bloody
debates” of the early 1790s had led to the destruction of their “famed
forces.” The entire fleet of war piraguas, he added, had been destroyed.130
Analysis of the documentary record for these years also confirms that by this
time, and as a consequence of the events of 1789-1791, a decisive shift had
taken place in the balance of power between Indians and Afro-Indians, mark-
ing the emergence of the king as the most prominent and powerful of the
region’s chiefs.131 However, the evidence does not appear to support Miskitu
oral memory, as recorded in 1893, that following George’s victory in the
civil war, the Indian Miskitu became tributaries or slaves of the Zambo
127. Troncoso to Conde del Campo de Alange, Guatemala, January 1, 1792, AGS SGU 6950, 1.
128. Ibid.
129. See the discussion of the reports submitted by Bernardo Troncoso, in AGS SGU 6950, 2.
130. Sánchez Pareja to Domás, Guanizon, April 11, 1797, AGS SGU 6951, 3.
131. Williams, “‘If You Want Slaves.’”
Miskitu.132 However weakened they may have been by their defeat, the
records show that a king, a general, and a governor continued to lead and
speak for the Miskitu throughout the years that remained to the Spaniards in
the region. They also show that Indians and Afro-Indians continued to par-
ticipate in the juntas or assemblies in which leaders, elders, shamans, and vil-
lage chiefs had customarily consulted on, and debated, matters of common
interest.133 Moreover, although brief references to the enslavement of Indian
Miskitu do emerge in 1798, these appear to relate to a single individual in
George’s possession. His enslaved status may have been no more than sym-
bolic of the Indians’ defeat. The records identify him as of those peoples
“whom they call slaves.”134
Interpreted as a reflection of the strength of Miskitu hostility toward

Spaniards, and of the depth of their regard for the Britons who had lived
and traded among them for half a century, the violent contest for control of
the Miskitu polity that was unleashed by British withdrawal has been all but
overlooked by historians. This analysis has shown, however, that the events
that took place in the Mosquitia from the late 1780s not only have impli-
cations crucial for understanding the development of the Miskitu kingdom,
but also shed new light on the complex ways in which independent native
groups became entangled in, and were affected by, European imperial poli-
tics. As inhabitants of a territory that was at once a native homeland and a
contested borderland between rival empires, the Miskitu had, through the
decades of the Superintendency, succeeded in managing a substantial British
presence, while remaining in control of their own internal affairs. Yet even
as they continued to live according to their own cultural values, the sus-
tained contact with Britain changed their social, economic, and political
practices in significant ways. The most important of these changes relates to
the central place that European manufactured goods and the political
recognition that gave access to them had assumed by the end of the eigh-
teenth century. The Miskitu might have rejected the outcome of Anglo-
Spanish diplomacy over the future of British possessions on the coast, and
they might have refused to countenance Spanish occupation thereof.
132. This is the testimony of the Zambo elder, as recorded by the Moravian missionary Heinrich Ziock.
See Offen, “Sambo and Tawira,” pp. 324–325.
133. See for example Meany to Domás, Río Tinto, August 30, 1798, and “Diario formado por el Dr.
Sproat,” in “Testimonio del Cuaderno 7,” AGS SGU 6951, 3, fs. 83, 99.
134. Although difficult to interpret, there may be some significance in the fact that his name was
Clemente, the name by which Colville Briton and Robin Lee’s successor as governor of the Indian jurisdic-
tion was also known. Estacherría to Domás y Valle, Río Tinto, September 17, 1798, and “Ingreso de Jorge a
la Sabana del Ganado del Rey,” September 28, 1798, in “Testimonio del Cuaderno 7,” AGS SGU 6951, 3,
fs. 118, 140.
Instead, they competed over the honors, privileges, and rewards that
derived from cooperation with Spaniards, turning not against outsiders but
against each other.
University of Bristol CAROLINE A. WILLIAMS

Bristol, U.K.

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LIVING BETWEEN EMPIRES:

unsuccessful attempt on the part of Major Hewlett to extract revenge on the

The bitter internal divisions provoked by the resolution of a long-standing

Conceptualized as middle grounds, borderlands, frontiers, strategic frontiers,

tion, accommodation, incorporation, or entanglement.8 The late eighteenth-

The extant scholarship on the region—whether focused on the period of British

decades of contact the Miskitu became seasoned negotiators, adept at capital-

challenges that colonial officials encountered as they tried to understand the

CONTENTMENT AT ANY PRICE: EUROPEANS IN THE MOSQUITIA

If this was an unusual approach toward the incorporation of a native popula-

29. Quesada to Estachería, Río Tinto, April 21, 1787, ibid.

Spanish experiences further south were entirely different, however. When

31. Estachería to Marqués de Sonora, Guatemala, June 15, 1782, ibid.

Superintendency.37 The leaders of the four jurisdictions that comprised the

The Miskitu-British relationship, however seemingly unequal, was not strictly

“FAMILIARITY AND EQUALITY”: LESSONS OF THE

Seemingly contradictory, these observations reflected Hodgson’s understand-

political jurisdictions collectively participated in ritual drinking and consulted

54. “Diario” (Meany-Sivelly), June 22, 1791, AGS SGU 6950, 6.

When in November 1787, viceroy Caballero y Góngora informed Madrid of

Yet when Antonio Porta y Costas reported on a tour of inspection that

tion”—the officer also revealed that multiple independent factions existed

Drawing on the knowledge of the antiguos colonos as well as personal obser-

69. “Relación” (Porta y Costas), AGS SGU 6949, 17.

FIDELITY AND VASSALAGE: NEGOTIATING TERMS

The widely reported willingness of leading chiefs to identify themselves with

opened, by the presence of Spaniards beyond the borders of Miskitu territory.

84. Sorsby, “British Superintendency,” pp. 325–329.

Unlike officials in the viceroyalty, who advocated gradual methods based on

Spanish misdjugement and Miskitu assertions of independence notwithstand-

“THEY ALL GO WHEREVER THEY FEEL LIKE IT”

By mid-1789, there were sources of tension in the Miskitu-Spanish relation-

Because the English commissioned a Zambo king, a general . . . called Tambli

An unsympathetic observer concerned by what he interpreted as Briton’s

Historians of indigenous societies have, of course, to approach assessments of

106. Barrueta to Villegas, Laguna de Perlas, June 24, 1789, ibid.

As an outside observer reporting grievances communicated by unidentified

In bringing their investigation to a close, Meany and Sivelly predicted that in

Interpreted as a reflection of the strength of Miskitu hostility toward

University of Bristol CAROLINE A. WILLIAMS

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