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British Logwood Extraction from the Mosquitia: The Origin of a Myth

2000; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-80-1-113

1527-1900

Karl Offen,

Cuban History and Society

Fundamental to the historiography of Central America is the assertion that Englishmen began settling along the Mosquito Shore in the early seventeenth century in order to procure logwood for Europe’s emerging textile industry. Indeed, according to Troy Floyd, “the most important event for Central American history was the English occupation of the coast at Cabo Gracias a Dios” in the 1630s. Attracted by the abundance of logwood and other dyewoods, so the story goes, Englishmen from the failed colony at Providence Island initiated the first of several Anglo settlements along the Caribbean coast of Central America (see figure 1). Logwood’s alleged role in shaping regional dynamics only grew after European nations began to restrict privateering in the second half of the seventeenth century. At this time, Mary Helms claims, dozens of retiring pirates established logwood encampments “at virtually every cove and river mouth” along the Mosquito Shore. After the Belizean logwood merchant William Pitt moved to Black River along the coast of northeastern Honduras in 1732, the purported significance of logwood in directing Mosquitia developments increased dramatically. Writing in the HAHR some 15 years ago, Frank Griffith Dawson implicitly assumed that logwood had attracted the Belizean woodsmen to the Mosquitia because, as he put it, “logwood grew in abundance” around Black River. Likewise, in his influential study of the logwood trade, Arthur Wilson stated that the Mosquito Shore “figured prominently in the production of logwood from about 1740, when British logwood cutters first settled along that littoral.”1 In short, scholars have identified logwood as the principal reason for initial English settlement in the Mosquitia and, correspondingly, have assumed that logwood was an important factor in sustaining British interest in the region.The trouble with this historiography, and the nature of this commentary, is that there is no compelling evidence that Englishmen, or any other Europeans, actually acquired or shipped logwood from the Mosquitia, or for that matter from anywhere south of Belize. Indeed, the historical record explicitly shows that logwood was unavailable in the Mosquitia, and that other dyewoods, acquired from trade with the Spanish and originating from outside the Mosquitia, constituted only an insignificant fraction of regional commerce. Perhaps more troubling still is the fact that the Mosquitia’s flora contains no logwood, nor any appreciable quantity of any other commercial dyewood. In actuality, there never was logwood in the Mosquitia, and Englishmen never procured any from there. In order to trace and dismiss the myth of logwood extraction from the Mosquitia, this article reviews the natural and humanized distributions of Mesoamerican dyewoods, outlines the commercialization of these woods, and reevaluates the historical evidence.To be sure, the myth of logwood extraction from the Mosquitia is only one of many regional misunderstandings that have impeded a more critical and geographically sensitive assessment of social and environmental history along the Mosquito Shore. Unfortunately, our complacency with this myth has affected people’s lives in concrete ways. Within Nicaraguan and Honduran historiography, for example, the myth of logwood extraction from the Mosquitia has symbolically anchored the tragic narrative of Anglo transgressions against Spanish sovereignty.2 Predictably, logwood underscores popular understandings of British colonialism in the region and, in the case of Nicaragua, inaugurates a calamitous history of territorial violations and colonialist incursions. As such, a cornerstone of Nicaraguan national identity is indirectly riveted to the logwood myth. During the 1980s, when heated interpretations of Anglo influences informed Sandinista policies in eastern Nicaragua, logwood became a polemical symbol of European and capitalist expansion in general and Anglo imperialism in particular.3 Dislodging the myth of British logwood extraction from the history of the Mosquitia is an indispensable first step toward a reevaluation of the cultural, ethnic, and ecological processes that British colonialism did instigate. Unfortunately, the myth of logwood extraction from the Mosquitia is so pervasive and self-replicating in the literature that dispelling the myth necessitates that these more vital issues await a separate commentary.Arthur Percival Newton once wrote that except for sugar, “no single commodity has played a greater part in Caribbean history than logwood.” While this might be an exaggeration and certainly does not include slaves among regional commodities, logwood and other dyewoods were among the most important gathered plant resources in the Americas before rubber entered world markets in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although the Neotropics contain numerous dyewoods, a convoluted nomenclature and humanized distributions have precluded a differentiating study until the definitive dissertation on this subject by David McJunkin.4The word dyewood actually represents a large class of vegetal genera which provides a wide range of natural dyes. During the colonial period, logwood was by far the most valued and politically significant of all the Neo-tropical dyewoods. The most common names in English and Spanish for dyewoods found in the Mesoamerican region were logwood, brazilwood, Nicaragua wood, fustic, palo de campeche, brasilleto, palo de brasil, and palo de mora (see table 1).During the colonial period, all commercialized Mesoamerican and Caribbean dyewoods originated from three genera: Haematoxylum of the Leguminosae family and Chlorophora and Caesalpinia of the Moraceae family. Haematoxylum is represented in the Neotropics by two species, H. campechianum L., or logwood, and H. brasiletto Karst., one of the many brazilwoods. The genus Caesalpinia contains several New World species and has a wide-ranging geographic distribution. Typically classified as brazilwoods, both Caesalpinia and H. brasiletto Karst. contain the chemical compound brazilin, derived from a Malay word inscribed upon the land called Brazil. In Nicaragua, brazilwoods were called either Nicaragua wood, brasilleto, palo de brasil, or simply brasil. The genus Chlorophora is best known for its species tinctoria L., called fustic in English and mora in Spanish. Despite the crimson color implied by the Spanish mora, fustics produce a yellow dye. The small, spiny, and dense tree called logwood (Haematoxylum campechianum L.) contains the compound haematoxylin, which is chemically related to, but distinct from, brazilin. With the growth of textile manufactures and an improved fasting technology during the eighteenth century, European merchants imported thousands of tons of Neotropical dyewoods, and especially logwood.5In order to correctly interpret the historical evidence for logwood extraction in the Mosquitia, it is necessary to review the natural range and current biogeography of Mesoamerican dyewoods. Fustic, or mora, is a large canopy tree and has a wide distribution. It is especially common in semi-arid foothills of the western slopes of the Isthmus’s Cordillera Central. A number of tropical foresters maintain that a variety of fustic is also found in tropical lowlands from southern Mexico to Central America.6 The presence of fustic in eastern Nicaragua, however, is doubtful. The chief forester of the Bragmans Bluff Lumber Company in the late 1920s, F. Englesing, recorded no fustic (Chlorophora tinctoria L.), logwoods, or brazilwoods (Caesalpinia spp; Haematoxylum brasiletto Karst.) in an exhaustive survey identifying over 120 trees in northeastern Nicaragua. Likewise, United Fruit Company forester Paul Shank found no dyewoods in his six-plot survey conducted along the Rio Punta Gorda in southeastern Nicaragua. In a study conducted in the 1950s in Nicaragua’s northeast, the forester B. W. Taylor did not list fustic or any Haematoxylum or Caesalpinia genera among his findings. More recent surveyors, however, claim that mora grows throughout Nicaragua.7In contrast to the eastern lowlands, fustic and the brazilwoods, Caesalpinia spp. and Haematoxylum brasiletto Karst., were once commonplace among the flora in western Nicaragua. Between 1830 and 1960 traveler accounts and export statistics testify that several thousand tons of fustic and brazilwood originating near Lake Managua in western Nicaragua were exported from San Juan del Norte, via the Rio San Juan, and later through the Pacific port of Realejo. Nevertheless, no nineteenth-century author describes any dyewood extraction from the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua or Honduras, despite a flourishing economy in several other forest products.8Logwood (H. campechianum L.) is native to the riparian lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula and northern Belize, where it grows gregariously in swampy and calcareous ponds.9 Spread by seeds and coppice shoots alike, logwood was introduced by the English to several Caribbean islands in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Logwood did particularly well in colonizing the limestone outcroppings in Jamaica and the Bahamas. Likewise, the French successfully brought logwood to Haiti and to several other islands of the Lesser Antilles. By the end of the eighteenth century, logwood was thriving in British gardens in the Indian Ocean and, soon thereafter, in Pacific Oceania. In marked contrast, logwood was not successfully introduced to Central or South America. The eastern slope of Central America is comprised of uplifted Tertiary volcanic sediments and some limestone but remains quite distinct from logwood’s native karst landscape. In the conclusion of his lengthy study, McJunkin was forced to acknowledge that “Caribbean Nicaragua is the most frequently mentioned source [for logwood’s commercial extraction] which does not have an identified population of dyewood.”10Despite a varied nomenclature and the humanized distributions of Mesoamerican dyewoods, then, available biogeographic studies suggest three findings concerning the Mosquitia. First, logwood’s natural range does not extend along the eastern coast of Central America south of Belize, nor is there any evidence that it was successfully transplanted there. Although logwood thrives in swampy lowlands like those characteristic of the Mosquitia, it prefers limestone outcroppings, absent from the coastal plains of the Mosquito Shore. Second, with the possible exception of fustic (Chlorophora tinctoria L.), modern forest studies conducted in the Caribbean lowlands of eastern Nicaragua do not report any of the three principal dyewood genera in spite of extensive surveys seeking to identify commercial resources. Finally, while Nicaragua exported a large volume of brazilwoods and fustic through its Caribbean port of San Juan del Norte, these woods had actually originated from the seasonally dry foothills of the Cordillera’s western slopes, not the Mosquitia. The biogeographic evidence provides no indication that logwood, or appreciable amounts of other dyewoods, can be found in the Mosquitia in general or eastern Nicaragua in particular.On his first voyage Columbus brought back fustic or brazilwood from the island of Española. As early as 1501 the Portuguese returned with dyewoods from Brazil, initiating a traffic that rose to 1,200 tons a year quickly thereafter and 12,000 tons annually by the late 1500s. By the 1620s, Dutch pirates were cutting Caesalpinia (brazilwood) from the islands Bonaire, Curaçao, and Aruba. Compared to the Portuguese or the Dutch, the Spanish showed little interest in dyewoods, although they were shipping small quantities of palo de brasil from Veracruz as early as the 1530s. After an attempt to subdue the Yucatecan Maya in the 1550s, the Spaniards learned about a new dyewood they called palo de campeche, which the English have called logwood ever since.11By the late sixteenth century, buccaneers from northern Europe diligently sought the valuable Spanish cargo they had once discarded. As official support for privateering waned in the latter half of the seventeenth century, buccaneers began actively raiding Spanish logwood sites and many established their own cutting enterprises in the Bay of Campeche and along the eastern edge of the Yucatán Peninsula. By 1722 successful Spanish attacks had restricted the range of Anglo logwood cutters to the area surrounding the Rio Hondo in what is today the boundary separating northern Belize from Mexico. As early as 1755 Belizean woodcutters were exporting some 13,000 tons of logwood annually to New York, Boston, Rhode Island, Jamaica, London, Bristol, Holland, and South Carolina. This volume oscillated with economic policies originating in Europe but remained steady throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.12Regional historiography unequivocally claims that settlers originating from the failed English colony at Providence Island (1629– 41) were the first to initiate dyewood cutting along the Mosquito Shore. Newton, for example, states that English colonists cut dyewoods at Providence Island and on the Central American mainland near Cape Gracias a Dios.13 In a more recent study of the Providence Island colony, however, Karen Ordahl Kupperman notes that although settler correspondence promised to deliver dyewoods, most efforts to produce dyes centered on the cultivation of cochineal and the Old World madder.14 On the other hand, Providence Island investors took out a charter for the small island of Tortuga, off the northern coast of Española, in 1632. Here, in contrast to Providence, Englishmen devoted their attention exclusively to procuring dyewoods and, with the help of African slaves, were exporting “Braziletta” to France by 1633.15 The evidence that Providence settlers cut logwood or other dyewoods on the mainland near Cape Gracias a Dios remains inferential and doubtful. While Englishmen spent a good deal of time at the Cayos Miskitus, and in the Caratasca Lagoon region procuring vanilla, silk grass, annatto, and other natural resources, extant documents do not mention dyewood cutting among their activities.16 Still, it is likely that the first European settlers along the Mosquito Shore and in the Bay of Honduras were connected in one way or another to the Providence Island colony.17Following the English capture of Jamaica in 1655 and the 1670 Anglo-Spanish Treaty of Madrid, logwood achieved a new level of economic and political importance among English officials in the Caribbean. In 1670 the Jamaican governor Modyford wrote that a dozen English vessels were devoted to the logwood trade, selling their wares for £25–50 a ton. The governor mentioned that cutters acquired their woods from the Bay of Campeche, Cape Gracias a Dios, Mosquito, Darién, Cuba, and Española.18 Despite the wide and uncritical circulation of this statement in regional historiography, the governor appears to conflate sailing and pillaging routes, especially those of Henry Morgan and John Morris, with logwood’s extraction sites. Certainly, English logwood cutters congregated at Belize and showed relatively little interest in procuring logwood from other regions. For example, demographic data show that Belizean logwood enterprises employed some 500–700 men around 1700, whereas no more than 20 Europeans resided in all the Mosquitia at this same time.19 Indeed, other than Governor Modyford’s comments, no seventeenth-century documentation provides any evidence that Englishmen cut logwood, or any other dyewood, in the Mosquitia or anywhere else south of Belize on the Central American mainland.Pirates cum woodsmen-chroniclers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries did not associate logwood extraction with the Mosquitia. The well-known pirate and Yucatán logwood cutter William Dampier wrote extensively about his logwood experiences in the Bay of Campeche and the Yucatán. Although Dampier did not describe logwood extraction along the Mosquito Shore, he visited the Mosquitia in the late 1670s and claimed that Nicaragua was the only source for “bloodwood,” possibly palo de sangre or sangredrago (Pterocarpus officianalis).20 Shortly after Dampier’s Mosquitia forays, the eloquent English privateer known only by his initials M. W. wrote in 1699 that the Miskitu Indians had “woods which dye a very good purple and yellow, and without doubt their lagunes would furnish logwood enough and camwood, if any would labour to cut it.”21 Although often cited to illustrate the presence of littoral dyewoods and logwood operations in the Mosquitia, both Dampier and M. W. appear to be presenting the potential for the Mosquitia rather than detailing existing enterprises.Some of the most significant sources disclosing colonial logwood ventures in Belize in the early eighteenth century come from Nathaniel Uring, who coincidentally shipwrecked near the Caratasca Lagoon in 1711. Despite the claim by Alfred Dewar in the introduction of a 1928 reprint of Uring’s Voyages and Travels, Uring never stated that the Englishmen along the coast of northeastern Honduras cut logwood or any other dyewood. It is true, however, that in his chronologically organized narrative, Uring described his experiences among Belizean woodsmen at great length.22 Sailing routes between Belize and Jamaica typically followed the Caribbean counter current to the south, passing between the Bay Islands and the Mosquitia.23 This sailing circuit suggests that English interlopers along the Mosquito Shore may have had a relationship with the Belizean logwood enterprises, but Uring provides no evidence that European residents in the Mosquitia sought or acquired any type of dyewood from the region.After the Spanish attacked Belizean logwood sites in 1730, several Baymen, as they were called, fled to Black River on the Mosquito Shore. Although most men returned shortly thereafter, William Pitt remained and initiated the most politically important British settlement in Central America outside of Belize. According to Dawson, Pitt remained at Black River because its location facilitated his illicit trade with the Spanish and because “logwood grew in abundance.”24 In contrast, one contemporary writer stated that Black River was a favored refuge for Belizeans simply because it was the nearest retreat: “It was wholly owing to this shelter that [the Belizeans] were not totally crushed.”25 In fact, logwood played no role in attracting the Baymen to the Mosquitia. One nineteenth-century visitor to Belize noted that although the Baymen founded the Black River community, they did so “not for the purpose of logwood cutting, for there is no logwood to the south of the river Belize.”26 The Belizean captain George Henderson, who was also familiar with the flora and economy of the Mosquitia, observed in 1804 that logwood is “rarely discovered in any direction southwardly from the settlement of Balize.”27After the Anglo-Spanish War of Jenkins Ear (1739– 48), William Pitt’s Black River settlement formed the nucleus of a territorial entity encompassing the Mosquitia known as the British Superintendency for the Mosquito Shore (1749–86). Before Anglo residents were forced to comply with the 1783 Treaty of Versailles and evacuate the Mosquitia in 1787, some 500 British settlers and 1,600 African slaves resided at Black River and a few other select points along the coast to Punta Gorda in southeastern Nicaragua.28 Although many historians implicitly accept that logwood was among the principal reasons for British settlement and interest in the region, political and economic issues affecting Jamaican decisions about the superintendency focused on other issues. As part of their rationale to support the superintendency in 1744, the Lords of the Committee of Council at Jamaica held that the Mosquito Shore was well situated for communication with Roatán, which had some 50 settlers, as well as with the logwood cutters of Belize, and most of all for opening trade with Guatemala.29 Jamaican support for the creation of the Mosquito Shore superintendency came from officials hoping to increase trade with the Spanish and protect the logwood trade at Belize, not expand Britain’s source of logwood.30No British author who resided in or visited the Black River settlement ever described logwood, or any other dyewood, among the region’s economic resources. In 1751 Jamaican governor William Trelawny wrote that settlers so feared a Spanish attack that they could not carry out “their normal operations” of cutting mahogany, fishing for tortoise shell, and gathering sarsaparilla. Superintendent Jones (1759– 62) described Miskitu Indian pastimes of gathering cacao, tortoise shell, seal oil, sarsaparilla, silk grass, honey, beeswax, animal skins, and “sundry sorts of gums etc.,” in addition to making canoes, hammocks, and “cotton cloaths for coverings for beds or tables etc.,” but he never associated the Miskitu with logwood. Furthermore, Jones outlined the region’s limitless economic potential while exaggerating its soil fertility, yet he did not mention logwood nor any other dyewood among the area’s attractions.31 After being asked to evacuate the Mosquitia in October 1786, settlers sent off an angry letter to Superintendent Lawrie (1777–87), explaining that they would not be able to take out their mahogany, modestly estimated at one million feet, unless they were allowed to await the next year’s floods. A historian who also consulted this missive, yet insists that settlers did cut logwood at Black River, found it interesting that the letter contained “no mention of logwood.”32Available export statistics from Black River do not mention logwood and indicate that other dyewoods constituted only an insignificant percentage of overall commerce (see table 2). Providing data for 1750, Superintendent Robert Hodgson Sr. noted the export of 500,000 feet of mahogany, 40,000 pounds of sarsaparilla, and 5,000 pounds of turtle shell, for a total commerce of £27,000. In the next sentence, he contrasted the Black River economy with that of Belize, which exported 8,000 tons of logwood valued at £20 a ton. Over a decade later, Superintendent Otway reported that the Black River trade “consists chiefly in mahogany, sarsaparilla, tortoise shell, and mules.” Exports for 1764 included 650,000 feet of mahogany, 110,000 pounds of sarsaparilla, 8,000 pounds of turtle shell, 150 mules, and some very small quantities of cotton, indigo, and cacao. Exports in 1769 included mahogany, sarsaparilla, shell, cacao, mules, horses, and small amounts of hides, deerskins, cotton, coffee, indigo, and Spanish coin, gold, and silver bullion totaling some £61,048.33 Individual shipping manifests from 1759 to 1776 do not mention logwood among their cargo; however, a single ship carried 300 feet of Nicaragua wood, which likely refers to palo de brasil acquired from the Spanish. In sum, available documentation shows that logwood was not exported from Black River and that residents only shipped minuscule quantities of other dyewoods that they received from the Spanish.34By explicitly recognizing English rights to logwood cutting in the Bay of Honduras, the 1763 Treaty of Paris put the Mosquito Shore superintendency in a precarious position. On the one hand, after Britain secured logwood rights in Belize, many Mosquito Shore settlers moved there.35 On the other hand, the treaty specified that Britain would dismantle its fortifications in Spanish domains, which the Spaniards believed included Black River. It appears that British officials drafting the treaty assumed that by including logwood rights in the Bay of Honduras that they somehow covered the interests Mosquito Shore settlers.36 In order to avoid compliance with the Spanish interpretation of the treaty, Superintendent Otway made two observations. First, he noted that the Mosquitia had no protection under the 1763 treaty because the region contained no logwood and thus had nothing to do with the Belizean colony. To offset the implications of this reasoning, Otway claimed that the Mosquitia was not a part of Spanish domains and therefore was not obligated to raze its fortifications. Thus, as cited by Robert Naylor, Otway concluded that the Mosquitia was “a large sovereign country independent of Spanish jurisdiction, and one from which logwood had never been cut or shipped.”37Given Britain’s apparent willingness to abandon the Mosquito Shore colony after 1763, a large body of promotional literature quickly materialized to justify the colony’s existence. Superintendent Robert Hodgson Jr. (1766–76), who resided some 40 years in the Mosquitia and was among the most prolific writers during that period, reckoned that the acquisition of logwood rights in Belize would be of limited use to Britain’s industrializing needs, since the region was virtually devoid of logwood. By comparison, Hodgson argued that logwood could be transplanted to “the Mosquito Shore [where] any required quantity may be raised,” since the shore contains the “same lowlands,” and it was known that logwood “grows like a weed.”38 In a different context, Hodgson made a more direct case for transplanting logwood to the Mosquitia by stating that “there are marshy grounds enough, of the same nature with those in the Bay of Honduras, to produce more than a sufficiency [of logwood] for our own consumption; any quantity of the seed might easily be procured, and in less than fifteen years, the wood from it would be full grown and fit to cut.”39 Robert White, who represented settler interests after the 1783 Treaty of Versailles, followed this same line of reasoning. He wrote that the riverbanks around the Black River settlement are equally adapted as Belize for the growth of logwood, adding that “we have reason to think, from the nature of this plant, that in the course of 20 or 30 years, a sufficient quantity may be raised in this country [the Mosquitia] to supply all Europe.”40 Both Hodgson and White clearly imply that the Mosquitia contained no logwood at the time of their writing, nor had settlers successfully transplanted it there. If logwood had been a part of Black River’s economy, these two authors surely would have constructed their validating arguments in a very different manner.In 1773 Bryan Edwards outlined Britain’s obligations to the Mosquito Shore: “Either the native Indians have purchased our protection by the cession of their country, and uninterrupted allegiance of upwards of a century, or they have not.” He openly advocated the former and defended his view by showing the importance of Mosquito Shore commerce to British regional interests. Yet among the long list of potential economic benefits the Mosquitia afforded, Edwards makes no mention of logwood.41The Jamaican historian Edward Long noted that the Black River colony was a major source of crown commerce that included hides, mahogany, cedar, Nicaragua wood, fustic, logwood, cacao, coffee, cotton, sarsaparilla, silk grass, indigo, china root, gums, balsams, cochineal, turtle shell, and bullion, yet he remained unsure what percentage of this trade was “properly English” or “properly Indian.” Long, who never visited the Mosquitia, acknowledges that he received much of his information from the English Captain Speer.42 Speer, who served the crown for 21 years in the Mosquitia, also published a polemic in support of the erstwhile colony in 1765. He listed the same export products noted by Long but qualified his comments by stating that Britons produced only mahogany, sarsaparilla, cotton, cacao, and turtle shell, while the remaining articles of commerce, including the dyewoods, derived exclusively from trade with the Spanish.43 Jefferys’s 1762 collection of Caribbean “maritime expertise” stated that logwood was a product of “Honduras,” but he cited Uring’s account, which only referred to Belize.44 To be sure, numerous contemporaneous writings show that the place-name Honduras referred only to the Bay of Honduras, or Belize.45 The works of Long and Jefferys provide classic examples of contemporaneous, albeit secondary, sources that have been misunderstood by twentieth-century writers seeking a summary of British resource interests and commercial activities in the Republic of Honduras and along the Mosquito Shore.Spanish sources provide the same type of dichotomous evidence found in British sources. On the one hand, contemporary observers make no mention of British dyewood cutting or extraction from the Mosquitia, but on the other hand, most historians and period writers have assumed that British “woodcutting” must have also included dyewoods. The Spanish captain Juan de Lara y Ortega, for example, made a detailed reconnaissance around northeastern Honduras and reported on settler activities at Black River in 1759. Although Lara y Ortega described the trade in cattle from upland Indians to the coastal Miskitu, as well as noted a population of Spanish mulattoes at Sonaguera who gathered sarsaparilla for the English, “as if they were Indians of a Repartimiento,” he did not include logwood or any other dyewood among coastal activities.46 In a similar report made by an unknown Spaniard visiting Black River around 1776, the author noted the presence of 8–10 English families and some 400 black slaves. He wrote that the main commercial activity of these Englishmen was gathering sarsaparilla, contraband trade with the Spanish, and “woodcutting,” which is almost certainly referring to mahogany.47 In 1770 the governor of Costa Rica, Joseph de Nava, wrote to the captain general of the Guatemalan Audiencia, Pedro de Salazar, explaining his recent agreements with the Miskitu leaders of Pearl Lagoon. In his correspondence, de Nava noted his surprise that the British “processed” logwood at Bluefields, because, as he put it, “this tree does not grow at Blaufil.” De Nava suggested that the logwood came to Bluefields from the Bay of Honduras, because “it is well known that the English along the coast of Honduras cut, extract and transport logwood, or Campeche from that region.”48The Nicaraguan historian Sofonías Salvatierra explicitly claimed that English interlopers and the Miskitu Indians participated in the extraction of dyewoods from the Mosquito Shore. He wrote that the Miskitu Indians traded “palo de tinte” to the British that “they stole from the Spanish, or had obtained from them via contraband trade.” Salvatierra also claimed that English traders at Cape Gracias a Dios extracted many woods, including palo de tinte. His source for this specific assertion, however, derives from the Spanish capture of the English sloop Antelope off the coast near Cape Gracias a Dios in 1776. Although the ship was said to contain “woods for construction and dyewoods,” it is unclear where this ship had originated.49 Like many English writers of the time, period Spanish officials and chroniclers assumed that British activities in eastern Central America included the cutting and extraction of logwood and other dyewoods. Such faith, perhaps, inspired the Spanish engineer Luis Diez Navarro to label the area behind the English settlement at Black River “monte Campeche” in a 1774 map.50 Although the landscape behind Black River might have appeared like the low-lying vanishing horizon of the Yucatán region, a better explanation might be that, in the collective imagination of Spain, all English settlements along the eastern coast of Central America contained contraband traders and logwood cutters.51After Central American independence, the infamous Scotchman Gregor MacGregor received a colonization grant from the Miskitu king for a huge tract of land along the northeastern coast of Honduras. The London agent for MacGregor’s Poyais enterprise, Thomas Strangeways, wrote a surrealistically glowing polemic about the virtues of the Mosquito Shore in order to attract investors. One contemporaneous reviewer mocked Strangeways’s blatant exaggerations by claiming that his prose read as if “roasted pigs run about with forks in their backs, crying ‘come eat me!’”52 Despite his transparent embellishment and promotionalism, Strangeways still had to admit, “I am not aware that this tree [logwood] is to be found in the Mosquito territory, and if so, in only very small quantities.”53 Likewise, while detailing the availability of valuable hardwoods along the northeastern coast of Honduras during his tenure in 1839– 42, the Englishman Thomas Young failed to note the presence of logwood or any other commercial dyewood, despite making extensive comments on several other woods.54 In sum, throughout the nineteenth century, when Belize and western Nicaragua annually exported thousands of tons of logwood and brazilwoods, respectively, there is no evidence that logwood or any other dyewood was sought after, acquired, or shipped from the Mosquitia, despite expanding capital penetration and an intensifying global interest in the region.55This commentary has sought to weigh the evidence that English interlopers and eventually Anglo residents participated in the cutting, extraction, and shipment of logwood, as well as other dyewoods, among littoral forests of eastern Nicaragua and northeastern Honduras, otherwise known as the Mosquitia. Despite the fact that historical monographs investigating the region, as well as innumerable articles and regional surveys, unambiguously claim that Englishmen cut or procured logwood in the Mosquitia, I find that they did not. There is no biogeographic evidence that the Mosquitia’s flora contains any natural or transplanted stands of logwood, and the same can be postulated with lesser, but not insignificant, certainty for other dyewoods, especially the brazilwoods, Caesalpinia spp. and Haematoxylum brasiletto Karst.Available commercial records for Black River provide no evidence that logwood was ever extracted or shipped from the region and suggest that other exported dyewoods, acquired from outside the Mosquitia, constituted a negligible portion of overall economic concern. Moreover, following Central American independence, there is no evidence whatsoever that logwood or any other dyewood was procured from the Mosquitia, despite the fact that a flourishing regional economy involved the exportation of other forest products.Despite overwhelming documentation to the contrary, Central American historiography contains the self-evident assertion that pirates from northern Europe and, later, Anglo residents first settled along the Mosquito Shore in order to extract logwood and other dyewoods and that over time the availability of these woods helped sustain British interest in the region. Paradoxically, the false notion that Englishmen first came to the Mosquitia to extract logwood nourishes an important dimension of Nicaragua’s national identity by locating its eastern frontier within the crosshairs of English industrialization and, later, British imperialism. As only one historical myth among several buttressing political discourses and governmental policy in Nicaragua, the genealogy of the logwood story suggests that other British activities, and their effects on Mosquitia developments during the colonial period, might be advantageously reevaluated.The research for this article was supported by a Fulbright IIE Dissertation Fellowship for Nicaragua and two Graduate Fellowships from the University of Texas at Austin. In Nicaragua, the Centro de Investigación y Documentación de la Costa Atlántica (CIDCA) sponsored my research during 1995–96 and 1997, and I am pleased to acknowledge its support. I would like to thank Phil Crossley for making extensive comments on an earlier draft of this article. I would also like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of the HAHR for their close readings and suggested improvements. Continued shortcomings remain my own.