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The Evacuation of the Mosquito Shore and the English Who Stayed Behind, 1786-1800

1998; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1008294

1533-6247

Frank Griffith Dawson,

Historical Studies in Central America

On 14 July 1786, representatives of the Kings of Spain and England signed the Convention of London by which His Britannick Majesty undertook to evacuate all British subjects from the northern coast of Central America, thereby putting an end to over a half-century of conflict in that remote corner of the Caribbean. Although Article I of the Convention referred to the territory to be evacuated simply as “the Country of the MOSQUITOS …,” the intention was to secure the removal of a string of small British settlements extending from sixty miles east of Trujillo in what is now Honduras along some 550 miles of coast to Cape Gracias a Dios, and then south and east to Nicaragua’s San Juan River. The area was called then, as now, the Mosquito Shore, and had been a British sphere of influence since the 1730s.